Ok, I'm going to feel like a bully afterward, but I want to begin by giving kudos to the Dreadnought Dominion group for actually creating and finishing the film they wanted to make.
With that said, Haunted has a lot of problems as a film.
I had an idea what I was in for during the opening title sequence, featuring no less than 9 actors\supposedly ''main'' characters. In my opinion, Starship Exeter and the first 3 webisodes of Starship Farragut did this right, limiting their stories and focus on less than a handful of characters, everybody else should either be window dressing or say lines\get a moment to shine only if it helps the story along. Ideally these bit players should be distinct from everybody else. Dr Azzato from Exeter is a great example of this.
Phase 2 was guilty of this leading up to and including Kitumba as they let the story get completely hijacked with bits of needless business so that every face could have their moment to shine. It hurt the flow of their stories, but they learned from this and Mind-Sifter was a good example of putting the focus back on the characters that matter.
Star Trek Continues and Farragut also need to quit trying to flood their episodes with needless bland characters that take time away from the story (looking at you Drake, Smith and Palmer from STC, and the sudden influx of second bananas on Farragut except Foster and Stahler).
Ordinarily I wouldn't have made such a point were it not for the fact that in Haunted, EVERY character without exception has ZERO personality, including the commodore and lead character. I watched a full 20 minutes and still have no idea who anyone is, except that the older guy with the goatee does a bad british accent and the chief engineer would get fired in a real life situation.
On to the episode: again they might want to rethink their huge cast list, because with the long opening titles and shuttlecraft shots, it takes a whole 2 and a half minutes before a single line of dialogue finally begins the story.
Someone should tell the editor to stop machine-gunning needless cuts...
For the story itself...how can you have the captain's log stating the main actor was away while his ship was refitted for 18 months and he was, supposedly, judged ''physically, mentally and EMOTIONALLY fit'' before reassuming command, but everything that happens afterward (and even the conversation he has on the shuttlecraft) suggests that on the contrary he is NOT?
If this were a real Star Trek story, some outside alien disease, artifact or other would have provoqued the Commodore's feelings of deep-seated (and unmentioned?) shame and guilt that he would have needed to overcome, but this episode mainly tells you the commodore should have gone more often to see his mental health professional during his sabbatical...
By the way, it might have helped to have either a line of dialogue or some sort of visual cue somewhere in the episode to explain to those of us, like myself, who fail to see the difference between a regular starship and a ''dreadnought'', apart from the 3rd nacelle...
