I just started watching Discovery season 3. I was quite traumatized by the low quality of s02, but I decided to give season 3 a chance because I like most of the characters. Now comes the point. I do like Saru a lot nowadays, but at first I was put off a bit by his treatment of the tardigrade. Did any of you mind his lack of empathy for the animal? Or were you alright with him treating the creature as a resource without thinking twice? It feels kind of wrong to me when his own nation is treated as a resource on his home planet.
I'm curious what made season 2 low quality for you, can you elaborate on that?
I also finished season 2 yesterday, currently giving Discovery another try on my journey to watch all of Star Trek since I watched it as it was releasing but I stopped halfway through because the Terran Empire thing was difficult to keep track of for me at the time (probably because it helps my memory if I can watch an episode a day and don't have to wait a week for the next one to keep track of the storyline). My rewatch made me a pretty big fan though and don't really understand the hate it got/gets in the fanbase.
Sorry for not writing for such a long time - my first try got erased before I sent it, but I'm back now to answer your question! It was the writing. I found so many of the dialogues to be really cringeworthy. To be fair, this was not the case for all the episodes. I felt ashamed to bare witness to some of the dialogue in The Sound of Thunder for example, while Light and Shadows was ok for me. I truly suffered through the Red Angel arch. There were so many things that just didn't make any sense to me that I kind of stopped caring. And there was so much unending declamation with no real depth - all I saw were actors trying hard to say the flat lines as well as they could. I continued watching Discovery even after this season mainly because there were great characters again, that is Discovery's strength in my eyes. And the later seasons seemed better to me.
Have a nice day!