In my TNG season 1 rewatch, I finally got to the season finale, “The Neutral Zone.” Though best known for Picard’s utopian declarations to the cryogenically frozen people from the 90s about the post-scarcity future, it also centers on a tense confrontation with the Romulans. I noticed many parallels with the setup of the Discovery premier, “The Vulcan Hello” In both, our heroes confront a foe that has not been heard from in many years – the Klingons for Discovery and the Romulans for “Neutral Zone.” In both, they are befuddled by a cloaking device. And in both, there is a dispute about how to respond to the situation – Burnham and Worf both insist that they must fire first or risk annihilation, and both are drawing on the experience of their parents being killed by the respective species. And I suspect that this parallel is intentional on the part of the writers, because of the crucial difference – Worf is 100% wrong about the need to fire first, while the verdict is much more ambiguous for Burnhan. She agrees that she was wrong to attempt mutiny, but was she wrong to try a preemptive attack under the circumstances? We never know for sure, and even she never directly repents of her desire to strike first. By creating a parallel with a well-known TNG episode and then inserting a crucial difference, the writers are sending the signal that we are definitely not in the utopian TNG era.
But what do you think?
It also occurs to me that Worf and Burnham were both raised on a foreign planet by foster parents of a different species and feel like outsiders or anomalies in Starfleet. The fact that this parallel exists with a Klingon would presumably make Burnham feel some kind of way, as the kids say.