Editing Star Trek (section)

= The Shows =
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==''The Original Series''==
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[[File:OG enterprise.jpg|thumb|400px|Right|Do do do...]]
Created in 1966 by legendary sci-fi [[spiritual liege]] and money-grubbing, sexist, pseudo-communist lounge lizard Gene Roddenberry and pitched as a "Wagon Train to the stars", it's a pulpy adventure sci-fi, full of fistfights, sword fights, and hammy speeches.  (The guns never work.)

The USS ''Enterprise'' is tasked by the Federation to go on a five year mission to explore space: the final frontier, to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations and boldly go where no man has gone before, though due to budget constraints, her crew often finds that man has in fact gone there before. Or at least something that looks exactly like a man but is actually an [[Xenos|alien]]; most episodes split the difference. James T. Kirk sleeps with [[Hot Chicks|hot alien babes]] who either die tragically or leave tearfully at the end of the episode, but it's 'k because he's too in love with the Enterprise to ever love a mere ''woman'' more. Mr. Spock and Dr. McCoy are cold and logical and rash and emotional respectively, and their constant friction must be resulting in the best make-up sex in the world, Mr. Sulu and Lieutenant Uhura wait in vain for focus episodes that never come, Ensign Chekhov suffers horribly to the approval of American Cold War audiences, and Scotty [[gets shit done]]. Uniforms, while iconic, tend to look a bit civilian though. Miniskirts are apparently mandated attire for the ship's fan-servicey female "yeomen" and others, because 1966. The civilian nature of the attire (including, one must assume, the miniskirts, but they had a visual appeal all their own) were apparently an intentional design decision by Roddenberry who didn't want uniforms to look military. Further specialness on the part of Roddenberry demanded phasers not look like guns ([[FAIL|not even have trigger-guards even though those exist for safety reasons]]), instead looking like nothing in particular at all (although looking back at them today they look sort of like TV remotes, which would be invented much later), and also (probably the only sensible decision in this category) ships that didn't look like rockets, giving ships their distinctive and iconic saucer-engineering-nacelles look that still stands out today.

The Original Series frequently ran out of budget and entire episodes were filmed using spare costumes belonging to the production company, resulting in a series of extremely goofy excuses to go to planets full of gangsters or [[Nazi]]s. This is often copied by shows who don't realize it was done out of pure expediency, and nowadays this [[TVTropes|"Planet of Hats"]] gimmick is practically a box to check off when doing sci-fi adventure. The lack of budget also resulted in one of the more memorable inventions; unable to budget for a sequence showing the ''Enterprise'' or a shuttle landing on a new planet every week, the writers instead decided to invent the transporter to "beam" the crew down to planets or between starships. Also worth noting: despite its mediocre critical reception, ratings and eventual cancellation, not to forget the uneven quality of many episodes, especially in the Roddenberry-less third season where poor Fred Freiberger had to come onto a show he didn't understand and try to get better ratings with less money, ''TOS'' had a hell of a cultural impact thanks to syndication and it has been said that since it entered syndication in 1969, there hasn't been a 24-hour period without some TV station, in some country, playing Star Trek. Cancellation of The Original Series is now considered one of the worst decisions in TV history, and while much of its silly 60's campiness is now laughable, it often still manages to teach relevant and important lessons today.

Fun fact: the ''Enterprise'' and each of her 11 sister ships have enough firepower to [[Exterminatus]] a planet by themselves, after getting issued an order called General Order 24. This however is likely a time-consuming task. According to a later DS9 episode, it takes a fleet of 20 warships 1 hour of sustained bombardment to destroy a planets crust and 5 hours of sustained bombardment to destroy a planet down to its mantle. These 20 ships were also in service 100 years after the Enterprise so they were also more powerful. 
Kirk has the distinction of being the only known captain to issue a [[Exterminatus|General Order 24]], because a planet was ''too'' much into wargames (he changed his mind after they dropped wargaming).

* '''Outstanding Episodes''': Balance of Terror (submarine battle in space, debut of the Romulans), The Devil in the Dark (sometimes hostile aliens have a good reason for being hostile) Space Seed (Khan's first appearance), The City on the Edge of Forever (beautiful tragedy), Amok Time (Spock's in heat and he and Kirk have to fight to the death), "The Doomsday Machine" (''Enterprise'' vs. an unstoppable planet killer and the captain whose ship it destroyed)
* '''Episodes to Avoid''': "And the Children Shall Lead" (annoying kids, magic, and most of TOS's weakness dialed up to 11), The Way to Eden (dumbass hippy episode), Spock's Brain (idiot aliens steal Spock's thinker and McCoy has to remote control him for the rest of the episode).
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==''The Animated Series''==
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The often forgotten middle child. More or less "seasons 4-5" of ''TOS'' with the same writing staff and actors, sans poor Walter Koenig. He was replaced by a weird camel person. He learned this at a convention, from a fan, while he was trying to announce he'd be writing an episode, which Gene promptly demanded he rewrite over and over.  Classy. 

Being animated allowed the staff to get a lot more creative with the alien designs and plots, and the writing and acting remain... well, top notch is a stretch, but certainly at the same levels as ''The Original Series'', with the occasional low point. Not ''nearly'' as bad as you're probably picturing from the name, although still limited by the low budget and primitive, cheap animation techniques of the television era it was aired in. Notably some sci-fi novelists were brought in to write some episodes, such as Larry Niven, and at least one episode, "Yesteryear," is considered such a pivotal moment in Spock's development that even people who hate the series enough to consider it all non-canon often make an exception just for that one.

