I'm finally caught up, so I can participate in these now :)
t would be silly if, say, the Breen dreadnought was to show up and simply yoink away the structure with a tractor beam while we’re still in the cold open, and the Lagrange point did not matter for the rest of the episode.
That bugged me so much 😆. I literally yelled at the TV: "Why didn't you just do that?! Or at least technobabble away why you 'can't just' "
Granted, all the cool stuff that followed wouldn't have happened, but still.
Burnham uses her xenoanthropology specialization to understand that joining a Breen feast day would be considered a good thing to do. Xenoanthropology was established as Burnham’s scientific focus in the series premiere, “The Vulcan Hello”.
I am really loving the multiple callbacks to Burnham's xenoanthropology background this season. Given the nature of their mission, it makes sense for that to be a relevant focus.