Is it just me, or is Star Trek going the wrong way?

[Nerys Myk]

I think TMP is the closest.

And it didn't quite feel like Star Trek to me.

 

[fireproof78]

And it didn't quite feel like Star Trek to me.

I tend to agree largely owing more to the pacing of the film and Kirk's overall demeanor. It lacked that camaraderie that I liked from TOS. I certainly appreciate the idea behind it, but it lacked a measure of warmth.

To me, TMP goes too far one way when it comes to the more contemplative aspect of Trek. I could argue that ST 09 goes too far the other way. I think a more balanced approach could be done and be quite successful, without being the slower plodding of TMP or 2001.

 

[dupersuper]

Season 1 Picard may be one of the worst lead Captains in Trek. I'm glad Patrick forced him to evolve as a character because had he remained Season 1 Picard for the entire series he'd be downright insufferable.

I don't know: he mellowed, but he was still letting people die for no reason in season 7 (Homeward), and nearly doing it in season 2 (Pen Pals). Maybe if the aliens in Homeward had a cute kid sadly calling out on his comms...

New Star Trek is not dystopian. Critics, of all types, need a new word that is accurate rather than hyperbolic.

Mine, especially for Picard, is depressing.

 

[fireproof78]

Mine, especially for Picard, is depressing.

Another overused, abused, term, that has lost its clinical meaning. But, it will have to do I suppose.

 

[dupersuper]

Another overused, abused, term, that has lost its clinical meaning. But, it will have to do I suppose.

I mean, I know when I find something depressing. I think every one is also aware that saying a show/story is depressing is in no way saying you're clinically depressed.

 

[SalyutBuran]

Because you defined the dictionary definition of 'objective' and turned right around and fell into the common colloquial definition. For something to be quantifiably of poor quality there has to be something to quantify. No such thing exists in the appraisal of art. Now, there are certainly things having to do with the quality of television production that are absolutely quantifiable. But even at its absolute worst, Star Trek has maintained a quality-level well above any baseline standard.

You're living with an outdated idea of the concept.

The human brain is no longer magic, you can stick electrodes to your brain and figure out which parts of your brains activate when watching something.

In this whole word salad you demonstrated a complete lack of understanding of your own premise. It's like you knocked and drew the bow with precision and efficiency and then flung the arrow whirling straight into the ground. Good job.

Because you defined the dictionary definition of 'objective' and turned right around and fell into the common colloquial definition. For something to be quantifiably of poor quality there has to be something to quantify. No such thing exists in the appraisal of art. Now, there are certainly things having to do with the quality of television production that are absolutely quantifiable. But even at its absolute worst, Star Trek has maintained a quality-level well above any baseline standard.

No such thing exists in the appraisal of art.

This is semantics game. If you want to have some convuluted definition of art go ahead, at the end of the day Star Trek is a product.

You're throwing about some mental gymnastics to evade the point. Not all things are created equally, and you can objectively quantify the performance of something. This isn't the 1970s, we now have a good enough understanding of the brain to know our perceptional of art isn't some magical snowflake event.

People have relatively predictable reactions to things, these things are quantifiable.

 

[SalyutBuran]

Just referring back to DS9,I love the show but was there ever anything as excruciating as it’s “lighthearted” episodes?

Discovery has its faults yes but where it succeeds is in having a very likeable cast and a can-do optimism.I do wish they had avoided the dumpster fire that is the mirror universe but you can’t have everything.

Burnam just comes across as blatantly narcissistic, I'm not sure how you can take it for granted a character with a strong set of narcissistic traits is suppose to be likable.

FYI I thought the STD cast was great at the start of season 1, and it was a downward decent from then on out.

 

[SalyutBuran]

-Gul Dukat's daughter being murdered
-Vulcan being destroyed in the Kelvin Timeline
-800 million Cardassians being slaughtered by the Dominion in the closing hours of the war
-"Brain and brain, WHAT IS BRAIN?!?!?"

