It reminds me of DS9 in that sense. SNW season two seemed to alternate between really dark episodes and really light episodes.

There’s a quite long series of novels that follows on from DS9, starting with Avatar books one and two.

Later they intertwine with Next Gen, Voyager, and (briefly) Enterprise continuation novels too.

But that series was wrapped up a couple of years ago after Picard started, because the TV series contradicted the novels, and the publishers wanted to get back into sync.

I really enjoyed following along with the continued adventures of the ds9 crew.

This week’s just felt designed to annoy us, what with getting the ranks wrong and all. Let alone the totally un-Trek message.

Anything by Una McCormack. Especially DS9, but not exclusively.

A Stitch In Time, by Garak, is also generally considered top of the class.