Ah, my bad. I missed that. In that case the plan to capture the angel makes even less sense than before, does it not?
The show needs to work on it´s writing in general, but really, it seems to be much better when it´s concentrating on individual episode´s plots, not on the serialized arcs.
You bring up several wonderful points, yet none actually responds to the issue at hand. Indeed, just because forms of popular storytelling change, that does not make them bad, but it also does not make them intrinsically good. The examples you mention are not at all like DSC, as they have functional narrative structures, and DSC does not. You think I mean something by Soap Opera that I do not. My description is acedemic, not judgmental. Character focus is not a problem. In fact it's one of DSC's many strengths. Lack of functional narrative is likewise not a problem, just a fact. This particular thread is about the time travel element of S2. And sure, you can make a kind of sense out of the plot. The way other treks used warp to get to stories, DSC uses plot to get to emotional moments. That's its MO, that's it. So trying to make sense of the time travel element that was a means to an end and not built as a story, why? If you really think it's fair game to discuss the quality of DSC's storytelling in the broader sci-fi context, then it basically sucks. The narrative is a hot mess of arbitrary elements that are so poorly set up, any of them could be interchanged without impacting the meat and potatoes of those crucial emotional beats. But DSC doesn't suck. Not at all. So why measure it by yardsticks that fail it?
Yup, you hit it exactly. And I found a lot of this from the moment Control was introduced halfway into the season.
Things like this are signs repeatedly that the backroom upheavals did not help the show. They might have done well to avoid too much serialization while they went through those changes. I know Paradise is putting a good face on it. She should. And she's doing well, for inheriting what might have been a mess. I loved season 2, but these logic and continuity problems that show up repeatedly later in the season could have been dealt with. It's the same kind of writing problems that plagued Capaldi era Doctor Who. They clearly care about the show they are making. they put in a lot of effort and they know as much about the lore as most fans, but herding all that into one cohesive thing, its not an easy job i am sure. They may have reached too high with this complicated a plot. If they can focus on less twists and just let the writers, who really are talented, write the stories they want tell, they can still have an arc narrative that doesn't have to look like a Gordian knot on a flowchart.