Sleep deprived stream of consciousness thoughts.
I like the story at a very broad level, but unfortunately it didn't come together when it came to the details. The Breen and Moll was completely wasted, although I'm glad they didn't resurrect L'ak or Kwejian, the faith storyline with Culber kind of just... ended. Like it technically paid off, but there was no lesson learned from it for the character.
I'm also a bit tired of the alien info dumps at main character plot device, even though technically TNG and DS9 do it in their finales as well. I didn't hate it, but I feel like there must be a different way to do that kind of revelation nowadays. At least it wasn't a legacy character doing the info dump or a copy of Michael.
I have many nitpicks as well:
They forgot Adira was a trill again.
They bring back the OG bridge crew for a cameo, which is great, but then delete the new bridge crew from existence because they're not family I guess.
The direction of the fighting scenes was terrible.
Why did Daniels have Sisko's baseball? Did he literally go back in time to steal it, along with Gordi's VISOR, or is it implied that he worked with both of them and they gave him souvenirs?
Speaking of Daniels, I'm not too offended by it for the most part and actually smiled when he said his name. It ties into the story at least and doesn't feel completely shoehorned in like, well, Picard S3.
It's so weird. I do like Discovery S3-5, but it also feels like such a wasted opportunity. Literally a blank canvas to do anything you want with the Star Trek "brand" but without the baggage of worrying about continuity, and other than remixing some of the races a bit, it doesn't feel all that different. Even in the context of leveraging an exciting ancient alien legacy story, Star Trek Resurgence did a better job with how it was handled than this season.
I'm just confused about how I feel... because I actually do think Michael's arc is great and giving her the finale moment makes sense. It's just everything around that is so underwhelming. It's like someone gave me like a perfect Kobe steak, but served it ice cold.
Oh, I think the volume has lost its magic for me. I just couldn't help but feel that the entire portal place looked so fake. Compare that to the beach at the end. I get that you can do really cool things with it, but something about how it's been used lately makes it all feel about as worse as the Star Wars prequels and the incessant green screen. I was starting to feel it with SNW, but this kind of cemented it for me.
