Good - episode and season story lines are good, kept watching cuz I wanted to know how it turns out.
Good - acting, sets, costumes, etc.
Good - continues in Roddenberry's tradition of addressing social justice issues. (If you don't like that, don't watch ST!).
Bad - Burnham character in S1E1 was a very unlikable loose cannon, a liability to the entire Federation and all persons in it. By S4 she had transformed to a responsible person who has learned from her elders. I respect that they tried to fix what they broke in S1, and that's why I've continued watching, but this transition from Starfleet officer to unrepentant criminal who belongs in a penal colony and back to Starfleet officer is hard to swallow. It violates the integrity of Starfleet, well established in the franchise.
Bad - incorporating emotional health issues is good, but it is way overdone.
Worse - good wordsmithing, but bad context. E.g. Good dialogue between two characters, but wrong place and time; when frantically trying to handle a crisis with a clock ticking down is not the right time to talk about their feelings. E.g. Good speech delivered at the appropriate time and place, but by the wrong character who had no business being there at all, much less talking.
Worst - no consequences. Start an intragalactic war by desecrating a holy site and murdering a prophet, assault a superior officer, mutiny, murder, piracy, kidnapping, theft, insubordination, treason, espionage, conspiracy to commit genocide - no problem as long as you have friends in high places doling out Get Out Of Jail Free Cards to their friends like candy, while poor sap Mudd gets life. We already have that here; I'd like to envision a better world where justice is applied equally to all.
ST has always presented a better society (some say overly idealistic), what we'd like the future world to be. I do not want to live in a world where there is no rule of law, no justice, no consequences, no discipline, just every person does what is right in their own eyes. That is not a better world. It is Mad Max in space. It is chaos, corruption, and dystopia on a galactic scale. This is the first ST I would not have let my kids watch, because it does not contextualize crime and judicial corruption as clearly being bad.
Last Straw - While ST has never shied from tackling hard social justice issues, it has never been overtly political. That ended with S4. Flagrantly endorsing a real life politician currently running for office. The producers have dragged the good name of Star Trek down into the toxic cesspool of contemporary politics.
The writers are like a bunch of teenage wannabe's dribbling out what they believe are cool ideas and haphazardly stitching them together into a hot mess of a script, without an adult in the room to say "that won't work because ..." or "that'll work but we need to do it this other way ...", or "that's crossing a line, we need to dial it back a bit ...". It seems there's no consequences to the writers/producers IRL, just as there are none in the show.
Paramount, please pull the plug before this abomination drags down the entire franchise. It is irredeemable at this point.
Good - acting, sets, costumes, etc.
Good - continues in Roddenberry's tradition of addressing social justice issues. (If you don't like that, don't watch ST!).
Bad - Burnham character in S1E1 was a very unlikable loose cannon, a liability to the entire Federation and all persons in it. By S4 she had transformed to a responsible person who has learned from her elders. I respect that they tried to fix what they broke in S1, and that's why I've continued watching, but this transition from Starfleet officer to unrepentant criminal who belongs in a penal colony and back to Starfleet officer is hard to swallow. It violates the integrity of Starfleet, well established in the franchise.
Bad - incorporating emotional health issues is good, but it is way overdone.
Worse - good wordsmithing, but bad context. E.g. Good dialogue between two characters, but wrong place and time; when frantically trying to handle a crisis with a clock ticking down is not the right time to talk about their feelings. E.g. Good speech delivered at the appropriate time and place, but by the wrong character who had no business being there at all, much less talking.
Worst - no consequences. Start an intragalactic war by desecrating a holy site and murdering a prophet, assault a superior officer, mutiny, murder, piracy, kidnapping, theft, insubordination, treason, espionage, conspiracy to commit genocide - no problem as long as you have friends in high places doling out Get Out Of Jail Free Cards to their friends like candy, while poor sap Mudd gets life. We already have that here; I'd like to envision a better world where justice is applied equally to all.
ST has always presented a better society (some say overly idealistic), what we'd like the future world to be. I do not want to live in a world where there is no rule of law, no justice, no consequences, no discipline, just every person does what is right in their own eyes. That is not a better world. It is Mad Max in space. It is chaos, corruption, and dystopia on a galactic scale. This is the first ST I would not have let my kids watch, because it does not contextualize crime and judicial corruption as clearly being bad.
Last Straw - While ST has never shied from tackling hard social justice issues, it has never been overtly political. That ended with S4. Flagrantly endorsing a real life politician currently running for office. The producers have dragged the good name of Star Trek down into the toxic cesspool of contemporary politics.
The writers are like a bunch of teenage wannabe's dribbling out what they believe are cool ideas and haphazardly stitching them together into a hot mess of a script, without an adult in the room to say "that won't work because ..." or "that'll work but we need to do it this other way ...", or "that's crossing a line, we need to dial it back a bit ...". It seems there's no consequences to the writers/producers IRL, just as there are none in the show.
Paramount, please pull the plug before this abomination drags down the entire franchise. It is irredeemable at this point.