You’re forgetting the 4th one.
Wesley Crusher: Jack Crusher was actually replaced by a surgically-altered Cardassian spy whose goal was to incriminate Picard by secretly impregnating his wife with Picard’s DNA, making it seem like they were cheating on him. Wesley is actually Picard’s child, thus why he’s so weird around Wesley.
(We love you anyway, Wes!)
When you put it that way, I agree.
TNG made a point to avoid doing this as much as possible, and it ultimately worked and arguably usurped the original.
I guess that’s also part of the strength of Lower Decks and somewhat Prodigy; both shows are the only ones of this wave to be mostly focused on original characters. Lower Decks does bring in legacy characters frequently, and Prodigy does have Hologram Janeway and later starts to heavily feature legacy characters as part of the storyline, but both have an original cast as the core of the show that isn’t anyone we know’s brother or cousin. I superficially thought about this, but didn’t think about it in comparison to the other newer Treks before.
I mean, if they struck a balance, it could be enjoyable enough.
It’s not a dynamic we’ve fully explored in Trek. We kind of got it with adult Jake and Captain Sisko in the later seasons of DS9, but we haven’t really fully seen the experience of a Starfleet empty nester.
Still, drama after drama is rather annoying.
After being disgusted by the horribly-done pre-school show, I’d much rather see a Star Trek done in the spirit of Craig of the Creek and Bluey that’s about a friend group of kids running around a star base and getting into fun and trouble and low-stakes ethical dilemmas, preferably while their parents (the crew and civilian residents) deal with DS9 levels of heavy stuff. After saying this to my younger sibling, they have a more developed pitch, having sketched up some concept art for fun.
I would certainly not reject a well-written Lower Decks season 6, so I don’t agree on the animated comedy front.
What always drove me insane about DIS Orions is they all looked the same; same skin tone and same hair color.
Probably the only reason I could tell Osyraa from other Orions was she was the main woman Orion and usually in contexts where it made sense for the Emerald Chain leader to be there. Pretty much all the other people were barely distinguishable from each other.
Lower Decks did a better job on that front I feel; part of it is definitely just that it’s animated and so they can use character design to distinguish them. However, they also did so many things to distinguish one Orion from another that could be done with makeup; there were so many skin tone and hair color variations. For instance, in “Hear All, Trust Nothing”, Tendi has more of a lime green skin tone while Mesk has more neon green one.
To be fair, Discovery was the first series to roll out Orions as a regularly-occurring species. (I consider Enterprise’s use not so regular.) I think Trek has gotten better at it since then. Take SNW’s Remy for example:
I’m not forgetting that guy’s face any time soon. Granted, I don’t think I would count SNW as having regularly-occurring Orions yet. We’ll see if maybe STA does it better.
How do we know the whole Star Trek franchise isn’t some Romulan plot to erase the Federation from the timeline via butterfly effect?
I think they just had to put something there, so they threw in a joke. They probably never expected it to be visible or readable.
It’s similar in nature to how the DS9 promenade directory has “Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems” from Buckaroo Bonzai, albeit a more dark-humored example.
In universe, it doesn’t exist, I’d say. It’s just a part of the aesthetic, similar to how some things on TOS would look less hokey in real life.
I think it was TNG Tech Manual?
It has its weaknesses, but I think you should watch it if just to form your own opinion.
I’ve only watched through the middle of season 4, where I got a bit tired of it, though I might pick it back up.
Season 1 is interesting, season 2 is weird, and season 3 has its flaws but keeps you on the edge of your seat.
Season 4 I feel like squanders the new setting introduced in season 3; the plot they introduce feels so artificial to me, which is very upsetting because it feels like the new setting has so many stories that would practically write themselves even if you do decide to lean on “Big Bad Villain/Problem” storytelling.
I saw the first part (which I have faded) online and added my response.
Actually, they were stored across the entire station's computer systems; only part of them was in Quark's holosuite. It basically took every bit of storage on DS9 to store them.
I mean, that's fair.
I feel that somewhat by accident, Lower Decks does better capture some aspects of classic Trek than other series, namely being mostly episodic and bringing a sense of humor back to Trek, and it sometimes even attains a level of dramatic skill comparable to the best of classic Trek (namely above all else the exchange between Mariner and Ma'ah in the S4 finale). Also, I'm honestly really impressed that Lower Decks managed to get me attached to its characters and make it feel like they've evolved so much in a total runtime less than that of the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
That said, Lower Decks does lack the mellow charm and the long(er)-form storytelling of classic Trek. However, considering the Trekiness they otherwise pulled off, I kind of wonder how the Lower Decks writers would do if they were given the opportunity to do a 50 minute "standard" Trek series; I think they might be able to do pretty well.
Similarly, with SNW, while it has some of the strongest writing of social interaction, the sci-fi aspect is often weaker than it should be. For instance, "Four-and-a-Half Vulcans" is almost a brain-dead premise in terms of science fiction, but executed so well in terms of the social dynamics and character writing.
In other words, I can see your desire for a no-compromises, no catches Trek.