Yeah, it’s weird. Compare Star Wars to Lord of the Rings? Of course. Compare Star Trek to Doctor Who? I can see it. Compare Star Wars to Star Trek? Makes no sense to me.

All Star Trek is just Forbidden Planet fanfiction.

Oh boy.

Honestly, I think this has more consistently been Star Trek’s approach. Early TNG was the exception. It really pushed for an “evolved humanity” model for Star Trek, where something has fundamentally shifted in our collected psychology. Examples like Dr. Crusher speaking like its remarkable that people used to fear death, or Picard dismissing religion as childish superstition come to mind as particularly strong hints that we’ve changed a lot.

But later Trek pushes against this: DS9 with it’s murky way arc, Voyager with episodes like Equinox and Scorpion, and even late TNG with Pegasus and Journey’s End. They are all more likely to see the “evolved human” as something to be tested by the story, with the drama coming from the possibility that it might fail that test.

And I think this is for the best. If humanity is too evolved and too perfect, the series can feel a bit heavy on U.S. exceptionalism - with the very American coded Starfleet going around to other worlds to fix and moralize about other peoples’ problems, but never needing to self-reflect or improve on themselves. I think a healthy balance is needed to actually model the qualities that allowed humanity to improve in the first place (and that we really need to see more of in the world now).

“It was a fucking adult that did it!!!”

I love it - much more consistent with Star Trek concepts than whatever it is they’ve been going for. I could almost see Lower Decks sneaking an idea like that in if they were still around.

Because an expansive universe lore is enjoyable if it’s coherent and there are stakes at play. If you consider the official canon, voyager as a series is pretty much to throw away, because the Federation would already have the technology to bring them home centuries ago.

This sounds like a very good argument not to care about canon. You, who care about canon, are bothered that two shows made 20 years apart by different creative teams have a little friction with each other. I, who don’t stress about canon, am able to accept both shows’ premises on their own terms and enjoy them for what they are.

I would not recommend watching it sloshed. That combination would just put me to sleep.

It’s a terribly simple MacGuffin-chasing plot, yet somehow feels weighed down by exposition. All of the characters are super flat and under developed. It’s not bad in any entertaining way, it’s just boring.

There was a lot of talk around here before hand about whether Section 31 should ever be used as protagonists, or if that represents a betrayal of the principles behind Star Trek. This movie was not worth that level of discussion. It doesn’t raise any murky moral quandaries or even really glorify the idea of an anything-goes type secret organization. This could just as easily have been an on-the-books Starfleet team - apart from the fact that they didn’t seem all that competent. The concept implies a darker version of a Mission Impossible team, but what was delivered was a bunch of goofballs more in line with Guardians of the Galaxy.

Pluses:

Michelle Yeoh does a great job with what she’s given. That’s not much, but she’s fun to watch as always.

The woman who plays young Rachel Garrett does a good job - she has some of the cringiest dialogue in this, but she delivers it well. I wouldn’t mind seeing more of her in this role, though that seems very unlikely at this point.

The action is executed well enough, and the effects are all very pretty. It doesn’t mean much without a compelling story behind it, but it’s still worth saying.

The idea of a microscopic character is interesting, and they used it in some fun ways. The character himself was awfully annoying, though!

I mean, that moustache is a bit of a choice.

I love Discovery. You should definitely give it a chance.

It’s not perfect, and some of the complaints in this thread are completely valid, but I attribute the ferocity of the hate it gets more to the fact that it brought Trek back as a series after a very long hiatus, and took some pretty big swings as a result.

I was around when DS9, Voyager, and Enterprise were the new shows that “just didn’t understand Star Trek,” so from my perspective it’s all very cyclical. Trek fans, as with most long-standing fandoms, don’t all handle change very gracefully.

That’s not paper. That’s a tactile holographic interface with a retro 20th century filter applied. Much simpler than using something as awkward as paper!

My hot take is that Star Trek is actually a fictional show, and not 100% accurate historical documents at all! If this were true, we could all just ignore the parts we don’t like.

I know. No true Star Trek fan would believe this. Maybe I’m just losing my faith.

The same phenomenon that turned the TNG era Klingon into a Discovery era Klingon also turned the Cerritos from a California class to a Galaxy class. So I guess TNG is also no longer canon.

I mean, we’ve seen a number of ships in Starfleet that don’t look identical. The set design also seemed pretty spaceshippy to me. Especially when you consider that it’s an experimental ship designed for this one purpose. Very clean and pristine and showing that one purpose design.

Discovery’s set design resonated reasonably well with the look of the TOS films, which made sense for a cutting-edge ship. And that was also well underscored by the way the Shenzou looked more Enterprise inspired, right down to using the NX-01 style lateral transporters versus Discovery’s vertically aligned ones.

That’s to say, Discovery used Trek design elements from different eras intelligently, to communicate the different roles and histories of these ships. Very much the opposite of throwing it all away.

Ah, yeah, I forgot Lower Decks used it, too. It’s really weird - like watching your coworkers speculating about what your new boss’ email sign off is going to be.

I’m in favour of the sliding timeline. Star Trek was always supposed to be about our future, and I personality prefer that it stay that way.

But the SNW explanation makes no sense. A massive global conflict can just be postponed for forty years and that change has no significant downstream effects? Ridiculous.

I prefer how they handled it in the DS9 and Voyager. Just quietly retcon when the eugenics wars happened and try not to call attention to it.

Honestly, TOS had the right ideas when they first gave us a stardate instead of a year. It’s the far future, that’s all we needed to know. Perfect solution if they had only stuck to it.

I’m halfway with you. I thought it was cute the first time they did it. It suited Saru’s character to be stressing out over something so unimportant.

But then they brought it up again in Picard and again in SNW, and now it seems like everyone in starfleet is super invested in their captains’ incidental verbal ticks. The joke worked once and once only, but they keep going back to it.

Yeah, that was wild. In City on the Edge of Forever, Kirk was so emotionally scarred by what he did to repair the mess they’d made of Earth’s history that he abandoned an timeless artifact of unimaginable scientific value while it was offering him the secrets of the universe. Gene had to fight the suits to let them use “hell” as profanity just to drive home how hurt he was.

One year later and he’s casually jumping back to the 1960s just to kinda, y’know, see what was up?

I think it’s the episode By Any Other Name where the Enterprise explicitly covers something like 1000 light years in 8 hours. Plus there’s the trip to the edge of the galaxy in TOS, then to the galactic centre in TAS and again in the films. Pretty hard to square any of it with Voyager’s 75 year trip home.