Similar recipe.

The daughter thing was directly because the writers were freaked out by the popularity of an obviously fascist psychopath.

And I think it's easy to say that almost all of season 7 was far too dark.

 

[SalyutBuran]

Here's the actual definition of what a dystopia is: Dystopia: A futuristic, imagined universe in which oppressive societal control and the illusion of a perfect society are maintained through corporate, bureaucratic, technological, moral, or totalitarian control.

Now using the above definition, please explain how current trek is in any way dystopian. If you can't do that, please learn the meaning of words before using them.

This is incredibly easy.

We know the federation has control over almost everything in canon trek.

We assume that control is a good because federation ships feel like cruise ships. Obviously things are truly as great as they appear if you have holodecks so on and on.

In STD we still have an obvious societal structure that is based on ideals that give a lot of power to a hierarchy, a hierarchy where the military has a pivotal role.

I say a military because the entire plot of the first season was based on a war.

In that hiearchy you have a women so corrupt she'd sleep with an obviously psychopathic mirror universe character. In turn his entire crew is comprised of "I was only following orders" types.

Your lead voice of opposition against that character is a person that obviously comes across as a total narcissist.

Saruu has very obvious traits of cowardice and enabling behaviours that makes him come across as a "I was only following orders" type.

You have a power structure that is corrupt as can be, one that seems to be unchecked by any principles found in 90s trek.

By the definition you give it's 1+1 = dystopia.

STP same logic applies.

Star Trek as a concept is entirely dependent on the idea that things are relatively Utopian, as it's a given the state has a large influence over the lives of its people.

The captain is your catch all authority on almost any aspect of life and philosophy. That's a lot of trust and it quickly becomes tyrannical if you can't trust the guy at the top.

For this to not be a dystopia, you need to ensure that surrendering control to the captain isn't some illusion of prosperity. You need to illustrate it episode after episode.

Having an actor read a line like "the federation is great I really feel like I live in a utopia" doesn't make it a utopia.

Having a bad admiral once a season doesn't mean it's a dystopia.

What matters is the overall day to day experience.

You have to convince the audience that they personally would surrender control of their lives over to the ships captain. And in return this whole process would give the audience a much better life.

When we say Utopian it doesn't have to be some ideological state of perfection.

It has to be something that the audience wants, and is willing to make sacrifices for.

And with STD I don't see that being a thing. It seems to me that the majority of fans have no interest in actually being in that environment, seems more like a lot of these people really like to watch people suffer.

 

[CorporalClegg]

Yada Yada Yada. Blah Blah Blah. I need to learn how to use the multi-quote.

You're right. You do.

Everything else, though, is complete and utter nonsense. I mean if even a tenth of what you suggest is possible actually was, then Hollywood (And the music industry and fashion and food and political parties) would have already thrown every resource at their disposal into your diode research to crack the formula. And since that hasn't happened - and probably never will - you're pretty much pissing in the wind.

The only thing your brain drain whatever can tell you is trends. But trends are never 100% true 100% of the time. And how your diodes predict someone brain will react to Van Halen in 1955 is not the same as how it would predict someone's brain would react to Van Halen in 1985.

Because people are constantly being influenced by a potentially infinite number of outside sources that affect their current mental and emotional states as well as their thought process. Which is why art will always be subjective.

 

[cooleddie74]

And I think it's easy to say that almost all of season 7 was far too dark.

Easy to say, but wrong.

 

[Precious Tritium]

You're living with an outdated idea of the concept.

The human brain is no longer magic, you can stick electrodes to your brain and figure out which parts of your brains activate when watching something.

This is semantics game. If you want to have some convuluted definition of art go ahead, at the end of the day Star Trek is a product.

You're throwing about some mental gymnastics to evade the point. Not all things are created equally, and you can objectively quantify the performance of something. This isn't the 1970s, we now have a good enough understanding of the brain to know our perceptional of art isn't some magical snowflake event.

