A considered opinion that she does a far better job of articulating than any Discovery fans have managed in defense of the show's many failings...
I don't think that is true at all. Many good counter arguments have be posited for most of what Katherine rages about. If you don't see them as compelling I think that is just your current perspective or negative impression of Discovery shading the discussion. (This probably happens in reverse for me too, but I think I am willing to grant some arguments about elements of Discovery that haven't been great.)
I believe it is, yes.
Yeah, i09 jumped the shark years ago.
Yeah, i think it was when they were bought/merged with gizmodo. Before that, they had tons of good stuff I wanted to read every day. Now, not so much - though their recent added focus on hardcore sciences (astrophysics, theoretical physics, etc.) has been really nice.
I would cooperate with the Klingons too if the alternative was to be tortured by them. For fuck's sake, he is a civilian and a Federation citizen, It was Lorca's duty as a Starfleet officer to save him!
Do we know he is a Fed citizen though? He has committed crimes against the Federation and it's citizens, but I don't think we even know what planet he was originally from let alone where he calls home now. And i would argue that in a time of war, Lorca is under no obligation (legal, ethical or otherwise) to bring along a traitor/collaborator with him on an escape mission. Despite what some have said, that definitely would endanger Lorca, Tyler, and the overall war effort.
The nature of the spores allows the traveler to arrive at any point in space, operating almost 4th dimensionally (or above). Any amount of shielding in the 3 dimensions wouldn't have stopped it from appearing if it was already traveling on its own spore-actuated journey from somewhere else. Once it was "trapped" on the Glenn in conventional 3 dimensional space, with no more access to the spores that got it there, or a new batch of compatible spores, it couldn't leave.
We don't know what kind of shielding was being implemented but I would say that it apparently did extend into the dimensions through which the Tardigrade could travel, because while the shielding was on, it did prevent it from escaping. It probably traveled to the Glenn at sometime when shields were down, then was trapped their later. If I remember my next gen technical manual (whose applicability to this situation is arguably limited) Starfleet shields warp space itself to turn back attacks whether they are physical objects or energy beams, etc., so regular shields might just do it too. The Glenn's crew just added "always on" shields around engineering so that even if the main shields were down, the Tardigrade could not escape. Basically, the Tardigrade either was always behind a shield, or lacked access to enough spores to make the jump. To argue that the writers didn't plan for this would ignore that the writers invented the extra shielding around the Glenn's engineering section and pointed it out first thing, even though it is otherwise totally unnecessary to the episode. There might be a scene where there could be an exception to the always shielded/lack of spores rules but if so it should just be reasonably treated as a simple error while the overall implementation is still consistent.
