Reflecting real world issues in which people do documentaries to try and prove something instead of, you know, document.
The only documentarians who do that IRL tend to be real amateur-hour types who can't get a work as a real documentarian because the moment they pitch to anyone, even potential cameramen etc, they immediately get pegged as some sort of weird little axe-grinder who lacks the basic personality traits to be a good documentarian (I know I sure as hell couldn't be). Perhaps this is why Umberto has to work with a robot?
Usually it's people going undercover trying to do a gotcha (often of welfare systems or the like) and failing to get anything compelling.
And I don't think it's actually really a modern "real world issue", I think it's a kinda-outdated issue, they should have made him more like a streamer or something, like at least made him have an existing audience, which would have made his attempt to make a very slanted and pre-motivated piece make more sense/have more relevance.
What the episode succeeds in doing in spades is:
A) Making Umberto look completely talentless. Especially given the revelation a few episodes back that his camera essentially auto-tracks and auto-gets moments of emotion due its software.
B) Making Umberto look like a jerk. My god, the camera is like 1-2 feet from people's faces most of the time we see a long shot (not talking about the "laptop" shots, this floating cam in face ones). Star Fleet training must be INCREDIBLE that people aren't regularly smashing that camera out of their face because humans innately hate that! A family member you liked doing that would probably get yelled at, let alone a talentless weirdo causing problems on your spaceship! But on top of that he fails to note one of the people who he keeps interviewing is his sister, and another is a chick he's trying to bang. Nor does he note that nepotism got him that access, which is like, common for rubbish journalists, but documentarians do often note.
In fact let's add:
C) Making Umberto look deeply unethical and like he has no code of conduct. A lot of the shots he uses are ones that aren't appropriate for an actual documentary, they're from like undercover journalism. But he's not undercover. He has huge access, so stuff where he's hiding the camera from them and sneaking around? That's actually not okay. You can't have it both ways. You can capture stuff where you're not hiding but they're not paying attention to you - documentarians do that all the time, but he's hiding the camera at times, and that is not cricket, and I think whoever wrote this just doesn't understand what a documentarian does, and conflates them with the worst kind of tabloid/yellow journalist.
Also huge question raised and not answered unless I somehow missed it:
Who the hell told him about the missing logs from sick bay? That seems like something you could absolutely not find out without access levels to ship systems he absolutely could not have as a rando civilian, and also not something you could ever guess. Making M'Benga say "I do not recall" like Ollie North is some more of the godawful NYC-in-space brain syndrome I mentioned with previous episodes. Like, come on man. This is Star Trek, not a bad Law & Order spin-off. It's also totally out of character for M'Benga, isn't an absolute dimwit like North, and always aware of appearances, so would just, based on all previous characterisation, just act like he had no idea what was being talked about, laugh and shake his head and so on.
It's easily the worst episode of this season though because it essentially has no reason to exist, doesn't tell a compelling or meaningful story, serves to make a character look
much worse not to give them more depth or humanity (Umberto in this case, actually a kind of scumbag it seems). Also they don't even stick to the format - like a 34:15 or so they just abandon it for a bit, and it's like, no, commit to the bit or don't commit to the bit, don't stop just stop doing the bit random because you think it'll be more emotional if you stop! It might well be the worst episode of Strange New Worlds period.
They did say the rarely-heard outside D&D word "psionics" though, and I like that lol. The whole plot could have been like a pretty basic and "done" but still fun Trek plotline but it's absolutely ruined by this ghastly presentation which feels like it's a hatchet-job on Umberto himself lol. It does make Pike look pretty damn great but he already seemed like a near ideal captain!
I mean I'll tell you what this does confirm to us - the Federation is a true utopia in that, even a genuinely talentless idiot who is monumentally unsuited to being a documentarian, who like would fail basic classes IRL, can, with the Federation's loving embrace, live out his dream and get incredible access and make a godawful documentary lol.
