Why Star Trek Sucks

That's General Order 74, to be carried out whenever the props and costumes budget is running low. Its predecessor in Jim Kirk's era was General Order 21, requiring the ship to visit a planet with a culture coincidentally just like some period of Earth's history. Guess they must have run out of those.

 

We do see the crews engaging in hobbies outside of the holodeck. Sulu had a series of hobbies, Beverly did stage plays, Riker played music, Picard dabbled in archeology and tried painting, Sisko built a few models, Paris had a interest in history.

 

That was memorably extreme. Agreed that Bashir/O'Brien, Quark and Tom Paris especially brought the tone more down-to-Earth.
I like Trek and in particular TNG in part because I don't think it's entirely realistic for how we could live today but provides well-done, thought-provoking ideals, some that we should live by already and some that we can make progress toward.

 

I give the first season credit for attempting to present a future which is different than our own present. However, some of these differences are things I would hope we never obtain, and I personally see as negatives (the differences weren't all first season).

People will have no fear of death. It's considered odd that a child would mourn the death of a parent. People will have no desire to have possessions.

Those are just a few examples.

 

I do like the idea that people don't fritter their time away like we are doing right now and have purpose to their action. But I find the writers' conceit that the only types of entertainment worth pursuing are those which require years of technical education to be kind of ridiculous. Because that has an 'Intellectual superiority of the rich and educated' connotation.

 

I would say that the movie Shades of Grey was worse than either one.