Television

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.