Also, since the series now has no excuse for throwing in lots of Space Puritans and Space Wizards, it of course continued to do so to derptastic results, because by this point it had become traditional. The presence of a straight-up [[furry]] on the bridge, however, is downright unacceptable.
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==''The Next Generation''==
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[[File:Enterpris D.jpg|thumb|400px|left|USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D: battleship, scientific research center and luxury hotel rolled into one]]
Here's where it starts getting a little deeper and a little darker, although with a lot of left-wing political subtext turned up to 11. The USS ''Enterprise-D'' (the original and C were destroyed in action while A and B were retired) is, like its predecessor, tasked with going where no-one has gone before, but this time around the problems are less likely to be solved in a single episode. Jean-Luc Picard is the captain and he plots and negotiates his way to victory; Mr. Data is cold and unemotional, though not by choice - as an android, he'd very much like to change that; Riker takes over the captain's "sleep with alien babes" duties since Picard is married to the job; Worf the Klingon gets beaten up by monsters to show how tough the monsters are, meaning that Worf winds up looking incredibly weak by the end of the show's run and doesn't regain his badassery until his run on ''DS9''; Dr. Beverly Crusher is good old Bones minus his temper; Dr. Pulaski is Bones ''plus'' temper; Counselor Troi is so badly written she becomes a running joke; and Geordi LaForge [[gets shit done]]. Only two things need to be said about helmsman Wesley Crusher: he was [[Mary Sue|Gene Wesley Roddenberry's shitty self-insert fanfic character]], and his sueness got to the point that even his actor started to hate him within the first season of the show.

Due to the massive success of The Original Series in syndication (and Paramount being [[Rage|pissed off]] by broadcast networks treating their most valuable IP like any other show), TNG was aired through syndication from the beginning. Although the first two seasons were laughably bad, the quality began to improve dramatically after an increasingly cocaine-addled Gene Roddenberry got too sick to keep ruining it and his partner-in-crime Maurice Hurley was thrown out on his ass, a moment often pinpointed via looking for when [[Meme|Riker grew a beard.]] The later seasons are widely considered to represent the apex of the franchise's episodic formula on the small screen (although ''DS9'' gave it a run for its money with a more serialized approach); sadly, this series only got one good movie.

The Next Generation started and ended on one of its skubbier elements, that being Q, an omnipotent trans dimensional alien that starts testing Picard in the first episode and is finally persuaded to go away in the last.  The entire multi-season run of the show is set up with the subtext that the Q are judging whether humanity is worthy of its implied lofty destiny.  What should have been a stifling deus ex machina was carried entirely by the performance of Q's actor; the dialogs between Picard and Q were some of the show's most entertaining, even as the Q episodes tended to be the obligatory season silly story.

*'''Outstanding Episodes''': "The Measure of a Man" (is Data property or not?), "Q Who?" (introduction of the Borg, Q at his dickish best), "The Best of Both Worlds" (epic Borg 2-parter with plenty of action and drama), "Family" (companion piece to Best of Both Worlds, Picard has to deal with the trauma of being assimilated), "Darmok" (Picard learns to communicate with an alien captain on far-away planet, all of TNG's strengths), "The Inner Light" (I am not crying, you are crying), "Sarek" (excellent Picard and Sarek character piece)
*'''Episodes to Avoid''': "Code of Honor" (racist and stupid), "Angel One" (sexist and stupid), "Shades of Grey" (half-assed money-saving clip show), "Up The Long Ladder" (annoying Oirish stereotypes wind up on the ''Enterprise'', shenanigans ensue), basically any episode from the first five seasons that focuses on Troi, her mom Lwaxana, or both (not Majel or Marina's fault, they were handed shit writing and had to make do)

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==''Deep Space Nine''==
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[[File:Deep Space 9.jpg|thumb|500px|right|''"A Star Trek show where they stay put? It'll never work."'' Boy did they get that wrong.]]
Unlike all the other series so far, ''Deep Space Nine'' primarily takes place in a fixed location - the titular space station Deep Space Nine, out near the borders of Federation Space. Said space station is near Bajor, which was recently freed from Cardassian occupation, and a wormhole to the other side of the galaxy which allows [[Warp|all sorts of of crazy shit to go down]]. If the other shows are a wagon train, this one's the border fort.

Benjamin Sisko is the captain, declared Emissary by the nearby Bajorans for making contact with the wormhole aliens they worship, and he successfully hybridizes the blow-the-shit-out-of-whatever-you-can't-punch Kirk approach with the talk-in-a-very-dignified-way-about-the-philosophy-of-the-thing-and-win-by-rhetoric Picard maneuver, in his ultimately-successful quest to become the baddest motherfucker in space, then literally becomes a space god. Kira the Bajoran ex-<s>terrorist</s> <S>''noble freedom fighter''</s> (who are we kidding she calls herself a terrorist) struggles to free and rebuild her people while coming to terms with the moral ambiguities of situations she prefers to see in black-and-white, Dr. Bashir works to find his character for several seasons before becoming a highlight, Dax gets often written poorly and has to switch bodies doing it, Odo IS ''Liquid Space Cop'', Quark runs his bar and [[troll|heckles]] the Federation from the sidelines, Garak pretends to be a tailor while definitely not being a super-spy, hitting on Bashir, and dropping killer lines, and Miles O'Brien [[gets shit done]] and gets physically, mentally, and/or emotionally tortured in at least one episode a season (referred to by the writers as the "O'Brien Must Suffer" episodes). Also Worf wanders in halfway through, and actually gets to punch things instead of just getting punched by them, up to and including offing the Klingon chancellor in an honor duel. It's also a lot more political than other series (though ''TNG'' and ''Voyager'' have their moments) and the last series to have Gene Roddenberry's involvement (with less enthusiasm, in fact often much to the benefit of this particular series thematically, although Roddenberry's complete departure did not necessarily bode well for the franchise in general.)

