Could you elaborate?

The biggest recent example of someone getting backstory as prelude to killing them off is Airiam (Robot-Head Person).

I also like that he is the only main character in an ongoing series to be from the pre-Enterprise era (since the Tellarites we see there have normal warp engines and presumably would not still be using generation ships like his).

I agree that ideally they would maintain that kind of fuzzy timeline to maintain our connection to their future. In fact, many years ago on the old Daystrom I tried to argue that we shouldn’t take dates on the show literally other than as an indication of the general order in which things happened – leading to massive pushback from almost everybody! It seems like Picard season 2 went pretty far out of its way to endorse the fan-favored theory that the Trek timeline forked sometime prior to the 90s, though, and I worry about the slipshod continuity management that is emerging as the streaming era matures. Of course, the Picard finale also abruptly undid the whole climax of season 2, so maybe the official position is that we’re going to pretend season 2 never happened.

It still seems like they could have coordinated the two plots in a more transparent way, given that the shows are running concurrently and have overlapping staff. Fans shouldn’t have to do this much mental gymnastics to reconcile episodes that aired two years apart. The in-universe claim that the pre-history of our era is constantly shifting seems like a cop-out in those circumstances.

Why did they have to show Khan shifting into the future just one year after Picard and co. travelled back to the same time and we saw Soong on trial for the Khan project (a past event)? What benefit is there to jacking around with what they just established?

The biggest gap in the existing series is the one-two punch of the Romulan War and the founding of the Federation, which we only missed due to ENT’s cancellation. Finding some way back into that era, beyond Riker’s holodeck program, would be number one on my wishlist.

Yes! I’ve been thinking for a while that Discovery season 1 is the Last Jedi of Star Trek – except of course that Star Trek started with that alienating move for its new era.