Gotta spread the love around to different communities, and parcel it out. Make ten memes and post two a day, meanwhile banking up more. If you have the talent for making memes, before long you’ll have so many stored up that you can just post them at will, either over time or downthread as a reaction to something else and let someone else repost them.
That could have been an incredible story, if the whole story was about that. But it felt like an afterthought, like they needed to create some motivation for the character that the Nexus could exploit. Apparently it was Patrick Stewart himself who suggested that plot point. On top of that you have Kirk and his horse, which seemingly has nothing to do thematically with Picard’s troubles.
The Nexus concept is good, but they didn’t push hard enough on it. Here’s this psycho-temporal rift in space that functions like a literal heaven. It’s basically the manifestation of everything the Traveler talked about: thought transcending time and space. So Picard wants to cosplay a Victorian family Christmas, and Kirk wants to be alone on a ranch? Like, what? Maybe if Kirk was there with Carol and the son he barely got a chance to know, it might have created a parallelism that Picard could relate to. There’s just way too much going on, and it doesn’t cohere very well.
In universe, that works. The sad reality is that the goatee-and-shaved-head look (which Avery Brooks sported both in his previous TV roles and in real life) was considered by studio heads at the time to be “too urban” (ie, “too black”). It wasn’t until the show had established its roots that Brooks had enough leverage to change Sisko’s look to what it should have been from the start.
That’s a great point. They’re certainly at least 3-dimensional, as seen most clearly when someone is on the main viewscreen but their eyeline matches the smaller figures on the bridge, rather than looking more like a zoom window as it would if it was a simple camera-flatscreen configuration.
I’ve headcanoned it that Discovery was covertly part of a Section 31 collaboration with the Department of Temporal Investigations to test technologies and materials acquired or implied through various temporal incursions, the goal being to see which ones could be arrived at and used without causing potential disturbance to the timeline. The updated look of Federation ships is also a result of that, producing a 23rd century which looks quite different but in which events play out functionally the same.
All it would take is a Short Trek where someone rediscovers the network and encounters a group of advanced beings living there, who explain that it has been closed to current warp-capable beings because they have proven themselves not ready for the privilege yet.
Discovery was like Alexander the Great stumbling onto warp drive.
They couldn’t have destroyed the network, because it was strongly implied that it was a fundamental aspect of the universe itself. What would have been better is if some higher-dimensional beings living there said “You abused the privilege, and your rights to use this network have been revoked”.