It's the closest the pre-Kelvin series ever get to [[grimdark]].  Especially when the Dominion show up. With minimal grimderp that plague the later seasons and Kelvin era movies. The show has aged remarkably well and the terrorist/freedom fighter debate was repeatedly explored in a very mature and honest way; the darkest episodes ventured into duping the Romulans into a war by assassinating a senator, and forcing a Klingon regime change [[rip and tear|''the Klingon way'']]. ''DS9'' is the most serialized of all Trek shows and could be considered a forerunner to the golden age of television with its long story arcs and deep character development. It's also notable for singlehandedly salvaging the Ferengi after the mess Gene made of them in the early seasons of TNG and bringing back the mirror universe after nearly thirty years with an ongoing plot showing the consequences of Kirk's meddling. Overall, ''DS9'' has to be considered the most consistently good Trek show thanks to the excellent writing and fantastic performances from a truly wonderful ensemble cast. At least until the final season . . .

Which brings us to DS9 Skub. The show was airing around the same time as another thematically similar sci-fi show, ''[[Babylon 5]]''. Not only that but characters also shared similarities, as did the episodes especially as both shows became war stories later on. Interestingly, beginning of both series, introduction of characters and airing of similar episodes were often too close to each other for one show to copy the other but this did not stop massive [[Rage]] and [[/v/|fanboy wars]] from starting between fans of the two series accusing one another of plagiarism and having an inferior product.  Happily, as time went on and both shows evolved, these hurt feelings have mostly faded.

There's also that last season. The earlier (good) writers had got pulled to try to make movies, which movies they'd failed at. The new writers also had to bring in a new Dax due to Berman constantly being a sexist asshole to actress Terry Farrell. This new Dax, Ezri, was very different from Jadzia, and she only got that one season to make her mark, which season she had to share with the Great Epic Conclusion (it's a miracle Ezri was as well received as she was, and a testament to Nicole de Boer's talent). Those finale episodes were mostly okay and tied up the story semi-satisfyingly, though a few die-hard subplots fell flat. The season, therefore, was shaky; not necessarily a harbinger for The Decline Of ''Trek'' to come, but at least inauspicious.

How good is ''Deep Space Nine''? Every subsequent Star Trek series and even the reboot movies have pretty much ripped off ideas and concepts established during the series. Famously, within the "Trekker/Trekkie" fan community, there's a little cell of fans who like it better than most other ''Star Trek''; these fans are typically called "Niners."
* '''Outstanding Episodes''': "Duet" and "Waltz" (excellent character work elevates low-budget episodes), "Trials and Tribble-ations" (30th anniversary comedy episode that sends the DS9 crew back to the TOS era to stop a rogue Klingon assassinating Kirk), "In the Pale Moonlight" ("how far would you push your principles to save the world?" done very well), "It's Only a Paper Moon" (Nog has PTSD after losing a leg in battle), "The Circle" (the only Star Trek trilogy episode and as close as DS9 will ever get to a movie), "Valiant" (A Defiant full of asshole cadets gets blasted into smithereens for their own hubris), "Empok Nor" (Garak goes feral and brutalizes a lot of people).
* '''Episodes to Avoid''': "Move Along Home" (some of the crew gets trapped in a board game with annoying rhymes), "Fascination" (Lwaxana Troi is going through Betazoid menopause and wants to bang Odo), "Profit and Lace" (Quark has a horrible relationship with his mom and has a sex change for zany antics), "Let He Who is Without Sin" (bullshit on resort planet Risa)
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==''Voyager''==
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[[File:USS Voyager.jpg|thumb|400px|left|''"Are we home yet?"'' 
"No."
''"Are we home yet?"''
"No."
''"Are we home yet?"''
"Tuvok, please give Ensign Kim a dose of the Medical Phaser.]]
Star Trek: Voyager centers around the eponymous USS ''Voyager'', a smallish ship which gets teleported over to the other side of the galaxy. The plot of the series centers on the crew's efforts to get back home, which COULD have made for an excellent premise. Unfortunately, there were few lasting story arcs, with most episodes being fully self-contained (as well as being littered with far too many episodes featuring holodeck or transporter incidents). As a consequence, despite being completely isolated from the Federation, no matter how bad things got Voyager always appeared in the next episode without a scratch, fully supplied, and with all its shuttlecraft intact. Think ''Gilligan's Island'' on a starship.

