Maybe I’m just getting too old and grumpy for this teeny drama emotional crap, but for me this was the worst episode yet. I get that this was effectively trauma therapy after the Miyazaki incident, but boy was it not entertaining. It’s all just “oh, we are so damaged, nothing will ever be the same”. There’s nothing really at stake, no tension, no climax, just whining and speaking way too much in metaphors for my liking. I’m still watching Star Trek here after all and not some artsy independent movie.

I agree that I felt this was the weakest. This felt like actors writing an episode for actors about the healing power of ACTING! Just…calm down and see a real mental health professional.

Cableb and Tarima have negative chemistry, and I wish the writers would stop trying to make that happen, but here we are.

The stuff with SAM was great and should have been the A-plot.

Overall I’m still liking the show but this was definitely one of the weakest so far.

It’s disappointing worldbuilding that there is no advanced mental/medical health services everpresent already that people just use whenever. 1k years in the future and people need theatre to teach them to manage their mental health. But such things would require the showrunners to give a shit about the science fiction part of startrek and not for a modern day character drama set in a generic tech fiction setting. The technology in this show is not treated as a meaningful character itself, the science and technology is written for the convenience of the plot and does not form a cohesive and consistent world. This lack of object storytelling is a modern writing issue that makes the stories lack grounding in shared reality. Each episode might as well just be a dream one of the characters had.

I would find some sort of magical “mental health technology” not only unrealistic, but rather insulting.

Why?

That’s the perfect scenario for science-fiction. It’s theoretically possible to do so, trauma has a physiological footprint, it manifests in physical reality that can be altered by technologies. It’s entirely plausible for some effects of trauma to be healed medically instead of solely through something like talk therapy, or in this case, theatre therapy.

That’s the perfect scenario for science-fiction.

I don’t agree at all - it sounds rather soulless to me, stripping the humanity from the story.

That’s a pretty common part of science fiction, particularly cyberpunk, though. What does it mean to be human in a world of advanced technology? Data from TNG was this very question, that character existed to explore what it meant to be human and confront the realities of our relationship to technology. This hologram character could have been similar. If little to no part of the story is the relationship between human beings, technology, and scientific knowledge, it isn’t science -fiction.

I think that’s the crux of the hate for this series and discovery, of this Kurtzman era of trek. It’s isn’t science-fiction at all, it’s drama set in a techno-fantasy world. Those are two very different things and neither is Star Trek.