One thing that rubs me the wrong way in the season is that many things, mostly actions taken, make very little sense and yet we're supposed to pretend that there's nothing wrong about them.
The built-in disadvantage DSC finds itself in is that there's too much time for the characters to engage in second-guessing. In the classic TOS episode, there would not be, and the heroes would be entitled to banging their foreheads for five days after the credits roll, for having missed the obvious solution in the heat of the moment (but thankfully it all worked out all right anyway). Here we
see those five days...
Gabrielle thinks nothing of traumatizing little Spock for years in order to save her child while we know that she disposes of powerful devices. I mean, she can transport a village halfway across the galaxy but her only recourse to save her daughter is to contact Spock!! Please!! How about killing the beast? Or transporting it elsewhere? Transporting her daughter near Sarek's house and alerting Sarek with a flare or whatever. I mean we're told that the only way to kill a fly is to use a photon torpedo and we're supposed not to question that!!!
I think this strikes at the same deeper issue as the nonsense about Dr Who never wanting to do a retry with his time machine, because criscrossing the time wires blows up the multiverse or whatever. No doubt Gabrielle B made many mistakes in her early days of time-meddling, and no doubt she would have been inconvenienced by first having to distract or drag away her former selves before she could meddle better. But sometimes the retry should have been worth it.
Then again, all that time meddling no doubt is a house of cards: mess with something done early on, and you lose all the things you originally won with your later meddlings... I could accept this Angel stuff being complicated and likely to make the Angel look conflicted if not outright insane, and what we see of Gabrielle B fits that pretty nicely!
When Pike says to Cornwell that as long as he stays there the torpedo can't go off. The only objection that comes to hers and his mind is that if he's wrong the ship will be destroyed, while the obvious answer is "not if he takes the admiral's place". That's the ridiculously obvious solution given the stupid limitations that are never explained ( using the transporter to beam out the Admiral, using one of the robots to close the door).
Also, a door that malfunctions stops the explosion - while the other door that was said to have worked fine just gets vaporized, along with that half of the saucer that it was supposed to protect?
This whole torpedo nonsense was apparent filler for turning the finale into a two-parter, and one of the most jarring bits there. Lose it, and you lose a lot of other filler, including the repair bots, meaningless Pike and #1 moments, and the fact that Burnham's vision of what is gonna happen never plays into what happens. Just get Cornwell killed somehow (perhaps directly by Leland) and be done with it.
Admittedly, the fate discussion was fun, but could have been worked into any other scenario there, too.
Perhaps the most egregious bit of "missing an obvious solution" comes from squeezing Sarek and Amanda into the episode. It's bad enough that Georgiou somehow just "comes aboard" again, without the heroes making any use of the asset that brought her there. Now the heroes get visited by the effing Vulcan Ambassador, and he skips bringing an armada with him! If telepathic contact with Michael is the one thing Control can't jam, why rub its disuse in our faces?
But the latter half of the season sort of atones for this general sin: they try many a thing with the Sphere Data, and admit to their errors, and ultimately return to a trick they originally pondered using, but didn't. No other Trek show has had the screen time to do something like that...
Timo Saloniemi