Like ''TNG'' and ''DS9'' it's a character-driven drama just as often as it is a sci-fi adventure romp, although compared to TNG only a few of the characters are particularly memorable. The captain and arguable "main character" is Kathryn Janeway, a Katharine Hepburn lookalike (I see what you did there) who is stern without being cold, and principled without being inflexible. The fan favorite is a character called "The Doctor" ([[Doctor Who|No relation]]); he's the solid-light hologram representative of the ship's emergency medical computer, who has to take on actual medical duties when their chief medical officer was conveniently killed in the pilot episode. Other than this, Chakotay is a peace-loving and spiritually rich indian <s>freedom fighter</s> <s>terrorist</s> [[FAIL|who was written with the help of a special Cherokee consultant so native his name was Jamake Highwater and it turned out later on that he was actually Jewish and didn't know dick about native cultures so he made everything up resulting in Chakotay basically being a borderline racist caricature of what you think Indians are like. Akoochimoya.]] Tom Paris is an annoying jerk and is counterbalanced by Harry Kim who is the ideal boy-scout, making him only half as annoying and twice as boring. B'elanna Torres tries to perpetuate a lineage of dudes getting shit done but ends up blankly reciting her technobabble, having second degree plasma burns and – worst of all – systematically fails to get shit done whenever the warp core goes nuts. Tuvok tries hard to be as cool as Spock but ends up being a lame version of the n°1 Vulcan who uses logic to justify everything and makes it short for "you are wrong, I am right because I said so." Kes is passed as a fragile and nice character but it takes a couple of episodes to realize that having a short lifespan does not change the facts: [[powergamer|when you can boil someone to death from the inside of their body, drain life from everything around you to become stronger and do anything you want without knowing how, just by thinking of it]], you are a goddamn Mary Sue. From the fourth season onwards the only character the writers seemed to care about was Seven of Nine, [[Mary Sue|a human woman who recently escaped from Borg control and kept all of her cyborg enhancements but regained her free will]]; another Mary Sue, to be sure, but she's [[Hot Chicks|hot]], and the other characters are much worse, so that's not really a bad thing. Fortunately, The Doctor still received a lot of attention from the writers and almost single-handedly made the show watchable. There was also Neelix, who was the apparent inspiration for Jar-Jar Binks, and any sane crew would have pushed him out of an airlock on the first episode. Fans who stuck with the show despite its glaring failings were given one final slap in the face with the <s>controversial</s> shit final season, in which the producers decided "screw steadily crafting a satisfying conclusion to a story which we have wasted for most of the last seven years anyway; lets just ignore it until the final episode and then throw in some shit about trans-warp conduits and time travel, bitches love time travel!" If you did not care about any of the characters or the subplots or time travel making sense (the writers sure didn't), then the final episode was made just for you (and the Borg got a major setback, too, just don't think about the setup too hard).

The Doctor never once stopped being totally fucking awesome though (enough so to even earn a cameo in First Contact and for Robert Picardo to turn up as his inventor in an episode of DS9), Jeri Ryan proved she wasn't just eye candy, and the (mostly) great acting from the rest of the cast carries the series from being horrific to ''occasionally'' watchable. Just goes to show that no matter how good your actors are, they can't make diamonds out of shit.

Overall, most Star Trek fans view Voyager's legacy with a shrug and a "meh." Unfortunately, hopes that Voyager's successor would revitalize the franchise would soon prove to be overly optimistic.

* '''Outstanding Episodes''': "Timeless" (excellent time-travel episode), "Year of Hell" (absolutely savage two-parter that trashes ''Voyager'' in service to a story of obsession and why you don't fuck with the timeline), "Tuvix" (one of the all-time skubbiest episodes of any ST show, deals with the complicated ethics of what happens when two people are fused into a new individual by a transporter accident), "Bride of Chaotica!" (aliens get trapped in Tom Paris' 1940s pulp holodeck program, Janeway has to become one of the characters to sort it out, good comedy episode), "Someone to Watch Over Me" (the Doctor falls in love with Seven but can't admit it), "Equinox" (''Voyager'' encounters another castaway Starfleet ship that's tossed Federation law and ethics into the bin to survive and Janeway gets ''really'' pissy about it)
* '''Episodes to Avoid''': "Threshold" (Tom Paris and Janeway turn into [[salamander]]s and have salamander babies; so terrible that rumors persist it was declared non-canonical to this day), "Fair Haven" and "Spirit Folk" (holodeck malfunction episodes full of more cringe Oirish stereotypes and Janeway wanting to bang a hologram), "Alice" (Stephen King's ''Christine'' IN SPAAACE!)

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==''Enterprise''==
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[[File:NX-01.jpg|thumb|400px|right|Where it all began. For better or worse...]]
From the minute the Nickelback-tier theme tune started, Enterprise attempted to take Star Trek in a new direction and was only partially successful in doing so. The series never quite caught its footing, although it still managed to have some enjoyable moments. It was most notable for providing a first-hand view of the key events that directly led to the formation of the Federation. The Federation's founding races were also featured heavily, with Andorians, Tellarites, and Vulcans all enjoying significant screen time alongside the human characters.

It's a prequel to the rest of the canon, taking place on the first ''Enterprise'', before the Federation was founded and during the period when Earth was still an independent power- so there's a lot of primitive versions of things from other series. At least the uniforms were pretty cool in an Air Force sort of way. Captained by <s>that guy from ''Quantum Leap''</s> Jonathan Archer, in hindsight the fact that they had to rename him from their original choice of Jeffrey Archer to avoid confusion with the disgraced British MP and author of the same name probably cursed the series with bad karma before it had even begun shooting. In an unusual twist for a ''Trek'' series, his first officer isn't a <s>terrorist</s> ''noble freedom fighter,'' however she does share a trait with her ''Voyager'' predecessor in that the actress who portrayed her frequently criticized the show's writers in interviews. Other than that, well, Hoshi Sato screams a lot, Travis Mayweather was so dull that even the writers forgot he existed, the resident Vulcan T'Pol serves as both the Science Officer and source of sexy fanservice, Malcolm Reed has an accent, Dr Phlox is a weird creepy alien with weird creepy alien morals (and gets surprisingly interesting when given enough screentime, which hardly ever happened), and Trip also has an accent and [[gets shit done]].

