VindictiveJudge

I don't think the Romulans are really any better, they just solved the problem with external control rather than internal control, that external control being an inescapable police state.

T'Lyn is one of the most rational and logical Vulcans in the franchise and she was booted from the Vulcan fleet for not fitting into their strict dogma.

Depending on who's writing the episode, yeah, and it's a great concept that I felt was explored well. Other times, however, we have an episode where Tuvok talks at length about the training and conditioning he underwent to control his emotions, then in the very next episode, talk at length about how Vulcans are naturally emotionless and incapable of feeling emotion at all. This chronic lack of consistency in the writers' room is a big part of why Moore left the show to reboot BSG.

Unfortunately, the writers often forget this. VOY waffles a lot on whether or not Tuvok is literally emotionless.

Are tribbles the new popplers?

I still think this would have been better with VOY sets for the background than TNG sets.

If it was mentioned, it was probably in ENT. They talked a lot more about grav plating in that show than any of the others, probably more than all of them combined.

That was entirely dependent on Stewart's contract negotiations, though, rather than anyone wanting to kill off Picard.

They didn't want to fire her, but she did want to quit. She wasn't happy with the direction they were taking her character. I wouldn't be surprised if she also had issues with the same guy McFadden did. Jadzia was killed off because Berman wouldn't let Farrell switch to being a recurring rather than a regular, which may be what you're thinking of.

Ah yes, psychedelics are famously not associated with mysticism.

Might depend on your area? I mostly just associate them with stoners. Mystic folks in my area are really into crystals.

The closest comparison is actual fungal networks that exist beneath forests supporting life through the transference of nutrients and biochemical communication, are some of the largest organisms on the planet, and are actual nonfiction science.

I meant in terms of 'a thing that links worlds together'. Typically, a trans-dimensional plant or plant-like thing is depicted as a tree, patterned off of the mythic Yggdrasil. World trees are also typically a high fantasy thing, since they're mimicking Yggdrasil. The mycelial network is essentially a world tree, or rather a world shroom. It's not exactly an expected trope in sci-fi. Mixing the genres is definitely doable, but you need to get your foot in the door with some shared concepts before you spring a wrong-genre thing on the audience.

I think I can agree with you to some extent there. Stamets, by virtue of being standoffish and prickly when the character is introduced, is not the best at explaining things, and the concept could have used a better explanation early on to mitigate the response I’m complaining about with this post.

Stamets not being a great vehicle for exposition is definitely a problem, but I think the real problem is that season 1 in general has weird pacing. They spent a lot of time getting Burnham situated on the Discovery and the Mirror Universe arc took up a lot of time for how little actually happened in it. They wound up course-correcting near the end of the season by literally skipping ahead a few months on the return trip. I'm sure it's partially a too many cooks situation with the early show's revolving door of showrunners, but the second season did greatly improve in that regard while still having to swap out showrunners mid way through.

My point is, season 1 is kind of wonky structurally.

And a malfunction has the potential to destroy all life in the multiverse.

I didn't like that part at all. An infinite multiverse, which they state in DSC is the case, means that anything with a probability greater than zero is guaranteed. Mathematically, the multiverse should have already been wiped out at some point. It's also a throwaway line meant to increase dramatic tension for all of ten seconds before the scene ends, and an empty threat given that following through would end the show.

I think the mushrooms almost feel too... mundane? The average person probably interacts with a lot more mushrooms than crystals. Crystals also have a long history of being associated with magical properties, and modern science has figured out some neat things that can be done with crystalline structures. We're pretty primed for crystals doing cool stuff. Mushrooms have significantly less mysticism associated with them and related science is more biological than technological. That's not really solidly in favor of one or the other, but it does mean the audience will more readily accept crystal hijinks with no warm up than mushroom hijinks with no warmup. The closest comparison to the mycelial network is Yggdrasil, which is solidly in the high fantasy category rather than sci-fi.

All that is to say, I think the mycelial network needed more time to set up than the show gave it. Some kind of foreshadowing, like simply mentioning something about advances in organic technology. Farscape probably would have been able to sell it pretty quick, but Farscape also has organic technology as a core part of the premise with Moya. Not an inherently bad concept, just kind of comes out of nowhere in the context of Trek.