I'm still impressed McNeill was able to say, "Yes, ma'am, his army of evil," with a straight face.

Nah, too vertical.

Also, there was just something about it that felt like a re-hash of an actual TNG episode, but I can’t pin down which one.

"Homeward," the episode where Worf's adoptive brother evacuates a pre-warp species to a new planet because theirs is dying using the Enterprise's transporters and holodeck to make them think they're just traveling over land to a new place. It's almost exactly the plan for moving the Ba'ku.

Vulcans as a whole, or at least Vulcan leadership, definitely seem to lean toward caution and a dash of fear. ENT showed a lot of this with how the pre-Federation Vulcan government reacted to Earth's rapid technological advancement.

Individually, they seem to vary a lot. Spock and T'Lyn have goals they use logic to both choose and achieve, but are fine with experiencing emotions along the way, so long as it doesn't interfere with achieving their goal (after heavy character development for Spock). Sarek privately admits, in a roundabout way, that at least some of his decisions are driven by emotion, such as marrying Amanda, but doesn't let his emotional private life interfere with his strictly rational professional life, often to the consternation of his children. And then you have Solok, the speciesist captain from DS9, who is totally driven by his emotions and deeply in denial about it. And, finally, Tuvok, who very specifically operates entirely based on logic, rejecting his emotions to the point that he sometimes has problems recognizing emotional behavior in others. Tuvok seems to be what the average Vulcan aspires to be, and many believe they already are, but a significant number seem to be more like Solok, with the better adjusted of them being like Sarek. Spock and T'Lyn actually seem to be a very small minority.

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.

The Warner's voices were pitched up a bit in post for the original show and they didn't do that for the revival, which is at least part of why the three all sound off.

Kind of too early to tell. Season one was heavy on setup. I personally enjoyed it. You really need to be familiar with The Clone Wars and Rebels, though.

There are hardly any non-human admirals at all though, so it's not a significant statistic.

I'd more expect him in Ahsoka. Kenobi hasn't had a second season confirmed and was pitched as a one-shot, too.

But it's also in a galaxy far, far away. Perhaps it just took a long time for them to get to our galaxy, with the Falcon arriving some time around the 2200s?

J+S ≠ 47

Yeah, DVD can handle better than what's on the existing discs. If better quality were viable and noticeable with the copies they're working with it probably would have been in the previous releases.

The 'more episodes per disc' thing is definitely true, though. A dual layer BD is 50GB. A dual layer DVD is 8.5GB. If the existing DS9 release fits a season and special features on seven DVDs, then if the discs are dual layer and completely full we're looking at two dual layer BDs for that entire season. Potentially one BD, depending on how much free space is on the existing DVDs.