This is really what Strange New Worlds is most about: giving us precious knowledge about what our heros in the original Star Trek were all doing before we met them on the Enterprise in the TV sets in our living rooms in the 1960s

I respectfully disagree. I don't think the most important parts of this show are the things it depicts legacy characters doing, though your review mentions little else.

Given your clear fondness for TOS, I'd be interested in reading you compare the two more!

Zombie Hemmer was freaky! Nicely done, wardrobe/makeup.

This clearly took a lot from TNG's Night Terrors right? A bit of Firefly's Bushwhacked in there too.

I liked it overall, but my favourite Star Trek episodes are when the crew gets to use their extreme competency to overcome a difficult challenge. This episode, the crew was... not so competent.

• Una's team can't identify that there's been sabotage even though it's just like, phaser blasts from a half-deranged man
• The dude easily escapes from sick bay and blows up a nacelle (had the stun setting not been invented yet? What about locked doors?)
• There's no way the medical team could keep Uhura around and try to do some tests when she's having an episode, they can only put on the brain scan screensaver
• They can't shut down the dang refinery! The lever's stuck and they're out of WD-40!
• Pike blows up the quadrillion dollar infrastructure project immediately, not even just targeted laser blasts to the parts that are doing the murder. The whole thing has to blow up.

I guess this is just trek being trek and I shouldn't take it so seriously. Emotionally, the crew was at the top of their game: intuitive, perceptive, empathetic, trusting. good stuff.

But yeah, I feel like I would have enjoyed this more had the problem been made more difficult instead of the crew less capable.

Absolutely. The prosecution wasn't given any opportunity to justify the laws whatsoever. It's hard to imagine such a black & white stance on the issue being believable, but they just completely sidestepped it, again.

I enjoy science fiction as a way to critique the social issues of our day through recontextualisation. Because this episode didn't get into the technical details of eugenics, it served far more obviously as an allegory for our present day discrimination - which probably makes it difficult to write compelling opposition that then doesn't just read as racist/transphobic apologetics or whatever.

I mean, I still think it would be possible to do. But I can see the constraints the writers are working with and why they chose to not get into the weeds. It's a shame.