I hope they don't go with the "magical mystery girl" formula *again*. I enjoy the companions, but not all of them have to be a mystery wrapped in an enigma. They don't have to be what the plots *built* around. I'm a lot more interested in the Pantheon or Mrs. Flood than I am Belinda.

I'll see your Romulans and raise you a temporal cold war. Honestly, nobody in their writer's room knew how to handle a time travel story. They should've poached Steven Moffat from the BBC; New Who was in it's infancy then, and Sherlock hadn't come along. He might have been available.

Ashley Judd. You don't have to go looking beyond her name to know why she didn't stick around. She was jump-starting her career, and I'm sure soon both priced herself out of TNG's market and filled her calendar up with other gigs.

*You* don't want this "dross", for whatever personal reasons you may have. I didn't mind Discovery at all, though I don't think it lived up to it's potential, especially in the first couple of seasons. And no, I'm no fawning young fanboi; at 54 years old, I've been watching Trek since all there was to see was TOS reruns on local TV stations, and the only fan forums were fanzines and Cons. Your opinion is neither the only one nor the only one that counts.