It was just 1 stupid thing after another, with nostalgia-bait at the end.
The 1st 8 episodes were decent and the 1st few episode arc in particular was pretty good, on the same level as TNG.
Then it's like they let a retard write this episode. Every plot point was annoying and stupid and totally contrived absolute dumpster fire garbage. This is the twitter profile pic of one of the 2 credited writers. Some young chick who gets coffee for the writers room.
okay so just off the top of my head:
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jack crusher suddenly being treated like the enemy for no good reason
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jack crusher suddenly running to the borg for no good reason so the plot can happen
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borg reveal and within minutes, jack crusher is at the queen
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the whole concept of a "borg queen" is fucking stupid, anyway, they're not fucking ants, they're the ultimate space communists.
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changelings totally disappear from the plot the moment they served their purpose
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rogue changelings were 100x more interesting than this generic borg shit
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the whole concept of "frontier day" is fucking stupid & contrived just to make an excuse to put all Federation ships in 1 place for a ... parade? absolutely idiotic.
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fireworks in space are retarded
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transporter technology cannot be use to alter human DNA en masse, or at all. this has literally never happened in ST history, nothing like as depicted here
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the idea that a human can become a borg because of a few hidden genes is retarded. borg are cyborgs. they spread by injecting nanites. this has all been established over and over.
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borg "brown noise" that makes crew
shit their pantssuddenly have borg nanites in their blood somehow -
LET'S NETWORK ALL OUR SHIPS TOGETHER, IT'S NOT LIKE EVERY SINGLE TIME THIS HAS EVER BEEN DONE IN SCI-FI, THE RESULT HAS ALWAYS BEEN THAT 1 HACK WIPES OUT THE WHOLE FLEET. absolutely retarded, contrived. comes out of nowhere. every view immediately knows it means they're all fucked. It's like "scary movie" levels of retardation.
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literally no reason to network ships unless you're doing a drone light show
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the old ship was destroyed but Geordi put it back together in his free time like your dad working on an old car
But muh nostalgia!
Brings back yet another random face from TNG just to kill them off in the same episode
D is back
Plot is now Battlestar Galactica and the cast is all boomers
As for your points,
Except that time it de-aged Polaski in TNG s02e07 'Unnatural Selection' from 1989.
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Unnatural_Selection_(episode)
So the basic idea is there, it was just upscaled in reach.
I totally forgot about that episode. I barely remember Polaski at all.
I mean if you can manipulate DNA with a transporter so easily, it would be used 99% of the time to cure everything & be the ultimate in cosmetic surgery. The medical bay basically would have no reason to exist. Want a footlong dick or size DDDD tits or to be 6'6" tall? Just tell the transporter to give you the genes for it.
Let me also say that Captain Shaw is easily the best character of Season 3 & the writers just do him dirty and kill him randomly for absolutely no reason. Fuck them for that.
Also fuck Raffi. What a useless dumb bitch.
She was only about for season 2 so it's easy to forget her.
It's not even a new problem as transporters have been used to fix shit a lot, even in more recent times like SNW having the ship's doctor use it to put his child in suspended animation, similar to what Scotty did in the TNG episode 'Relics', so that terminal illnesses or whatever can be literally put on pause.
It's like just addressed, offscreen, in a similar way to how extensive and large scale genetic engineering is banned because it would solve far too many things, both in terms of plot and lore due to the Eugenics Wars.
Ah but how else would Seven be just given command of a starship and avoid going through the proper protocols as everyone else should be expected to, similar to how Burnham from STD managed to end up as Captain of the Discovery despite STARTING THE KLINGON WAR BECAUSE "MUH FEELINGS!".
Yes I thought that was ridiculous as well. I could understand a cryopod or some kind of suspended animation, but using a transporter for that was absurd.
There was a DS9 episode where Bashir was put in charge of a bunch of autistic psycopath geniuses, all genetically modified like him, and the implication was that genetic modification usually went horribly wrong or something and turned everyone into that. LOL it was pretty ridiculous.
It also chaps my dick how these bitches can just jump in and out of starfleet like it's nothing. Raffi & Seven were not even in starfleet the prior season. Seven was some kind of mercenary or something. You can't just join Starfleet super easily. It's a super-elite group where only a tiny fraction of those who want in, get in, and it's always been treated as pretty much a lifelong commitment in the various shows. Yet these bitches can go LARP as Han Solo then suddenly be the XO on a starship or some high level operative for Starfleet Intel.
I have mentally blocked her existence out as repressed trauma.
Pretty sure it's been used as a magic fix for whatever problem was happening in various episodes other than the Polaski one. Sure it makes sense in some regards such as GTFO'ing something that needs GTFO'd, but it does start to get weird when it starts crossing dimensions and reversing aging.
In the episode where Bashir is revealed to be genetically enhanced it does state that gene-tailoring is allowed but is limited to fixing defects, it's only when someone is enhanced in some way that it usually resulted in Khan and the ENT era Augments or the Brain Club from DS9.
Ironically accurate to many facets of real life, though. Richest women in the world are mostly rich because of who they married, then divorced. I think that Aussie mining owner might be one of the exceptions but then she also has a lot of complaints against her due to unsafe work environments.
Probably for the best.
Unfortunately, there's a good reason why those women get such jobs. Thanks to diversity inclusion women often get high paying roles even if they're nowhere near good enough to perform at such level. Any show that's going to take the female point of view is not going to have the women grind to get where they need to go.
But she's black and a lesbian!!!!!!!
The transporter helping with aging dna shit is also used when Picard & co are reduced to children when the Ferengis take over the Enterprise.
That said - while I haven't watched any Picard after S1 - going Borg is utterly shit. There is a TNG episode though that deals with activating some hidden DNA shit (Barcley turns into a spider, Worf in an old Klingon being, ...).