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

The wormhole / Celestial Temple seems to be extradimensional in some way. They might actually be out of Q's reach. Or they might not. Q's powers are vaguely defined.

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.

I think the mushrooms almost feel too... mundane? The average person probably interacts with a lot more mushrooms than crystals. Crystals also have a long history of being associated with magical properties, and modern science has figured out some neat things that can be done with crystalline structures. We're pretty primed for crystals doing cool stuff. Mushrooms have significantly less mysticism associated with them and related science is more biological than technological. That's not really solidly in favor of one or the other, but it does mean the audience will more readily accept crystal hijinks with no warm up than mushroom hijinks with no warmup. The closest comparison to the mycelial network is Yggdrasil, which is solidly in the high fantasy category rather than sci-fi.

All that is to say, I think the mycelial network needed more time to set up than the show gave it. Some kind of foreshadowing, like simply mentioning something about advances in organic technology. Farscape probably would have been able to sell it pretty quick, but Farscape also has organic technology as a core part of the premise with Moya. Not an inherently bad concept, just kind of comes out of nowhere in the context of Trek.

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.

Are thirteen year old boys not the target audience for the decon room scenes?

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.

Something to consider with those two images is that they're different angles. Your first image is of the underside of the ship, while the second is the top of the ship.

Also, the texturing and nacelles are different between the two, but the body and saucer seem to be structurally the same. Still a long-boi even with the slightly shorter nacelles.

If you are what you eat, and vegetarians don't eat meat, are vegetarians meat? Is it vegetarian to eat a vegetarian?

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

I think they were banking on Vader hating the planet so much he'd never willingly return and then later training Luke in the hopes that Vader may hesitate to kill his own kids, because Vader hesitating to kill someone is basically the only way anyone has a hope of beating him.

If you think about it, logically, Tom is the original Riker and Will is the duplicate. Typically, the transporter moves mass from A to B, but can replace mass that's been lost along the way as a fail-safe. The missing original mass is either left at Point A or scattered along the transport path. The most likely thing that happened is that the transporter's fail-safe systems went overboard when they failed to pick up Riker's mass - rather than aborting transport as failed, it deemed it a successful transport with 100% missing mass and replaced every atom of Riker with spares on the transporter pad. Will is a transporter clone, Tom is the original.