Star Trek Discovery. [SPOILERS WITHIN]

IS it Enterprise? Or just a conny class?

The most easy way to explain it is that it's indeed an ISS conny class that gets into the ongoing continuity in a similar fashion to how Defiant got into the mirror verse.

Zoom in on that top pic. 1701.

SMG says they shot extra scenes for the final episode to make it feel more complete as an ending.
The actors apparently didn't know this was going to be the end.
I could have sworn the producers had 5 years as the plan. but...that was under Bryan Fuller; who knows what his arc was going to be.

https://www.darkhorizons.com/star-trek-discovery-gets-extended-finale/

explain "Saru is a cuck"?

I don't know that he is or isn't cis. I assume that he is, but there's no way to know for sure until the show establishes that he is or not.

The first point is that unlike old, white and male, cis is not something that has a defined look. Even though he apparently looks male by our 21st century standards, he could have been born female and had his appearance adjusted to this. (My bad of conflating cisgender with homosexuality earlier). We may have a default expectation now that everyone is the gender they appear to be today, in part because most people are, in part because there is a social stigma against changing, and in part because it would be expensive for most to change. But as was pointed out above, having gender reassignment surgery would be fairly trivial with futuristic tech like they must have in Kovich's time. Without today's cultural biases against gender reassignment and with money not being a factor, perhaps people in Kovich's time switch genders as often as we get haircuts.

The second point is that contrary to your post, the point of any version of Star Trek has always been to envision a version of the future where these sorts of things don't matter. Where politicians don't rail against things like gender-affirming surgery or agitate against the notion of men pretending to be women so they can lurk in women's bathrooms. So it is unlikely that the writers were trying to make any grandiose statement by having Kovich be whatever identities he may be.

Last, the way the Discovery writers roll, they don't spend a ton of time on the backgrounds of any character who's not Burnham, Saru, Georgiou or Booker. By that I mean, we don't really know anything about Tilly, Stametz or Culber's backgrounds before they came aboard Discovery, let alone most of the bridge crew. By contrast, 40 episodes into the sequel series on broadcast, each main character had had an episode centered around them so that we came to hear a bit more about their past. So I wouldn't expect the granular detail about anyone on Discovery to exist. Although I would be amused if Michael Burnham had been born male at birth and chose to switch to female.

Probably something one of his Youtubers said.
You'll be waiting awhile for him to ask in comments, get an answer from the peanut gallery, and then come back with that answer.

Point of order: We do know a fair amount about Tilly apart from her time on Discovery. They put a lot of time (relative to other secondary characters) into the whole business of her problematic relationship with her mother and her mother's expectations.

Maybe it's my poor memory, but I don't remember anything specific about Tilly's background the way (say) I remember that Mayweather's experience as a space traveler made him familiar with the sweet spot of the NX-01, or where we met his family members, or that Reed loves pineapple but is allergic to it.

Still wondering why Saru is a "cuck."

For "Face The Strange," I think it felt like mostly filler, in that we're getting a small character development moment with Rayner but not much else, but it's also an interesting look back to how far our characters have progressed, and how even the tone has changed through the seasons.

I'm thinking Rayner is going to go the way of Liam Shaw.

It was a filler episode, but I liked it.

I was so not interested in the Progenitor storyline. Didn’t like it in TNG.

But …, this episode …, I don’t know, now I’m interested.

IOWs, I didn’t hate it.

I will give more credit than the theory likely deserves.

Saru let himself be manipulated by the Vulcan advisor and tried to back down from announcing the engagement in a soft-to-the-hoop way. That could constitute being "cucked" on a couple fronts.

A more assertive being would have taken one of a couple different routes, such as:
1. Telling the Vulcan adviser to fuck the hell off because Saru and Sarina wanted to get married and announce their engagement, and any Vulcan purists can shove their logic up their asses.
2. Having a grown up, upfront conversation with Sarina and saying, "Hey, Vulcan adviser suggested making this announcement would cause you massive political problems. Should we think of a different approach or put the announcement on pause or something?"

I thought "Face the Strange" again felt like a classic Star Trek episode. Yes we've seen these type of episodes before especially in TNG, DS9 and Voyager, but I liked it. I don't think we saw one like this in TOS or ENT, but I could be wrong. The bonus was Rayner getting some character development, which is kind of rare for this show. It felt like Discovery's greatest hits and was clever way to remind the audience the journey the show has taken over the past five seasons. Yes it's a filler episode, but some of the best Star Trek episodes are fillers, I liked it a lot.

I just realized that the ship and the crew were quantum leaping because there’s no double Staments. Burnham and Rayner were protected by the transporter accident so that’s why there was a double Burnham. Staments just kept leaping into himself.

