Don’t watch ‘Star Trek: Picard’ season three, it’ll only encourage them

I want to give Orville a chance, but Seth Macfarlane humor and star trek matches about as well as stinky tofu and ice cream.

TNG had the last sparkle of Gene Roddenberry's vision of utopia. It got preachy at times.

The sad thing with Picard is just how dark and violent it gets. TNG and the rest were plenty dark, but not the same. I’m frankly pretty sick of the gore nowadays.

But if Picard is the only way I get to visit that universe, I guess sign me up. Picard flopping at all isn’t going to stop that only dark/gore crap gets made anymore. Seems no writers or viewers can really do utopia anymore.

There's a LOT of nostalgia for TNG in these comments; nostalgia primarily for the storylines and world, which the writers of Picard clearly didn't pick up on, and went with the "nostalgia for the characters" route + grimdark, and I'm not here to defend Picard. Season 1 and 2 were written like crap, Season 3 will probably also be written like crap, I'll watch it because of the characters, it won't really be remembered as "Good Trek" in ten years.

But talking about "Good Trek" is one of my passions, because: There's a LOT of Bad Trek in its canon. I'm a massive fan of the series, and I'll fully admit that there's probably as much or more Bad Trek than Good. But even for the series that were regarded as Good; there's plenty of grimdark, and a ton of peoples' favorite episodes or episode arcs could very easily be described as 90s grimdark. DS9 spent loads of time on the Cardassian occupation of Bajor, the slavery and persecution of its people, and war with the Dominion. The Voyager was fighting Borg every third episode. The Trekian Utopia concept more often pushed with TNG was extremely scarce in these two series; after all, as soon as literally the series after TNG the writers said "ok, but what if we take a Trek crew and tell stories far away from the safety of core Federation Space" (I don't remember if DS9 or Voyager came first, but it doesn't matter, because both of these series do that; and then Enterprise ALSO does that, but I'd rather not get into that hot topic).

And: We love them. Maybe DS9 more than Voyager, but In The Pale Moonlight is quoted up there among Measure of a Man as Trekies' favorite episodes, and ITPM is literally about Sisko betraying every Federation value he holds to conspire to commit a false flag to win a war the Federation is extremely close to losing. It is Grim; it is Dark; and its a great episode with great writing.

Point being, I think the article and other comments' criticism of "new Trek is bad because grimdark" is really misguided; I interpret criticism like that really more-so as complaining about lensflares and bad writing. Well, the lensflare modern cinamatography is what it is, not an interesting argument for me, fine. But I really think complaining about the bad writing is surface-level criticism of New Trek, which articles like this one attempt to "make deep" by throwing "grimdark" into it, even though that's also bad criticism; all of that ignores the ugly fact that Trek has a lot of bad writing in its history, and has a lot of grimdark in its history.

New Trek's bigger problem is that seasons only contain 8 or 10 episodes of content. That's not a Trek problem; that's just an industry thing, which unfortunately doesn't work all that well for Trek. You could go to any season in any series of trek and find a half-dozen episodes with roughly the writing quality of Picard. Go back to TNG and just marvel at the holodeck episodes, pretty universally disliked by the trek community (and they're bringing Moriarty back for Picard Season 3, so...), or how often the vast majority of the drama is derived from "we can't contact the Federation". Looking at the body of work as a collection, Old Trek oftentimes feels like throwing ideas at the wall to see what sticks, and in retrospect we really only remember the stuff that stuck; New Trek is just throwing less stuff at the wall.

And, again, I don't think that's a Trek problem; its an attention span problem. Studios can't do 24 episode seasons of anything anymore because by episode 11 people are moving on to the next Netflix release. Its not a problem Trek created; its a problem the Tech Industry and social media created. Which I only point the finger at because I love the indirect, delicious irony in how correlated tech workers and "likes Trek" is; we destroyed our favorite TV series (and pushed adderall prescription rates to historical highs, certainly much bigger problems out there than Bad Trek) because Money.

But even considering that: Lower Decks is pretty good. Strange New Worlds is really good, and easily ranks among the best Trek out there. Discovery Season 2 is genuinely good, and its worth making it through Season 1 to watch it. That's, like, half of All New Trek; which is good in my book. If I were a studio executive running Star Trek, I can't say I wouldn't do something very similar to what is happening in Trek right now. We've made a lot of good content, that feels to me like a modernized, quality take on Classic Trek. But we still can't do anything right. Maybe funding an series with a return of the original characters we know people love? There's nothing wrong with that; it just went wrong in how that nostalgia was applied, which is a mistake any and every writing team has made.

Discovery and Picard have their moments, it's not all bad. The underlying story line is "government bad, humans suck" but there are some good characters hidden away deep inside.

A new TNG would flop. Monster-of-the-week (or in the case of trek, political-philosophical-pondering-of-the-week) doesn't keep people entertained anymore. TOS is boring and unwatchable for most, TNG is often doable but many some stupid episodes, especially in the earlier seasons (why on earth did they have to include "rape gangs"? and a "say no to drugs" episode? that episode where Crusher has space sex with the holo ghost of her ancestor?). Even more modern, more ST franchises like Voyager and DS9 would flop.

I'll be controversial and say that I'd like modern trek to be more like ST Enterprise. I think Enterprise struck a nice balance between classic trek and more modern TV, even if it's two decades old at this point. There was an overarching story line to keep people watching, but there was also plenty of time for going down to a random planet and ponder about space AIDS/mind meld disease and the associated prejudices. I love the Star Trek universe, but the older shows simply don't warrant all of the nostalgia; I recognize that they were an important part of TV and science fiction history, but the media landscape doesn't allow for philosophical pondering and space western TV anymore.

I have a "friend of a friend", we'll say, who is an exec at Paramount and they're well aware that Discovery and Picard are creative trash. They do not care: it drives tons of subs every time a new season drops. Eventually you'd think that pattern would depress a bit but it hasn't thus far, allegedly.

I wouldn't even mind but the new stuff rarely catches the lightning in a bottle that the originals did.

The weirdest part of it all is the open war on customers like the posted article. What are they doing other than alienating clicks/readers? What is there to gain? They're willing to sink the business they work for over it (and its tolerated if not encouraged!!). Thats the most bizarre behavior of it all IMO.