Hot take: it’s a great movie, but not a great Star Trek movie. Too militaristic, gives you the impression that Starfleet is at odds with scientists instead of made up of scientists.

Obviously, though, to each their own.

I like helping people, but not with what I do for my day job. Ask me to shovel your driveway or help you move or proofread your emails or anything but more of what I’ve already spent all day doing.

Yeah, definitely not. Picard and Discovery were very serialised, as were the later seasons of DS9, but outside of those you can pretty much dip your toe in to almost any episode and not worry about getting sucked into a whole arc. It’s probably best to keep a low-commitment mindset and skip around a bit until something really works for you.

Since you’ve already watched the relevant parts of Discovery, I’d recommend SNW. It spins off directly from Disco season 2, but it’s more episodic and has a wider tonal range. Some episodes are dark and serious, some are plain goofy. Overall you’ll find it much more light hearted and adventurous than Disco.

Otherwise, I’m a big supporter of starting at the beginning. Give a few episodes of TOS a try. Yes, it’s a product of it’s time, but it still holds up as great TV. It’s also one of the few Trek shows that really hits the ground running quality wise - the '90s series tend to take a few seasons to rev up.

I grew up with this variation on my C64. Good times. https://gaming.trekcore.com/startrekc64-1/

I’ve also come across this mashup with 25th Anniversary, which looks like great fun: https://emabolo.itch.io/super-star-trek-25th

Theory of relativity. Which one is in the mirror is entirely dependent on your frame of reference.

I thought the crossover element of Generations really brought it down. The original cast had a far better farewell in Star Trek VI, and I don’t think the writers of Generations had enough to say about Kirk’s character to justify the tortured story logic that brought him in.

Give me a Kirkless cut and I’ll be so much happier. All the pure TNG elements work fine for me, McDowell is great, and the D looks beautiful with cinematic lighting.

If anyone earned their retirement, it’s Miles O’Brien. Maybe he could show up for one scene, where he lets the rest of the team know that, just like Wolverine did in First Class.

Fascinating! It would be illuminating to see this broken up by season as well. Seven of Nine’s relatively low ratio, for instance, can definitely be attributed to her late arrival to the series. In the latter seasons, I suspect her percentage could be rivalling Janeway’s.

Conversely, it’s impressive Lorca ranks as highly as he does, given he was gone by the end of Disco season one. But since he was simultaneously captain and antagonist while he was around, I guess it isn’t that surprising.

All fair, and I appreciate how much you’re trying to avoid Trekkie infighting in this thread. I’m not always so conscientious about that, but it is, after all, just a TV show.

I’ve seen this complaint a lot with some of the newer shows, but it doesn’t really resonate with me. A good central character ought to be able to carry a show, and I don’t hold Trek as being inherently different in that regard. In fact, I think the original series would have been an example of a show like that if Spock’s popularity hadn’t been taken into consideration by later writers. Even then, I believe it would have a pretty low “pass” rate compared to all the '90s series.

(Incidentally, since Burnham wasn’t Captain until season 4, Discovery passes on a technicality for most of its run).

I’m rewatching season 3 now, and the themes of trauma and mental health are so pervasive that I think it was really appropriate that the burn would be the result of a mental health crisis in one way or another. In that context, I think putting a face to it works. The “Force of Nature” or old-school Borg route could work great, but for a different show/season.

Agreed, Discovery has really only scratched the surface of what can be done with the Federation’s rebuilding itself, Earth’s new isolationist tendencies, and the unified Vulcan/Romulan society. It’d be a shame to leave all that behind. Plus, we still need to learn what’s become of the Klingons!

I’m 100% here for your vision of the Academy series.

Gay men are men, trans women are women.

I agree completely. The planet Michael and Book settled on was beautiful, the makeup was well done, the new uniforms were nifty, but what was the point of it all? That one day Michael will be old and nostalgic? I didn’t need to be told that. And I definitely didn’t need the half hearted Calypso tie-in. It was just disturbing watching Michael smilingly order a sentient intelligence to suffer a thousand years of loneliness for no reason that we or she knows.

The wedding and beach scenes were lovely and were already the perfect note to leave on.

I don’t think any rewrite would be needed. Almost the whole season was filmed not knowing it was the last. The few scenes they filmed with that knowledge were just to put a nice cap on the series. Probably something like the last scene in All Good Things, which wouldn’t have prevented a TNG season 8 if the winds suddenly changed.

That said, I think the most we can hope for is for this to encourage them to incorporate more Disco elements into Academy. I don’t see them backing down on this being the final season.

Now that I’ve thought about it some more, it’s unlikely the movies would be making any decisions based off of what’s best for the streaming shows. That would probably be seen as the tail wagging the dog.

That said, I’ve definitely encountered people who enjoyed the films but skipped the shows on account of not knowing where to start and finding the relationship too confusing. It would make sense to pair a successful “early days” movie with an “early days” spinoff series to lure some of that casual audience to streaming.

Having TV and film Star Trek exist in separate timelines seems like a bad approach for getting people invested in the franchise as a whole. I wonder if that’s the reasoning for the early Federation time period. People who have only watched the Kelvin films can understand it as a prequel to those, but elements from it could just as easily spin-off into a streaming show without issue.

Voyager was present at the big bang, also thanks to Q, so that’s got to be your first scene. This would be a massive undertaking, but a lot of fun to see.