The "what are you watching" thread

[Anaphylaxis]

I see you are also not a fan of Picard. Some people swear by season 3 but I just find it long nostalgia milking.
It may be better than the previous two seasons but that doesn't make it good Star Trek.
What I found one of the problems is that a story that could be told in two or three episodes is dragged out into a full season.
There are ST fans that wanted Matalas to do a Star Trek Legacy series that would build on the ending of Picard season 3 but I honestly do not consider Matalas the 'savior' of Star Trek as these people make him out to be.

I wasn't a fan from the first episode. It felt completely opposite of what Trek was supposed to be. It barely felt like a Star Trek show, and every episode after that just confirmed that feeling. On the topic of the "story could be told in two or three episodes" it's an issue with how shows are nowadays in general. You don't get the 30-episode-long seasons anymore, with enough time to establish plot arcs and characters. Every show is like a BBC miniseries. And that was great when it was just the BBC doing it for a bunch of one-off (two seasons max) shows, but now every show is like this and quite frankly most shows NEED 30 episodes in a season to even begin to care about the characters. Imagine if TNG's first season was just an extended 'Encounter at Farpoint?'

I don't anticipate Star Trek being saved by anything. Same feeling as my feeling towards Fallout. The only "things" that matter are the "original" run of TOS -> Enterprise, just as Fallout only matters to me as 1, 2, and New Vegas. To me stuff like Strange New Worlds, Discovery, and whatever schlock will end up filling the airwaves is just elaborate fan film projects. The only thing that COULD save Trek is an extended hiatus and, in ten years, a team of writers deliberately craft a canon/lore document to pad out for a potential twenty years of Star Trek. That's the only way.

I heard there was a reason for the whole Temporal War stuff but it has been a while since I read the interview with Braga in which it was mentioned.
But I agree that it was an in general pointless storyline that went nowhere.
And yeah I saw it as something Braga made up as he had a great fondness for time travel stuff.

Yeah I mean he was hinting at this shit back in Voyager, and even in DS9 (although B&B had limited input on what the DS9 team put out IIRC.) The Time Travel shit was what he wanted to lead Star Trek towards. I don't think the other writers who had stuck around from the TNG and DS9 days wanted to do that, so he had to relegate his time travel to one-off episodes and mostly confine it to stupid holodeck episodes on Voyager.

Well a prequel series could have worked, but I just felt the the producers didn't have the right mindset for it. You would have to be really nerdish about the facts and details from the background lore to pull it off and I didn't see B & B as being such Trek nerds.
Some may say that that would make Trek too much niche and not appealing to a greater audience, but if you do a prequel to established series the primary interested party are the hardcore fans who expect stories about the founding of the Federation and the Romulan wars.

Wanting to make Trek appeal to the larger audience is in my opinion one of the problems with Abrams, Kurtzman, and Paramount. They are so focused on this goal that they series they produce are in general so average and non Trek (I can't judge the cartoons as I don't watch Lower Decks and I have only watched parts of Prodigy), that its painful and disappointing to be a Trek fan.
Okay my rant is over.

I feel very conflicted about trying to appeal to the masses vs trying to appeal to the fans. I feel it is the same as with Bethesda's Fallout.
Why be a fan when everything you care about is such as lore and canon can be changed on a whim by people who only cared for a select few parts in the original productions.

Compared to Abrams and Kurtzman (especially Kurtzman) B&B might as well have been wearing homemade Spock ears at the convention asking Leonard Nimoy what Vulcan culture really is, since he IS Spock. Compared to the new host of writers and showrunners who came up with STD, Strange New Worlds, Picard, and Section 31, they are Trekkies. We simply didn't know how good we had it.

I think Star Trek CAN be marketed towards a larger audience if they took more risks in storytelling but retained the identity of the thing. That is to say, add some "drama" and "conflict" within the characters (which is what Roddenberry was all against, but whatever) but retain the concept of "exploring different planets in a serialized space opera." The problem is what they do is they have these serialized plot arcs that are meaningless because no one cares about the characters, and there aren't any "filler episodes" (planet-of-the-week) to make you care about the setting or the characters. Every show is in reality a miniseries/extended TV movie and it suffers from this.

Their approach at the moment clearly doesn't work, because I'd say Trek is at an all-time nadir even lower than it was for Enterprise or before that with the TOS hiatus. No one gives a fuck.

Ultimately, like I said, my view of the "lore" and "canon" is the same as my approach to Fallout. The only things that matter are the things that I like and enjoy, and everything else is at best some kind of fan fiction project. Maybe this is conceding and cucking out, but whatever. I do give all of these things an honest shake, and I've really tried to enjoy the new Star Trek projects, but when Vic Mignogna makes a better Star Trek production on a (relative to Paramount) shoestring budget as a fan film than the actual real Trek productions? That says just about everything there is to say.