The most recent episode of Starfleet Academy (ST:A) suggests that it’s struggling worse than I had thought.
The opening scene is, well, of an adult nature; I’m an adult, and I remember how Star Trek: Enterprise had Jolene Blalock in skivvies for the male gaze, 100% - but this was a scene with no nudity but in flagrante dilecto. We know people in the Star Trek universe are people, but this was gratuitous… and long. There was a payoff in the scene - no, not that kind of payoff, geez - but it could have been done differently and without … whatever that was.
And the story in the episode - which wasn’t sex at all - suggests that the galaxy is a few days’ wide… and yet has enforceable “shipping lanes.”
I have no idea why nobody in the writer’s room looked at “Hey, let’s get someone whose location is presently unknown on the scene in 15 minutes” and “he wants control over a shipping lane between two similarly-named celestial objects, implying that they’re close” without going “are these not gross contradictions?”
And then they tried to pretend these people had unique insight (“Hey, they don’t like light!” - not the observation, but similar; if it’s that trivial, it’d be super trivial to diagnose, like “oh we can defeat Dracula by using a light bulb, woo”) and the power to use so-much-si-col-uh-gee to play games with others’ heads. This is basic “hey, do we have a tricorder” stuff, even if they try to “help” by mysteriously blocking communication because why not, it’s convenient for the story.
This is episode six, guys. You shouldn’t be scraping the bottom of the barrel this early. At all.