One thing that makes the show and cast so frustrating is that you get glimpses of interesting things that could be explored but just aren't in favor of rejected TNG concepts. A weapon' officer still having somewhat free range as there are not federation guidelines? Not really, Malcolm is just here to give a second opinion and be Tripp's wingman. A linguist and sociologist without much of a clue as to what everyone will encounter in space in an age before rules of engagement and diplomatic norms are established? Not really, Hoshi just screams a lot to let you know something dangerous or scary is nearby. The struggle between a potentially more profitable civilian life and an assignment as a glorified military grunt before Starfleet is the institution we all know it would become? Who cares, the writers all forgot Travis is even in the show most of the time. All these questions are somewhat hinted at in some episodes when they really could have been defining character arcs for the cast but instead we got vulcan romance getting most of the screentime when the Xindi plot wasn't happening. Oh well.

Was retooled twice, the third season tries to be ''24'' IN SPACE (stop some aliens, the Xindi, from blowing up Earth) while the 4th season is a massive apology about the last three seasons that tries to fix all the problems they had. As a result, the last season is the only one that's close to being really good.

Unfortunately, the poorly-received final episode is set on the holodeck of the Enterprise-D, which leaves us with the firm impression that the producers would have much rather have just continued making ''The Next Generation''. Considering the mediocre quality of the ''TNG'' movies we got instead, this probably would have worked out better for all involved (Or not since ''Voyager'' was that; its first episode was even numbered 901, as in Season 9 Episode 1).

Yet despite all the bad directing, subpar plots, and frankly boring episodes, ''Enterprise'' sometimes still manages to be moderately enjoyable with occasional moments of awesomeness if you can suffer through a fair few awful spots and aggressive mediocrity almost everywhere else. The focus on founding Federation races like the Andorans was refreshing and the technology level, being somewhere between the original series and the real world present-day, was quite interesting. We also got to see the Vulcans portrayed as arrogant, superior dicks. This actually makes a lot more sense than the way they're usually portrayed (which is fairly submissive towards humans) because they are, obviously and objectively, the superior race. The Klingons certainly still considered themselves to be honorable but the show made it clear that the Klingon notion of honor is rarely analogous to the human concept which was interesting as all hell to watch. There have been a few small nods to Enterprise in Discovery and the Abrams movies.

And let's be fucking honest, [[/tg/]] loves 40k and the Xindi arc was about as grimdark as shit gets. And that was awesome.

*'''Outstanding Episodes''': "Damage" (Enterprise is nearly destroyed and can barely function), "Zero Hour" (End of Season 3, good action and good payoff), "Regeneration" (Borg episode, silly but well executed), "Babel One", "United" and "The Aenar" (three episode arc involving the Romulan scheme to engineer war, a glimpse of what might have been).
*'''Episodes to Avoid''': "Dear Doctor" (boring prime directive extremism), "These are the Voyages" (Trip dies in a rush-job ending, last minute or so is alright as a visual send-off divorced from crap narrative).

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==STD aka ''Disco'' aka ''Discovery''==
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[[File:USS Discovery.jpg|thumb|400px|left|Disco Stu's coming for you!]]
<s>A LOAD OF SOCIAL JUSTICE SHIT!</s> Ahem, let's start again, shall we?


A new "prequel" series set 10 years before ''The Original Series.'' Again. Run exclusively on CBS' paid streaming service (unless you live outside the US and Canada, in which case you can get it on Netflix) to try and drum up sign-ups and revenue, it features a mix of ''Enterprise'' and Abramstrek aesthetics despite supposedly taking place in parallel to the TOS "The Cage" pilot while [[what|having technology superior to late DS9]] and introducing [[dune|mushroom-based space travel]] that would imply [[retcon|all later events and warp travel would be outdated]]. The trailer has attracted a lot of concern over the fact that Klingons have been completely redesigned to look like slit-nosed ogres wearing ancient Egyptian cosplay, and rumors that the Klingons shown were [[Racial Holy War|primitives who had been trapped in stasis]] proved to be unfounded, so there is no excuse. Not having a cold war to posture about, the new villains are based off of Trump-inspired xenophobia by the admission of the authors. Also the lead character is Spock's human sister that he never mentioned before, aka the ''exact'' origin of the [[Mary Sue]] which is just fucking depressing. To further reinforce this, there are ''numerous'' examples of dialogue and exposition that serve only to show how the Mary Sue main character was right all along, usually in conjunction with the death of the character that had foolishly disagreed with her. Want a new Star Trek episode about racism and immigration? Try the now-banned [https://youtu.be/3VEZH8bqytA Star Trek Continues]. Want Star Trek with humor, we suppose: ''Star Trek: Lower Decks'', below. Oh! want a pseudo-Star Trek show about other modern issues? Try ''[[The Orville]]''. That's right, American Dad In Space <strike>may right now be</strike> is a better Star Trek than an actual Star Trek series.

Initial reviews have been... well, never mind the 2017-era soy-guzzling critics. STD is as much fun as an outbreak of Nurgle's Rot. Mostly. There ''are'' exceptions.

