It doesn't help that it was a badly paced episode in general. Too many sub-plots crowding out the main story.
The two-pip Kim betrayal arc was poorly signalled. They had a couple of shots of him looking grumpy about how things were, but they never really developed it enough to justify his sudden decision to kidnap all the Kims. They should have given a scene of him convincing at least one of them to work with him to explain the way some of them seemed to cooperate on the ship.
It was clear, to me at least, that they wanted to imply that parts of the multiverse were chronologically different from the part "we" know, which is how we get Lilly Sloan, T'Pol, and Curzon around at the same time. A single line of dialogue could have fixed that one. The script may well have had that line, only for it to be cut to allow more time for the bashir/garak shipping.
They should have had Curzon be Odo with Curzon's personality mingled in from that one DS9 episode. If we're going to do memberberries, then we really need to lean into it, instead of just referencing Voyager again.
The worst crime is that whoever wrote Garak had absolutely no idea what they were doing. Plain, Simple Garak should be far more obsequious and scheming.
