There’s 2 kinds of people in Trek fandom:
I haven’t gotten all the way through it yet, but I have very occasionally come back to it as a hobby project over the past year because I have been trying to collect a dataset of Majel’s lines in order to train a text to speech voice.
Usually, I’d find that a bit unethical, but in this case, they literally tried to collect a dataset before she died, which I think is as close to consent to such a reproduction as most passed actors could give. Also, it’s mostly for fun for something like HomeAssistant on Raspberry Pi.
While DS9 quality is an issue, I think Keevan is just a PS1 character- a beautiful one.
I find Pegasus a decent episode. I think that while utopian aspiration is a fundamental tenet of Star Trek, I think it’s a bit reducto e to call it completely a show about perfect humans.
Heck, from the get go we had Garry Mitchell doing pyscho god stuff and Charlie X groping people, and a captain who sacrificed his crew to the weird space Romans so he would survive.
I think in truth, Star Trek is both about the best humanity can be and how the best in humanity can overcome the worst in humanity - you can’t exactly do that without episodes where the protagonists or the Federation makes mistakes, sometimes small and sometimes on the magnitude of Pegasus.
In many ways, DS9, darker as it is, feels the most Trek - a team of very different people with different beliefs overcoming/respecting their differences and forming a beautiful community despite the folly and evil around and within them.
To be fair, not everything is played for laughs - I’d say pretty much every season finale gets moderately serious. I also think the Orion world building was top notch.
I enjoyed the crossover before I watched Lower Decks and still enjoy it, but I also feel like the way the characters were written at times reduced them to their basic archetype without the character development they would have had at that point in Lower Decks. I mean, it somewhat makes sense - probably a good idea to assume not everyone had watched Lower Decks and give an idea of who these people are - but I wonder if it could have been executed a bit better on that front.
Suffice it to say, I think late Lower Decks itself actually contains better examples of their “toned-down” real selves.
The whole Gumato!
Mostly - I find a lot of these quite funny, but I think LD is the least accurate one. TOS also is one of the less spot-on ones, but I think late TOS and especially the TOS films, it becomes very applicable.
I think the LD one really only applies to the early show, and mostly just Mariner and Boimler. Later on, it's often less they lack brain cells but often use them at the wrong time, but then their brain cells are good enough they actually make it out of the situation. I'd say none of the main characters are actually particularly mediocre except Boimler (not to hate on Bradward), as we slowly find out. Maybe some of the bridge crew stay within the box of mediocrity, but we still learn to love them as characters. I might put something for Lower Decks like "Pick one from each, and make it more dysfunctional".
Considering both the description of LD and there being no SNW, this was clearly written some time 2020 or 2021.
To be fair, the Romulans only showed up because this was an alternate timeline version of a TOS episode.
SNW is decent. S2 E2 is an especially strong episode.
That's nuts. I was just up in LA a couple of days ago to see They Might Be Giants. Stopped by the TOS cast signatures in the concrete in the walk of fame.
I'll have to see if I can get that in next time, although it's a bigger detour than simply jealously checking out the Micro Center in Tustin, which we have had nothing like back where I live since Fry's Electronics shuttered (and frankly, Fry's staff never seemed so nice).
It’s always a pleasure when Trek shark jumps and plops in a historical figure in an implausible way.
That’s half of what made the Amelia Earhart episode of VOY so fun. It’ll be really funny if we ever find out what actually happened to her.
Oops.