People have relatively predictable reactions to things, these things are quantifiable.

 

[JamesRye]

I think only time will tell if Star Trek has gone in the wrong direction. I don't enjoy the new shows as much as I did the older ones. But it's a common enough trait in people of my age to say that things were better in my day and wear rose tinted spectacles. It would be 'fascinating' to know how many people are actually tuning into Picard and Discovery - from my perspective, they haven't entered the zeitgeist in the way that the older stuff has.

I actually really enjoyed the first two Kelvin movies and would have maybe not had such a problem with Picard and Discovery in particular, had they been set in that timeline.

I think the 'modern' Star Trek series really miss out on what made TOS and TNG so special in the first place. The unbridled optimism and humanist viewpoint of Gene Roddenberry. This seems to get diminished with each passing series. Now, for me at least, there's little left to distinguish the show as something special and different.

I'm looking forward to 'Strange New Worlds' - hopefully, and for the first time in ages, Star Trek will once again be about 'discovering strange new worlds and new civilisations' - rather than war, or generic space battles.

 

[Lord Garth]

This is incredibly easy.

We know the federation has control over almost everything in canon trek.

We assume that control is a good because federation ships feel like cruise ships. Obviously things are truly as great as they appear if you have holodecks so on and on.

In STD we still have an obvious societal structure that is based on ideals that give a lot of power to a hierarchy, a hierarchy where the military has a pivotal role.

I say a military because the entire plot of the first season was based on a war.

In that hiearchy you have a women so corrupt she'd sleep with an obviously psychopathic mirror universe character. In turn his entire crew is comprised of "I was only following orders" types.

Your lead voice of opposition against that character is a person that obviously comes across as a total narcissist.

Saruu has very obvious traits of cowardice and enabling behaviours that makes him come across as a "I was only following orders" type.

You have a power structure that is corrupt as can be, one that seems to be unchecked by any principles found in 90s trek.

By the definition you give it's 1+1 = dystopia.

STP same logic applies.

Star Trek as a concept is entirely dependent on the idea that things are relatively Utopian, as it's a given the state has a large influence over the lives of its people.

The captain is your catch all authority on almost any aspect of life and philosophy. That's a lot of trust and it quickly becomes tyrannical if you can't trust the guy at the top.

For this to not be a dystopia, you need to ensure that surrendering control to the captain isn't some illusion of prosperity. You need to illustrate it episode after episode.

Having an actor read a line like "the federation is great I really feel like I live in a utopia" doesn't make it a utopia.

Having a bad admiral once a season doesn't mean it's a dystopia.

What matters is the overall day to day experience.

You have to convince the audience that they personally would surrender control of their lives over to the ships captain. And in return this whole process would give the audience a much better life.

When we say Utopian it doesn't have to be some ideological state of perfection.

It has to be something that the audience wants, and is willing to make sacrifices for.

And with STD I don't see that being a thing. It seems to me that the majority of fans have no interest in actually being in that environment, seems more like a lot of these people really like to watch people suffer.

1. It's VERY hard to read this post when you have one-sentence "paragraphs".

2. What I was able to get from this is that it doesn't look like you've seen DSC or DIS or Disco (not STD) passed the first season, or at least haven't seen much of it passed the first season. Would that be correct? Because only the first season has the "dark" tone that you describe.

3. The definition of "dystopia" according to dictionary.com is "a society characterized by human misery, as squalor, oppression, disease, and overcrowding." (link)

The Federation isn't primarily defined by overcrowding, disease, oppression, or squalor at any point in either DSC or PIC. And misery might have been an accurate description of The Burn in DSC, except that it happened over 100 years before the third season of DSC even takes place and the former worlds of the Federation have managed to cope, from what we've seen, and they've known the current state of affairs all their lives, so they don't live in "misery". They just live in a situation that's different.

