I actually really enjoyed the episode.
I've always been a bit on the fence with Discovery. That it was placed before TOS and went with more modern aesthetics than any of the other ST series besides the "Kelvin Timeline". The newer tech and new alien species looks felt weird when other ST shows that travelled to previous eras "respected" as it were the look of TOS. To me besides the Spock family thing they decided on that no one asked for, the basis and themes of the show have always felt like something that should come after Voyager.
Season One eventually got going and was good, and Season Two got much better with the introduction of Pike who I feel was a really great character to reuse from that time frame and gelled well with the existing characters.
So going into Season Three I was super worried about what their reasoning for the collapse of the Federation and Starfleet was going to be. They are pretty much bookending the universe fir any future stories that we have yet to see with the reasoning they would decide on as to why everything fell apart.
We might not have a lot of details on "the burn" so far besides the massive loss of dilithium, but I can say I'm generally alright with it so far. From what we've seen and has been said the burn was a galaxy wide event, every space fairing species would have been affected by it, and suddenly a base component of technology for interstellar travel essentially disappears over night.
I think a lot of fans had assumed it would be some omega particle like event and subspace was going to have been destroyed making warp travel impossible, which also would have worked I feel making the reliance on Discovery's technology even more important than just dilithium now being sparse. But I'm happy the Federation didn't just "fail", it seemingly didn't get too full of itself or too big, it like many other galactic governmental entities would have all had the same problem when "the burn" happened.
Going from the wreckage of ships and the station and a few lines, dilithium going "boom" likely took out most of Starfleets and pretty much everyone else's ships, that would have been a monumental loss of life and technology in one go across the galaxy.
I can totally understand why everyone would suddenly worry it would happen again. If for instance every single plane all at the same time fell out of the sky at once and no one knew why, even though a few planes could then still take off after, I couldn't see people just carrying on and using them as much as we do. It would cause a massive disruption to how the world currently works.
So it was nice going into this era and not knowing anything about it, there was a couple references to events and technology we knew about before, but everything else is new. I hope we don't end up too much like Andromeda, but I think the show can really develop from this sort of clean slate, possibly to the point that maybe this should have been the main idea behind the Discovery tv show from the start and not two seasons down the road. I do wonder if Pike and the Discovery era Enteprise characters hadn't been so well received if we would be getting a Discovery spin off set in this era that would be a more classic like Star Trek series, that would deal with more of the day to day return of the Federation and Starfleet side and could run parallel to Discovery's story.
So yea, I'm kind of excited which is nice and I'm looking forward to what comes next. Especially after Picard felt it went a bit flat, but lower decks totally knocked it out of the park with that last episode.
I also apologise and didn't realise how much I had waffled on for in this post.