The writing is overly convoluted, the massive injection of grimdark into pre-TOS continuity is anathema to the hardcore fans (the ''human'' characters are often the ones doing the nastiest shit, including [[Marines Malevolent|trying to kill a Klingon party by planting an explosive on the corpse of one of their comrades for when they came to collect the dead]]) and the Klingons are so flat and devoid of characterization that they might as well be Larry the Cable Guy lookalikes wearing Trump hats. This is a massive disappointment for a series that promised to put a spotlight on Klingon culture but ended up retconning all the characterization that happened in TNG and DS9. It ''may'' get better with time (remember that it took two seasons for TNG to get really good) but given the release schedule (split between 2017 and 2018 with a long break) it may come too late for the fanbase to care. Currently it's cause for more fans to lose their shit over whether it's better or worse than the Abrams movies, which is a new record of [[Skub|Trek Skub]]. Releasing the show on CBS All Access instead of cable or broadcast TV makes it seem that executives don't really give a shit if the show succeeds or fails, bringing up the question of [[Bioware|whether they're deliberately putting Star Trek: Discovery in a no-win scenario where, no matter what happens, the executives have an excuse to cancel Star Trek altogether]]. 

Another stupid decision was not shelling out the cash to bring back Bruce Greenwood and Zachary Quinto as Captain Pike and Spock, respectively. Their ages wouldn't have mattered either if CBS and Paramount weren't too cheap to use the anti-aging CGI tech that is so commonplace these days. Hell, Star Trek makeup artists are among the best in the entertainment business. So they could have pulled it off with applying the bare minimum, and we probably still wouldn't have noticed.

There were also allegations that large chunks of the plot were stolen from previews of an in-development indie game. The unreleased 2014 game featured giant Tardigrades that had the ability to use an interstellar network to travel anywhere they wanted to- sound familiar?

We must however give credit where credit is due. Season 1's fifth episode "Choose Your Pain" starred Rainn Wilson as a younger Harcourt Fenton Mudd, and this was a surprising treat. Season 2 also featured Anson Mount as Captain Pike, whose addition to the cast was nothing short of a revelation. Indeed, Pike's character was by far the most well-received aspect of that season.

Unfortunately, while Season 2 had some watchable moments, it was still middling at best, and nobody is ''ever'' going to let this series live down the garbage fire that was Season 1. If you do decide to watch Season 2, try not to think about it too hard once you are done. It gets worse and worse the more you think about it as you can and will come to realize that {{spoiler|the overarching plot hinges on time-travel but because the writing and production staff kept being shuffled, no one kept continuity so some of the hints of future actions or "red lights" are just forgotten about, some time-travel is done just to set up another event to make it possible for that same time-travel to happen. Think Bill and Ted, except lame and very confusing. Season 2 is an okay show if you look at the state-of-the-art visuals, let the big emotional moments grip you, but if you stop for a second and think about the continuity of events, you push yourself on a slippery slope that ends in not being able to ever trust the showrunning staff again.}}

Season 3 sees ''Discovery'' transported far into the future, one in which the Federation itself has fallen apart due to the mysterious disappearance of the dilithium required for warp travel. What was the issue with the dilithium? A member of the same species as the character Saru was on a planet with a lot of dilithium and had a freakout so bad it somehow psychically fucked up all dilithium everywhere at roughly the same time. Oh, and apparently turbolifts now fly around in a pocket dimension or some stupid shit.

Season 4 can basically be summed up as "Hyper-advanced extragalactic gasbags make a mess of things because they're [[Derp|too stupid to comprehend the concept of self as they're a hive mind]]".

Oh thank the God Emperor it's almost over! After four seasons of shit, season five is finally going to kill it! Oh Throne, thank you!
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==''<strike>Retard</strike>Picard''==
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Set to be a continuation of the original timeline, featuring old man Picard with Patrick Stewart reprising the role. Hopes are not high, but at the very least Patrick Stewart's presence should make it watchable if nothing else. 

Update: Season 3 is the only part maybe worth watching.

In the first season, Picard ragequit Starfleet after they sat back and let the Romulans get blown up by the supernova mentioned in the first Abrams movie. This happened because some rogue androids orbitally bombarded Mars and blew up the rescue fleet that was being built there, so the Federation has banned all R&D on synthetic lifeforms and subsequently become [[Imperium of Man|isolationist, racist and xenophobic]] (does this remind you of anything?). Picard has been living in his family chateau ever since, making wine and hanging out with his dog and his Romulan housekeepers. Then a scared girl named Dahj turns up on his doorstep, and it turns out she's a highly advanced biological android constructed from the surviving bits of Data's positronic brain by the guy who wanted to dismantle Data in that episode "The Measure of a Man." Before Picard can really figure out what to do about her, she gets killed by a secret society of Luddite anti-android Romulan assholes, but it turns it that's okay because she has a twin "sister" named Soji who is working with some other Romulans on a derelict Borg cube. Picard decides it's time to saddle up and go be a hero again. He starts putting together a crew that includes Agnes Jurati, a former cyberneticist; Raffi Musiker, his last executive officer, [[What|who is now an alcoholic drug-vaping hermit]] after getting kicked out of Starfleet; Cristobal Rios, a scruffy merc pilot whose ship is staffed entirely by holograms of himself; Elnor, a Romulan warrior monk raised by Romulan warrior nuns; and Seven of Nine, who has become a kickass pilot and is no longer wearing her infamous catsuit. Together, they're out to save Soji, stop the Romulans, and be the good guys in a galaxy that needs heroes, etc etc.

