""""loudly declare""""

Adira tells Stamets their pronouns, and Stamets says "okay" approvingly. That's it. That's the full extent of what you are calling a "big deal."

You understand that even in a society where everyone is allowed to "just be," accidental misgendering is still going to happen and corrections will still need to be communicated, right? Marco misgendered Nico on their first appearance, so Nico must have corrected him. You are effectively arguing that enby representation is only acceptable if actual conversations about gender occur off-screen.

This line was foreshadowing Lorca’s origin. You see, mirror Musk was actually competent, making him the precise inverse of real Musk.

I don’t care that the timing is suspect and there’s another Musk reference in Discovery, I’ll die on this hill.

... photoshop?

You're telling me that Robert Duncan McNeill isn't shredded?

EDIT: Apparently everyone on this website is insane

The inmates are running the asylum

There’s also nothing that indicates Kirk didn’t serve on the Enterprise in another role before getting promoted

Hm, here's an interesting formulation for all or part of a final season:

• Pike leaves, becomes an Academy instructor
• Una becomes captain of the Enterprise
• Kirk transfers in to be her XO

Kirk and Spock working together for a year or so would give us a chance to explain the unusual situation where Spock is simultaneously science officer and XO. By the end of this season you'd have the full TOS crew in place. (Minus perhaps Chekov, or maybe he's a cadet like Uhura was in season 1.)

It’s almost as if time itself is pushing back and events reinsert themselves and all this was supposed to happen back in 1992 and I’ve been trapped here for 30 years!

This line is a pretty conspicuous breach of the fourth wall placed there by the current stewards of the franchise to tell us that we’re back to pre-Kelvin timeline time travel rules. The whole “time travel creates two discrete timelines” notion is gone. It was a one-off to justify the Kelvin timeline, and now we’re done with it.

It’s all one timeline and while that timeline is in a constant state of flux due to time travelers tinkering with it on a regular basis, it’s still one big wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey timeline. Therefore, the answer to every “are X and Y in the same timeline?” question is a continuously shifting “maybe” which largely depends on how you choose to understand “the timeline.”

To put a finer point on it, this is the writing staff telling the fanbase to chill out about timelines. Akiva Goldsman speaking to CinemaBlend, emphasis mine:

This is a correction. Because otherwise, it’s silly, or Star Trek ceases to be in our universe…By the way, this happened in Season 1, so this is not a Season 2 [issue]. It’s a pilot issue. We want Star Trek to be an aspirational future. We want to be able to dream our way into the Federation as a Starfleet. I think that is the fun of it, in part. And so, in order to keep Star Trek in our timeline, we continue to push dates forward. At a certain point, we won’t be able to. But obviously, if you start saying that the Eugenics Wars were in the 90s, you're kind of fucked for aspirational in terms of the real world.

Translation: the Star Trek canon is going to keep shifting forward to accommodate keeping it in our future. More broadly, we should all accept some measure of canon flexibility so Star Trek is always set in an aspirational future, well suited for telling morality tales in space which are relevant to modern issues.

I love it when the "come to my free speech zone!" pitch reaches the point where a total lack of self-awareness is put on display

I really hope the mods here let you keep digging

And we're updated! Thank you for your advice, we really appreciate it.

You're not wrong, but man the Prime Directive would make a whole lot more sense if it did. The commonly misunderstood version of the PD that is intended to prevent cultural contamination is clear and simple. Given its status as the literal top rule, the actual PD—a generalized non-interventionism/pro-isolationism dictum—is oddly complex, vague, and lacking a focused objective.

there is literally an entire genre of subreddit dedicated to this kind of post

why are you feigning surprise about it?

What about Paramount+ is worse than all the other streaming services? Aren't they all hoovering up data about our watch habits? Isn't that the point?

If you don't want to stream it and you don't want to buy it outright, I don't know why you're asking us to tell you what the only remaining option is, matey.

Reviewing your questions to consider, it's very hard for me to conceptualize a show that fits the description in your title. Most of Star Trek is heading down to the planet of the week. Given the choice between focusing on the away team and focusing on the crew operating the starship, I think I'd sooner follow the away team and consign the ship crew to being nameless extras.

What's interesting, though, is that I can think of at least two occasions where the people making Star Trek had similar doubts to the ones you've articulated here. First, when Roddenberry decided that sending the captain down was too dangerous, which led to the development of Riker as a character. Second, when the Enterprise writing staff decided that what Star Trek really needed were marines and came up with the MACOs.

So, while I can't really envision a Star Trek where the main cast is confined to the ship, I can envision a Star Trek where a starship's senior staff is distinct from a starship's MACO command staff and the main cast is split between the two.

In other words, we're talking about a version of TNG where Riker, Yar, and Worf are not Starfleet officers, but MACO officers. In this version of TNG, away missions are composite affairs: Geordi is still heading down if there's an engineering problem to solve, Crusher is still heading down to respond to a medical emergency, and Data is still heading down in case they need to win $12.5m playing craps. But Lt. Col. Riker is still in command of the the away mission and Capt. Worf is bringing up the rear.

The thing is, this changes the texture of your average away team-centric episode so little that all we've really done is... add marines to Star Trek. This will inevitably pull Star Trek in a militaristic direction and I don't think we've gained anything in exchange.

Closing thought. While writing this response I encountered something that surprised me: Major Hayes is only in five episodes of Enterprise. I suppose it's a credit to Culp's performance that I would have guessed he was in at least ten episodes had you put me on the spot and asked, but on the other hand, it's pretty telling that even though Enterprise kept the MACOs through season 4, they just became redshirts and the Enterprise writers never even bothered to tell us who their new commander was.

It's hard to imagine Lt. Col. Riker faring any better given the same constraints. You can give the Enterprise a MarDet, but if you're going to give them something to do on a regular basis that isn't equally or better suited for the senior staff, then you're writing a far more action oriented show than we're accustomed do.