So, DSC and PIC both fail to meet the definition of "dystopia". Saying it's dystopia doesn't make it one. And saying something that isn't true over and over again is a tactic that certain other people out there are using, and it's not going to work for them either. People inherently know if something is true or false. The shows just have a different tone than what you want.

If DSC were a true dystopia -- and I'll stick to the first season because that's all I'm convinced you've seen -- then the Klingon Homeworld would've actually been destroyed by Discovery, Burnham wouldn't have come up with another solution and wouldn't have even tried, the Klingon War would've continued until the bitter end, Lorca wouldn't be from the Mirror Universe, he just would've been an asshole from the Regular Universe, every Starfleet Admiral would say that Lorca's the example all Captains should follow, the Federation would have a slow and painful recovery from The War, assuming it would've recovered at all, and The War would've lasted a lot longer. Maybe to the point where the Federation would actually become an actual military dictatorship and Admiral Leyton's plan from DS9's "Paradise Lost" would've been put into effect over a century before he attempted it. DSC didn't do any of that.

4. It's very hard to take anyone who calls DSC and PIC a dystopia seriously if they're not prepared to also say the same about DS9, ENT Season 3, and Star Trek VI. You'd still be wrong, but at least you'd be consistent with your judgment. All three depict Earth, Starfleet, or The Federation in a worse light than DSC or PIC.

 

[Mudd]

You're living with an outdated idea of the concept.

No. He's using the words and ideas pretty accurately. Your use of words like "Utopia," "objective" and so on is idiosyncratic and based on apparent misunderstandings.

Just as your suggestion that "The human brain is no longer magic, you can stick electrodes to your brain and figure out which parts of your brains activate when watching something," offered in apparent support of misusing "objective," is based on apparent misunderstanding of what we actually have learned through such experiments and what is far from settled.

 

[cooleddie74]

"This is incredibly easy."

Famous last words, and frequently wrong. Once spoken you're pretty sure what will follow won't be easy.

 

[fireproof78]

I mean, I know when I find something depressing. I think every one is also aware that saying a show/story is depressing is in no way saying you're clinically depressed.

Everyone is? Oh, OK. I'll just not file myself under everyone then.

I do hate the English language sometimes.

 

[Agony_Boothb]

This is incredibly easy.

We know the federation has control over almost everything in canon trek.

We assume that control is a good because federation ships feel like cruise ships. Obviously things are truly as great as they appear if you have holodecks so on and on.

In STD we still have an obvious societal structure that is based on ideals that give a lot of power to a hierarchy, a hierarchy where the military has a pivotal role.

I say a military because the entire plot of the first season was based on a war.

In that hiearchy you have a women so corrupt she'd sleep with an obviously psychopathic mirror universe character. In turn his entire crew is comprised of "I was only following orders" types.

Your lead voice of opposition against that character is a person that obviously comes across as a total narcissist.

Saruu has very obvious traits of cowardice and enabling behaviours that makes him come across as a "I was only following orders" type.

You have a power structure that is corrupt as can be, one that seems to be unchecked by any principles found in 90s trek.

By the definition you give it's 1+1 = dystopia.

STP same logic applies.

Star Trek as a concept is entirely dependent on the idea that things are relatively Utopian, as it's a given the state has a large influence over the lives of its people.

The captain is your catch all authority on almost any aspect of life and philosophy. That's a lot of trust and it quickly becomes tyrannical if you can't trust the guy at the top.

For this to not be a dystopia, you need to ensure that surrendering control to the captain isn't some illusion of prosperity. You need to illustrate it episode after episode.

Having an actor read a line like "the federation is great I really feel like I live in a utopia" doesn't make it a utopia.

Having a bad admiral once a season doesn't mean it's a dystopia.

What matters is the overall day to day experience.

You have to convince the audience that they personally would surrender control of their lives over to the ships captain. And in return this whole process would give the audience a much better life.

