I doubt they will see this, but I just wanna take a moment to thank the writers and producers of DSC season two for taking onboard criticisms of the show, and presenting two episodes which have been very Star-Trek-like in spirit and philosophy. The Federation again looks like a progressive society that the likes of Tom Paine would dream, and the preservation of innocent life is held inviolable.
From being disenchanted with season one, I have found for the last two weeks that there is now new Star Trek on television that I await with great anticipation again. I look forward to Fridays, something I haven't felt for a show in years. Please keep up the good work. The cast of Discovery are getting the likeable treatment that they didn't receive in season one; Detmer, Owosekun, etc, are being treated as part of a family, and as skilled landing party members just like Chekov and Sulu in TOS. Captain Pike is a joy to watch, I would now love to see a show featuring him, Number One and Spock onboard the Enterprise.
I was worried when in press statements they said this season would focus on faith vs science, or something to that effect. Literary faith, in the sense of the Greek pistos 'trusting in something', is different from the reductive blind faith presented by extremists, and can be shared by secular forms of philosophy, which have arrived at it through reason (say, trust that democracy is more compassionate and wise form of government than any other). Non-believers or atheists, despite having existed as long as humanity, can still face discriminatory stereotypes even in educated liberal countries, and their huge spectrum of personal beliefs are often misrepresented in the media. I was genuinely worried I would see a show created by a noted humanist/atheist turn into one hostile or contemptuous of academic western philosophy or irreligion. I need not have worried. Every character has been treated with respect.
Star Trek is a product of the enlightenment, an era when humanity reasoned that just because an injustice has happened often, does not mean that it always has to. The founders of the first modern democracies may not have been perfect, but they reasoned that there was no justification for why a monarch should be any more above the law than any other human being. It happened. They set up imperfect institutions through which people could seek greater and greater universal rights. In happened. Star Trek is a show about a society that has continued to take reason as it's guiding star, a philosophical thought experiment in what rights and responsibilities our reason might reap.