Spoilers follow for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Season 3
It took me a long time to get through season 3 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. The bottom line is that it's just not very good, unfortunately. I loved the earlier seasons, but this one is a let down. One of the things I like about ST:SNW is that they've been willing to take more risks than earlier series in the Star Trek oeuvre, but they missed the mark here.
The season started with "Hegemony, Part II", a reasonably strong with an action-filled episode that resolved last season's ending, if maybe a little too quickly and easily. Still, fun enough...but then...
More Spock romance. I'm not one to lament the substantial changes to Spock in order to explore his character more, but this season was even more heavy on Spock's romances, which—on top of being pretty out-of-character generally—just got old. Likewise, the episode where we got to see more of the cast act like Vulcan versions of themselves was a bit silly and tiresome, other than La'An being more Romulan than Vulcan.
The other La'An focus was in the Jonathan Frakes-directed episode 4, "A Space Adventure Hour". Sadly, the super premature version of the holodeck didn't hold a candle to the far superior versions of this trope from ST:TNG.
Episode 5 starts a trajectory for Captain Batel and introduce some plot devices that will (sort of) pay off later. Otherwise, it feels forced. Likewise, episode 6 sets up Ortegas and her brother for some later payoff...and it's pretty bad.
"Terrarium", the penultimate episode of the season was also disappointing. I'm not an Ortegas fan—her character feels the most two-dimensional of this crew. On top of that, this is the worst version I've seen of the now sci-fi standard of shipwrecking a character with a counterpart from the enemy side and having them find common ground. (Think The Return of Starbuck from Battlestar Galactica 1980 and You Can't Go Home Again from the Battlestar Galactica reboot.) They really skimped on the set and Gorn effects, and it was just way too much Ortegas.
The finale really put a nail in the season's coffin. It felt like they just really needed to get rid of Batel for some reason, and it was half-assed. Lots of plot holes and the villain was terrible.
Overall, it was just not good. :(