Been super busy (literally been reading the story 'graphs at a time)
Same here, I've been struggling to make time to even read them lately, let alone discuss them properly, which is really a shame (I'm here now, but I should be doing actual work instead...). In a nutshell, I think last week's story was pretty cool and did some desperately needed gap filling. The two stories before that had some real issues, especially the one about Urza's weird dungeon thing. And it's just really evident to me that the short story format is working less than ever for this set. Especially with episodes 5 an 6, everything felt more like summaries of random snapshots of outlines of scenes stapled together in no particular order and without much of a meaningful connection, spiced up with an extra dose of irritating vagueness. And that's not even talking about the issues with the actual content of said stories. Who ever thought the sheer number of characters, plot threads, worldbuilding and background information (or lack thereof) in
Dominaria could be crammed into 12 short stories??? That's insane! That said, I still enjoyed even the weaker and messier stories
on some level, simply because they provide a glimpse of what my favourite plane looks like today (which is doubly useful because I'm still determined to run that D&D campaign eventually). And you really have to give it to Martha Wells that she didn't promise too much when she said her goal was to make the returning old fan favourites feel "seamless" by capturing their voice and personality. Sure, you could always look at the general outline of the story and question why character X has or doesn't have motivation Y, but as far as their actual appearance on screen is concerned, characters like Teferi or Jodah felt spot on to me. Heck, Jodah only had a measly cameo, but he felt more like Jeff Grubb's Jodah in that one scene he was in than he did on any page of
Planar Chaos.
...but boy, Martha writes a godawful Chandra. Granted, everybody does these days, so I guess at this point that counts as a seamless experience. This story was a complete mess. So, Chandra somehow sensed a planeswalker entering Dominaria (which isn't how this works anymore post-Mending), realised it was a pyromancer and then jumped to the conclusion that a) this was totally Jaya Ballard, who, as far as she knows has been dead for ages, and b) that it was a good idea to just ramble incoherent things at her friends and run off in the general direction of Maybe-Jaya? I call BS. And how the heck does she just know exactly where she is when she follows the trail back to Dominaria? Also,
yeah, the timeline and logistics don't seem to make sense here if Jaya is Mother Luti. Add that to the plot hole that she should have recognised Jace when he appeared on the Weatherlight, because she's seen him before at Keral Keep when he and Gideon came to drag Chandra to Zendikar. I don't really have a problem with the general idea of Jaya being Luti, but they have to be really careful how they execute things from this point onwards.