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.
I often feel the same. Actually good homemade stuffing is amazing. But then they go and put big chunks of celery or fucking pickles of all things for some reason in it.
I felt like Molly and the rest of the tribe were pushed into the background
Having read the book, that was kind of the point. They didn’t have agency, because it was literally robbed from them at every moment. And during the part of the story where Ernest is under scrutiny and forced to own up to his sins, his wife is as passive as it can get, because she’s on death’s door and bed-ridden. It would be artificial to give her a big presence there, because in reality she was in the process of literally disappearing from the world. Molly actually gets more of an emotional presence onscreen, in part because the book is a more journalistic account and first hand sources of who she was are limited. I would like to have seen some scenes of her moving on with her life afterwards at the end in place of that weird epilogue.