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Star Trek Picard and Star Trek Discovery. There were a lot of good ideas, but the execution wasn’t there overall.
Picard lost me the moment they had a scene where a bunch of down on their luck blue collar workers were complaining about shitty rations and being forced to work on a holiday.
WHAT PART OF POST-SCARCITY LUXURY GAY SPACE COMMUNIST UTOPIA DID YOU INBRED FUCKING DOGSHIT FOR BRAINS MORONS NOT GRASP?
I swear to god, Picard is a Star Trek show written by people who have apparently never watched a single episode of Star Trek in their entire lives. Unbelievably poor grasp of the basic concepts of the setting, and of Roddenberry's core thesis. And it's not like you can't make Star Trek grimy if you want to. Deep Space Nine did it frequently, playing with concepts of liberty vs security and so on. But the writers of Picard were just too lazy to engage with the core ideas of the setting and instead just wrote a bunch of generic, broadly science fiction filler and then slapped the Star Trek logo on it.
Discovery I feel more kindly towards, even though it was also terrible. It at least makes some kind of an effort to be Star Trek, which automatically puts it above Picard, but god that is such a low bar. It still has the same basic problem of being written by people who seem to be deeply embarassed about the idea of writing Star Trek. They had to go in and try to retcon in a bunch of crazy tech, rewrite huge parts of the setting, throw out everything about the Klingons and start from scratch, all out of some kind of weird hatred for the universe in which they were telling stories. Also, dear god it was just incredibly slow and dull. Some of the worse pacing I've ever seen.
Thank the lord almighty for Strange New Worlds. If you're soured on all the new Trek and skipped it because you were worried about it being more of the same, holy fucking shit go watch it now! Strange New Worlds is perfect. It's a Star Trek show written by people who absolutely adore Star Trek. It's a love letter - a love anthem - to the original series. And it manages to somehow find an unearthly balance between being one of the most campy and fun takes on Star Trek, and one of the darkest and scariest. There's a musical episode, and there's an episode that's basically "What if the plot of Aliens happened on the Enterprise?" and somehow both of them fit in the same show perfectly. Also, THE KLINGONS ARE FUN AGAIN! They're loud and boisterous and drink blood wine and yell "Qapla" while they headbutt each other and it's fucking great.
SNW is the breath of fresh air that restored my faith in the franchise.
I could have written your post word for word. That first season of Discovery with that crazy Klingon bullshit was so fucking ponderous. I never was a big fan of Klingons, and always felt they leaned a bit too heavy on them, but this was next level terrible. I forced myself through the first 2 seasons, and bailed a couple of episodes into the 3rd, and never looked back. Truly awful and boring.
I'm on the fence with Picard, but I have no desire to ever watch it again. It's not among their best, coming in somewhere below Enterprise, and above Discovery.
Strange New Worlds is the real deal. Among the best of them all, like DS9 and NG great. I even love Voyager. SNW deserves to be in their company.
What good ideas? There were none.
I want them to dump all the current mythology and go back to the basic concept; 500 humans and aliens on a ship designed for research and military purposes. No Vulcans, or Klingons. No six foot tall aliens with five fingers and funny ears. Aliens that look alien.
Idk what it is about modern TV but it's like it's like everything made in the Streaming Era is like this. I have trouble putting my finger on it. Even good shows coming out right now like White Lotus seem like they're a bit dumbed down compared to "prestige television" of the past. It's also like the later seasons of Game of Thrones vs. the early seasons. I know a lot of that is running out of source material and having to rely on their own (bad) creativity but I do wonder if part of it is something to do with the format of streaming or maybe even the impact social media and smart phones have had on our attention spans. It's like shows are designed with the fact that you're going to be watching with a phone in your hand scrolling Instagram and only half paying attention in mind. Even Better Call Saul vs. Breaking Bad, it's like everything is a comedy, nothing can be too serious, and everything is just a bit dumber. Idk.
Look at the number of producers. Everyone wants to give their input, which is usually the exact opposite of someone else's.
STD was just garbage, too much pushing a METOoMOVEMENT, by S4, they decided that men were no longer needed in the LEAD casts. Picard definitely wouldve better if not for the low energy acting of the main characther, and the rest of the cast, plus writing too.
Wow you managed to have a toxic opinion without just saying "discovery woke". Congrats.
They both (Picard more than Discovery) used a nostalgia checkpoint to connect to previous media, rather than expanding those themes in meaningful ways.