Strong for this season, but the gimmick of genre homages on every episode (even the Martians were pretty pulp-serial in their production design) has really backfired, I think. When everything’s special, nothing’s special. As someone who got stuck in watching one summer of Young and the Restless with his mom one summer in the late 80s, the parody itself worked pretty well, but I found myself mercilessly slicing that nostalgia away to look at the story itself in a way that I wouldn’t if it had been slipped into a more “normal” season as a breather.

Overall, it was okay, the crew manipulated into dealing with some stuff that they didn’t want to, and knowing that stubborn Pike had to be the one to pull them through. I’m an absolute sap for pulling dad heartstrings, though, so that part came together nicely for me, and as the one time where we even briefly explore the fact that some ST characters end up living double or triple lifetimes due to cosmic events.

And, if we can channel 30 Rock for a moment… https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/853ad834-2855-48d8-bef1-0e8ff9a12bc3.mp4