I doubt the critical praise will mean anything. What matters is viewer numbers, and there's no indication this season has attracted anything beyond the hardcore fanbase.
I'm hoping the critical praise, increased traffic on Twitter, and positive reviews on YouTube help to move the needle.
I don't mind S3, I just don't see it as either significantly better or different to other modern Trek.
Fair enough, it seems several people in the TrekBBS have this sentiment. But showrunners in the industry like Marc Guggenheim and Ryan Condal, past Trek behind the scenes people like Mike Okuda, Doug Drexler, and Daren Dochterman, Trek pundits who in the past have been deeply critical of NuTrek like Mark Altman, and YouTube channels with over 1 million subs like Red Letter Media have all given strong endorsements of season 3 that where either indifferent to or negative about earlier efforts.
Indeed, it has plenty of stuff which people bitched about endlessly from past seasons of Picard and Disco - gore, swearing, retcons/inconsistencies, uncharacteristic behaviour, "small universe syndrome", "'memberberries"... If it had fewer familiar faces, I doubt it'd be getting the same reception.
Gore? I'm okay with decapitations, but not with torture porn like the Icheb eyeball scene... I've seen snippets on YouTube reviews but fast forwarded during that part of the episode when I finally saw it myself. If season 3 has gore on this level I will complain heavily on social media.
Swearing? Well I don't like the f-bombs, but it's not a dealbreaker for me -- it just runs against my aspirations that Star Trek should be a PG-13 franchise...
Retcons/inconsistencies? Ok the Jack Crusher timeline is complicated but basically on the baseline of Berman-era Trek, unlike the other two live action NuTrek series.
uncharacteristic behaviour? The Picard/Crusher scene does a good enough job selling that plot point, and other characters can be explained by 20+ years of growth off screen. Whereas Picard sulking in semi seclusion in his vineyard for 14 years is much harder to explain. If he so disagreed with the post-Mars attack Starfleet policy, he could have stood for office and made his case... instead he doesn't even explain his 2385 actions publicly until 2399 if I remember that arc correctly.
Small universe syndrome and memberberries? Season 3 co-executive producer Christopher Monfette has a great thread on their approach copied in a post somewhere down in this section.
Lord knows Trek needed a creative kick in the ass by the time of Enterprise, but IMO now that it got one the Powers that Be have discarded the fundamentals of three-act storytelling along with all the dross. B&B had many flaws, but they at least had a solid grounding in classic beginning-middle-end storytelling. I don't ever want Trek to regress to the days of Enterprise (the only series aside from Discovery I find utterly unwatchable) but, good God, modern Trek badly needs an infusion of old-school writing sensibility.
Even ENT seasons 3 and 4? No Manny Coto turnaround? Ahh, brings back the memories of being one of those people that defended it while airing. The more things change, the more they stay the same. I wonder what it must be like for Brannon Braga to be approached by many people apologizing for demonizing him in the past...