Key storytelling criticisms of the show include the idea that the Romulan Empire should have had enough infrastructure to effect an evacuation without help, and that even if they didn't, the Federation would ''never'' abandon a neighbor who was asking for help- not even a former enemy, and not even when doing so became difficult or inconvenient. Another issue comes up when the show reveals that the Borg have assimilated transgalactic teleporters from a throwaway alien race that appeared in an early episode of ''Voyager'', but only for the Borg queen to use in case the cube she's on is about to be blown up, which begs the question of ''why in the hell aren't they using them to overwhelm the Federation's defenses with drone spam and assimilate everything??'' There's also an (abortive) space battle in the final episode where Riker shows up leading a fleet of ships that are just copy-pastes of the same CG model, which was derided for being cheap and lazy on the part of the showrunners and a failed chance to show Riker in command of the ''Titan'' or ''Enterprise''.

To make matters even more dumb and yet also more complicated at the same time, the showrunners are apparently under some kind of licensing agreement regarding the portrayal of images and concepts from the earlier shows. This means that they can't, for example, casually mention the Dominion War and its impact on the Federation, because if they did, they'd have to pay a licensing fee. This is why the show has been carefully crafted to look like a distant, derpy cousin of Star Trek, while only occasionally featuring cameos of things such as the Enterprise-D, or directly referencing arcs in previous shows: because if they use concepts from prior Star Trek shows, they have to pay for them.

Finally, when all has been said and done by the end of Season 1, Picard himself is reduced to a nearly-useless side character in his own show. Where once he commanded the admiration and respect of friends and foes alike, in this show he is consistently portrayed as a disrespected, disregarded, and often powerless caricature of himself, utterly reliant on the characters around him. {{spoiler|It doesn't help they legit kill him in the last episode and then made him an android after he also agreed to "kill" Data whose memories are basically in a server on a planet of Soong androids. The showrunners specifically came out and said their plan was always to kill Picard to make a point about how privileged he was being a captain in Starfleet. You can't make this shit up. Patrick Stewart himself claims that they hadn't written Picard's death until they were almost finished filming the season, so who knows what the hell was going on.}}

One other thing is certain. Whether you like the series or not, it's clear that this series is not taking place in Gene Roddenberry's noblebright vision of the Federation, and the fact that it is yet another grim, violent entry into the franchise is a point that has left many viewers with a bad aftertaste. If the rumors are true, then this show may have either killed the current grimderp Trek or has left fans so pissed that CBS is, once again, on the verge of financial ruin and possibly looking to sell the franchise since they aren't making the money they thought they would after the massive amounts of money they dumped into both this and Discovery.

Season 2 premiered in March 2022 after the Covid pandemic delayed production. They definitely listened to some of the major criticisms of the first season - Picard's been reinstated in Starfleet, many fan-favorite starship classes returned for the big space battle in the first episode, the gratuitous swearing and needless grimdark got toned down, and more deep cuts from TOS and DS9 lore show up. 

Q shows up and launches the gang into a hilariously over-the-top alternate timeline where the [[Humanity Fuck Yeah]] knob got cranked to 11 and as a result the ''Con''federation of Humanity has been going around [[Imperium of Man|exterminating all xenos scum]] up to and including the Borg, which is admittedly pretty badass. They're all appropriately horrified by this, and steal the Borg queen right as she's about to be executed so they can do a sun-slingshot move to go back to 2024 Los Angeles and <strike>save the whales</strike>fix whatever got messed up. Brent Spiner turns up as yet another Soong ancestor, morally skewed as always, and the punk from Star Trek IV returns, still blasting his boombox all these years later. Picard and co. save the future by ensuring that his ancestor Renee goes on a manned mission to the moon of Europa, where she discovers an alien organism that allows humanity to magically fix Earth's biosphere and make everything noblebright forevermore, apparently because [[Derp|the writers forgot that WWIII will arrive in a few decades]]. Rios decides to stay in the past because he met a sexy doctor and [[What|dies in a barfight]], Dr. Soong is revealed to be working on more Khans, his fake daughter Kore meets Wesley Crusher and becomes a Traveler, and it turns out that the reason Q did all this in the first place was to help Picard confront his deep-seated family issues so he could avoid dying alone, as Q is in the process of dying alone himself. In the season finale, the Borg (now being controlled by Agnes after [[What|she forced the Borg queen to bitch down by getting her to admit her ''own'' loneliness]]) ask to join the Federation so they can keep an eye on some weird transwarp conduit that some unknown entity just opened, which was why the Borg rocked up at the beginning of the season. Least it wrapped up well. 

Would you believe Season 3 manages to turn it around somehow? Essentially a 10-episode attempt to answer the question, 'How can we get all of the original cast members together on a starship in the least contrived way?', Picard, Riker, Troi, LaForge, Worf, Data, and the bearable Crusher all come together to fight the new Borg threat. The series is written and directed by people who truly understand what Star Trek is about, and as such is a welcome sight to fans of the franchise. Each of the original cast gets time to develop their characters further - Worf drinks tea, Beverley finally manages to raise a kid who isn't [[Mary Sue|Wesley]], and Geordi now runs the fleet museum and has raised an impressive engineer himself. The series is practically dedicated to ignoring or fixing the last two seasons of Picard, if not the last quarter-century of TNG-adjacent movie and television media, and somewhat succeeds. {{Spoiler|They even bring back the right bridge, even if the excuse as to why was [[Fail|pulled out of their butts]]…}}

The only sore spot of the series is the latest ''Enterprise'' at the end of the series, [[Derp|which looks like a horrible kitbash of the original Constitution]], and compares very unfavorably to its predecessor in the looks department. Other than that, it provides what was sorely missing these last few decades: a good send-off for the Next Generation ''after'' 'All Good Things'. 

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==''Strange New Worlds''==
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An attempt to put the golden goose back together on the operating table.  After seeing the reception of having Captain Pike in Discovery, Paramount decided to simply return to the pilot cast of The Original Series with its fingers crossed that the old bird will resume replicating gold eggs.

