The character of Thomas is complicated. On the one hand, right off the bat, the first episode, he's a gay man who, for himself, has no real shame in that...
On the other hand, he's a scheming, manipulating, backstabbing antagonist who didn't even really get injured "for his Queen's Service" since he, as we all know by now, faked his own injury... or at least, made it happen, on purpose... So he's not even a hero... He's basically a coward... A coward who uses people and hurts them so he can climb upward...
Suddenly, Thomas has become a kind of sympathetic puppy of the series, and that makes him far less intriguing, because every show needs a villain, and since Mrs. O'Brien turned nice already, it seems a bit of a double-loss, and, well...
It's extremely unrealistic that a group of people, no matter how progressed they might be, at this time/year would be so openly discussing Thoma's homosexuality as if the series took place in 1997... Yes, the world should have been this way all along, but, folks... it wasn't that way and wouldn't be for many decades (and no one talked about homosexuality being-or-not-being a "choice" back then, as Robert does here, which is anachronism gone completely bonkers)...
Other than that, this episode is rather dull, replete with uneventful dialogue and really goes nowhere... slowly.