The “felt like real Star Trek” thing is the worst part of the show for me. Like Zack said in the review, Discovery is giving us Cliff’s Notes versions of popular episodes. When I was watching it with my friend, she kept calling out episodes it reminded her of (personally, my list is “Babel,” “Twisted,” “Disaster,”…

I mean, Mozart was basically the Brian Wilson of the 18th century so...

That was possibly the worst part of the episode. They might as well have flashed WE’RE CLOSING THIS PLOT HOLE NOW in large red letters.

What in the hell did I just watch? A giant orb thing just kinda shows up and traps the ship somehow, then doesn’t anymore because they let it upload a bunch of information before it blows up with no understanding of what it was at all? 

It’s not so far fetched. Elon Musk’s space Tesla had only recently been recovered (now in a museum on Ceres) and the sound system was still looping Space Oddity and Starman (they keep going and going...) so the songs had become popular again.

I literally told someone recently that my three favourite songwriters were Mozart, Brian Wilson, and Stevie Wonder. Whoops. I try not to be pretentious; I'm just a nerd.

Lord yes, an actual briefing room scene. I’m embarrassed at how right with the world it made me feel. In the other series, those scenes always function as a more nuanced, philosophical counterbalance to the action of the bridge, and it’s sorely needed in Disco, which rarely has a bridge scene that isn’t non-stop…

Burnham as a character has two modes: 1) ethereal, weird pronouncements in a flat tone of voice, and 2) bathos-laden melodramatic angst. There is rarely any middle ground. This appears to be as close as the writers can get to portraying what it might be like to be trapped between two cultures.

Pretty much everything wrong with this show is the writing.  Unfortunately, that means it’s a shitty show.

Yeah, most Trek series actually bend over backwards to AVOID referencing 20th Century culture with the exception of Riker and jazz.

Look at you acting like the Super Mario Bros. Movie didn’t do it first.

Trust the fungus!

Yeah, I was skeptical but satisfied with the idea that Spore Drive propulsion was too unreliable or dangerous to use as a method of transportation, and that’s why it’s not used or even mentioned in the future.

No no, this is the internet, if we disagree on something that must mean the other person is not only inherently and undeniably wrong, but also bad, and should feel bad! And we should never relent!

Yaknow, it’s weird to me that the show needed to spend time now in the second season with a new plotline to explain why the spore drive was never used in the shows set later in the timeline. Last season, I had initially guessed that they’d just end up destroying the spore network, but then as I saw the mirror…

There is a very real possibility that you are correct about the writing.
There are very few well written characters on the show in general. Even Tilly has been a bit too much Tilly this season.
But I can’t really find anything compelling about Burnham in the writing, in the character or in the acting; we’ll have to…

I have to respectfully disagree; I think Burham's character is actually quite compelling, just unfortunately hamstrung, as the main character, by the often rather hamfisted writing of the show.

Agreed.

I always have to laugh that Star Trek characters are so familiar with 20th century Earth pop culture. Tilly’s favorite song is ~300 years old and, wouldn’t you know it, Stamets also just happens to be a David Bowie fan.

I AM IGNAR, SON OF AHBYT’CH!