It's good so far. It's fun and optimistic, which is a genuine relief after the grimderp of Discovery and Picard, but isn't afraid to occasionally go in dark places and present genuinely difficult philosophical problems. We'll have to see if it holds up, the science can be very stupid even by ''Trek'' standards, and if you liked the Gorn you'll hate what they're doing with them, but overall, so far so good. The season 1 finale is a treat; it's a retelling of the classic episode "Balance of Terror" but with Pike in command of the ''Enterprise'' instead of Kirk, and they recreate everything from the blocking to the dialogue to the cheesy zooms of the original episode. It's pretty awesome.

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==''Lower Decks''==
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{{topquote|I FAILED THE KOBAYASHI MARU SEVENTEEN TIMES MOTHERFUCKER!|Brad Boimler}}
Mike McMahan is doing this one, him being the person behind the Rick & Morty cartoon. It's set in 2380 on the ''Cerritos'', concentrating (like the TNG episode of the same name) on the grunts working in the bowels of the ship. The main characters are ensigns and low-level lieutenants: Tendi is a perky Orion science office-in-training with massive insecurities about her species. Rutherford is Geordi LaForge with less experience and a Manchurian Candidate backstory.  Mariner is basically just reboot-era Kirk down to the captain's kid, broken home complex. They are all the bane (and close friends) of the worrisome Boimler, the Starfleet straight-man who could be the next Picard if he stopped worrying about getting promoted so much.
[[File:Star_Trek_Lower_Decks.jpg|400px|right]]
Fans feared this would focus on lowbrow "humor" episodes with technobabble nonsense stapled to it just like McMahan's other works; and they were half right, although the technobabble is here honestly ''less'' annoying than in mainline Trek, on account it's not being taken seriously.  But over the first season the show found its footing.  To enjoy it, you just have to embrace the likely reality that a few decks below all of Picard's noblebright ready room monologues there were hundreds of ignoble, corner-cutting crewmen who just want to get to the end of their shift.  It's entertaining, but in a "The Bashir & Garak Show" sort of way.  John de Lancie reprises Q, and Frakes returns as Riker, now in command of the USS Titan.  

By the end of the first season, the consensus had formed that Lower Decks is probably the best addition to the franchise since the Rick Berman era ended, with a much better understanding of what Star Trek IS (to its fans) than either Discovery or Picard. The second and third seasons moved the series towards an overarching plot. The Pakleds, a joke throwaway species from TNG, are fittingly brought back as the story's big bad. The Pakleds are basically Ork [[Freebooterz]], an entire species of idiotic space pirates. Brutally kunnin they are not; their "plans" are worthy of Douglas Adams. Mariner gets beaten with the nerfhammer for the middle of season 2 and occasionally in season 3 making her much more tolerable. Meanwhile, the story of Rutherford's cybernetics gradually unfolds as the result of a conspiracy in Starfleet.  Along the way, there's an episode ripping off James Cameron's ''Avatar'', a session of Klingon Dungeons & Dragons, space-faring Renfaire fanatics, and Mariner and Boimler having to work the Starfleet booth at job fair.

In summary, the first season was rife with teething issues (but show me a Trek series which wasn't) and directly appeals to people who loved Star Trek but now believe that "Star Trek is dead, Jim". Second and third season are more appealing to Trekkies who aren't afraid to laugh at the thing they like.

'''Outstanding Episodes: '''Crisis Point (Mariner hijacks Boimler's holodeck simulation of the bridge crew and turns it to a Star Trek film holodeck program); The Spy Humongous (Captain Freeman is sent to negotiate with the Pakleds while a Pakled spy pretends to be an asylum seeker. Answers the question how the various dangerous plot devices are disposed of); Where Pleasant Fountains Lie (Boimler and Mariner crash on a desert planet escorting an evil AI, Mariner gets well and truly nerfed. The ship's chief engineer turns out to be a prince of aforementioned Renfaire-fanatics); I, Excretus (The crew undergoes a holodeck drill program of various situations from past serieses. Boimler gets to shine in classic Starfleet activities); Grounded (Season 3 pilot. Mariner is convinced her mother is being railroaded in court and more evidence is needed from dry-docked Cerritos); Reflections (Rutherford races his past self in his subconciousness and his repressed memories start surfacing. Mariner and Boimler work a Star Fleet recruitment booth at a fair leading to the section quote.); Hear all, Trust Nothing (DS9 homage episode guest staring Armin Shimmerman and Nana Visitor. Tendi deals with her species embarrasment); Crisis Point 2: Paradoxus (Boimler desings a Star Trek film, but derails it almost immediately for himself and Mariner. Basically an RP sesssion where half of the players derail and split off).

'''Episodes to avoid:''' Envoys; Temporal Edict; Veritas; A Mathematically Perfect Redemption.
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=='' Prodigy''==
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Here for sake of completeness, an animated show targeting a younger audience that debuted in 2021 on Nickleodeon (alongside Paramount+). The show follows a collection of misfit (mostly young) aliens on a mining colony that find hidden in a crystalline planetoid the USS ''Protostar'', a Starfleet ship with a hologram of Janeway to aid the collection of "Cadets" as they escape and venture out into an galaxy full of adventure while the owner of the mining colony and his robot minion try to take the ''Protostar'' for themselves.

So far it has a decent critical reception. If you want Star Trek which is noblebright and not ironic and are fine with a PG rating, this may be worth a look.
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