The Macguffin of the story, the Godsend, was a built by Georgiou as a deterrent against anyone trying to overthrow her. She says there were always plotters and coups.

I could see it as part of a Tetrarchy type system. For periods during the Roman Empire there wasn’t a single Emperor there were 4. A junior (Caesar) and senior (Augustus) emperor for the Western and Eastern empires.

The Roman Empire’s government had two major related problems. It never established a stable and reliable means of succession and because of that the Emperor couldn’t delegate major problems to anyone else because that person would become a threat to overthrow the Emperor. The Tetrarchy was an attempted solution. Two emperor’s would share power and have junior colleagues that they could delegate tasks to who would eventually succeed them. It didn’t really work out and only lasted about 30 years before Constantine made himself sole Emperor.

The Terran Empire would clearly face similar problems with regards to succession. I could see an Emperor setting up a system where a junior Emperor was chosen by the Hunger Games method. I also wouldn’t expect it to last.

There’s a germ of a good idea here. A show following a band of misfits around the edges of the Star Trek universe while they get into and out of trouble could be fun. Several of the characters like Zeph and Fuzz have interesting concepts which we haven’t seen yet in Star Trek.

The bad however out weighs the good. One, it makes no sense for a super-secret spy agency to employ this bunch of marginally competent weirdos and it really doesn’t sell why a team of by the book Starfleet Intelligence officers couldn’t have handled this problem by the end of the opening credits.

Two, a history as a genocidal space dictator isn’t just a quirky character trait. The movie sometimes wants to deal with that seriously and other times treats it as a joke. I don’t know if there is a right way to deal with it, but this movie definitely isn’t it.

Three, this movie definitely inherits many of Discovery’s worst traits of frenetic camera work and inability to slow down long enough for us to get to know the characters.

I’m disappointed that they clearly don’t. The same tired justifications which amount to the ideals of Star Trek are a luxury made possible by hard men doing bad things in the dark.