The writing this season is atrocious. A lot of recycled crap from previous Trek series and other shows.

I swear video games have rotted the brains of writers. Here we are again with another quest thread this season. Find a thing. Get another clue. Go to the next thing. Oh and the bad guys are in hot pursuit. Wash, rinse, repeat.

I’ll ask you the same as I ask FF. Where’s your manuscript?

In your cooch.

Nope

If someone is claiming to be a professional tv writer, they should be better than random assholes on the internet.

Okay, here's a serious answer to @Jenee's dumbass question (which is often asked by folks who think they're a lot more clever than they actually are).

It's perfectly valid to critique a television series or film without being a writer or having a manuscript of your own. Criticism of a television series isn't about proving your ability to make one; it's about analysis and interpretation. Just as you don't need to be a chef to critique a meal, you don't need to be a filmmaker to critique a film.

It seems like the point is that it's easy to criticize when you don't have to come up with dozens of stories a season. People can criticize, it's a free country, but it carries more weight if you've been in the shoes of the writers.

It may be the point, but it's still invalid.

Counterpoint: If the writing is becoming stale because you're having a hard time coming up with ten episodes, perhaps the message is that the show should have ended earlier?

Again, you don't need to be a writer to understand the basics of storytelling. The quest for a powerful artifact is a tired trope that has been explored ad nauseam in countless television shows, films and works of literature. The quest narrative adheres too closely to a formulaic structure, with the characters moving from one clue to the next in a linear and predictable fashion. Indeed, Discovery has recycled this narrative in its last three seasons.

I heard somewhere that the writers wanted the audience to walk away at the end feeling like the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and they had structured the season after that movie. I don’t know if that is true or not.

I read something similar on Trekmovie.com.

I don't mind a MacGuffin hunt, as there are only so many plot structures out there.

What I mind is that this particular MacGuffin hunt is not being executed well. Or that is to say, it is being constrained by real world considerations of the producers more than what should be driving the characters internally.

The real world dictates that Discovery and our heroes are at the center of the hunt, because the show can't afford to pay for concurrent ships/crews on the hunt and wouldn't want to follow multiple ships even if they could. That's why the Federation isn't deploying every possible resource, or even more resources, in pursuit of this supposedly all-important goal. It's just a two-ship race, instead of one that involves multiple factions like "The Chase," the TNG episode this is based off of.

The real world dictates that the antagonists have a shot and can frustrate Discovery from succeeding. That's why, in addition to not using more ships/people, not just blowing up or detaining Laak and Mol, in addition to Discovery flat-out being a faster ship with a bigger crew and more resources, Laak and Mol can somehow get to Trill undetected, figure out where Our Heroes are, plant a time bug on them to lock Discovery in a time loop, and figure out whatever clue was there faster than our heroes.

The real world dictates that the heroes have a quest in the first place. That's why, despite the fact the people who found the tech 900 years ago and knew it was too dangerous to fall in the wrong hands, created the elaborate set of clues leading to the tech, as if someone following those clues correctly would inherently make them worthy, as if bad guys couldn't piggyback on the worthy people finding the clues (as they did in The Chase specifically), as if the bad guys couldn't reverse engineer the tech once the good guys introduce it, as if no one would in their time would scrutinize what they had done, where they had gone, etc.

Same here. MacGuffin hunts are an all-to-common common trope but can be entertaining if done properly.

One of the many issues I have with this season is that you have two antagonists with effectively no skin in the game. The viewer simply does not care about Moll and L'ak because there is no dramatic raison d'etre for them, other than serving the role as the "bad guys". Yes, there's the revelation of the relationship with Book, but it's nowhere near enough to hook the viewer.

You want my manuscript? Moll and L'ak kill Saru and Tilly in the first episode. Now you're talking about getting the viewers invested!

If I have one gripe about this season so far - it's that as far as i can tell, we just got what was effectively a filler episode.

When you only have 10 episodes in a season you should never consider doing a filler.

As far as I can tell Moll and L'ak only seem to be driven by money and some vague desire for "freedom," there's nothing to stop Michael from shutting them down immediately with an offer of a massive payout from the Federation, blanket pardons, and a a free spore drive trip to anywhere in the galaxy so they can start fresh. Are you telling me the Federation can't outbid the Breen?

Star Trek Online did this same basic hunt for puzzle pieces as well, years ago, and also involved the Breen. But they made the puzzle one created by the Progenitors themselves, which was a lot less grating than a puzzle created by some arrogant DS9-era scientists that think they know better than anyone else. "I've waited around for 800 years to judge you as worthy if you didn't get killed by those invisible monsters or just shoot them." Fuck you, asshole.