Star Trek: Discovery has really improved after hitting the reset button

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"When the first season of Discovery premiered in 2017, I was thrilled to welcome a new ship to the fleet. But it quickly became clear that this Star Trek series would rather drag us along on season-long arcs than serve the familiar episodic storytelling of Treks past," says Daniel Schroeder. "The dense garble of plot juggled too many stories at once, and the creators gave themselves a deceptively tough task setting the show in a pre-Original Series world while preserving the existing canon. Instead of embracing the freedom of a foregone conclusion, they spent too many episodes trying to infuse early Trek lore with a modern TV gloss. And while the titular ship is a stunning new invention—a science vessel able to instantly cross the universe coasting on a wave of mushrooms—too often those skills were used investigating series-long McGuffins about red lights in the sky and Klingon politics. I still ate it up because I’m always hungry for Trek, and the brilliant cast kept the ship on course in spite of itself in Season 1. But by the end of Season 2, the Discovery writers had trapped themselves in their own story with a sentient artificial intelligence threatening to destroy a universe we already know survives because we’ve seen the series that follow. The only solution was to start from scratch—which they accomplished with an absurd time jump, sending the Discovery crew nine centuries into an unknown future."