When we say Utopian it doesn't have to be some ideological state of perfection.

It has to be something that the audience wants, and is willing to make sacrifices for.

And with STD I don't see that being a thing. It seems to me that the majority of fans have no interest in actually being in that environment, seems more like a lot of these people really like to watch people suffer.

What are you even talking about? Have you actually watched the show? I'm guessing not. And you clearly don't understand what a dystopia is despite having the actual definition available to you. Lets dissect your claims.

The Federation is democratic government with a head of state elected by its citizens, it has a constitution/charter equal rights for all it's citizens and just laws. Citizens of the Federation are free to follow any career, live wherever they want and have all of their needs met.They live in peace, free from government scruitiny and tyranny. Dystopia's are in basic terms the exact opposite. Dystopias are generally dictatorships and actively seek to control the lives of their citizens through oppression. Please provide examples as to how the Federation we see in Discovery, is any of those dystopic things.

The Military Hierarchy you speak of is Starfleet. The same Starfleet we've seen for the last 50 years.

What do Federation starships 'feeling like cruise ships' have to do with dystopias? Also if you want throw around accusations about cruise liner starships, you might want to start with TNG.

Admiral Cornwell did not know Lorca was from the mirror universe when she slept with him. She thought he was the prime universe Lorca. It's stated that they have been friends for many years and were possibly previously romantically involved.

As for the crew being 'i was only following orders' types, provide actual evidence of this because the crews actions throughout the season say otherwise. Burnham, Stamets and Tilly openly defy Saru's order to use to the tardigrade to make the spore drive work and Saru realises he was wrong to and immediately orders the tardigrade freed. At the end of the season The entire bridge crew refuse to follow Admiral Cornwell's plan to bomb Qo'nos to win the war

You also clearly don't actually know or understand what a narcissist is. Narcissists are never the voice of reason or opposition towards morally questionable behavior. They are quite the opposite. There is absolutely nothing about Burnham that would define her as a textbook narcissist. In fact, Burnham's behaviour throughout the first season and the rest of the series is the polar opposite of narcissistic behaviour. Here's an actual list of Narcissistic traits:

• Have an exaggerated sense of self-importance
• Have a sense of entitlement and require constant, excessive admiration
• Expect to be recognized as superior even without achievements that warrant it
• Exaggerate achievements and talents
• Be preoccupied with fantasies about success, power, brilliance, beauty or the perfect mate
• Believe they are superior and can only associate with equally special people
• Monopolize conversations and belittle or look down on people they perceive as inferior
• Expect special favors and unquestioning compliance with their expectations
• Take advantage of others to get what they want
• Have an inability or unwillingness to recognize the needs and feelings of others
• Be envious of others and believe others envy them
• Behave in an arrogant or haughty manner, coming across as conceited, boastful and pretentious
• Insist on having the best of everything — for instance, the best car or office

At the same time, people with narcissistic personality disorder have trouble handling anything they perceive as criticism, and they can:

• Become impatient or angry when they don't receive special treatment
• Have significant interpersonal problems and easily feel slighted
• React with rage or contempt and try to belittle the other person to make themselves appear superior
• Have difficulty regulating emotions and behavior
• Experience major problems dealing with stress and adapting to change
• Feel depressed and moody because they fall short of perfection
• Have secret feelings of insecurity, shame, vulnerability and humiliation

Burnham has her issues, but she none of these things. Using these traits, feel free to provide evidence from the series as to how exactly Burnham is a narcissist.

Saru is anything but a coward by the end of Season 1. He steps up and leads the crew after it is revealed that Lorca is from the mirror universe and he literally stands up to Admiral Cornwell and refuses to follow her orders once it's revealed that her plan to win the war is to bomb Qo'nos. Having said that, I'm not sure how Saru's personality at the beginning of season 1 is reflective of a Dystopia.

How is the power structure corrupt? We see one Admiral make a morally questionable decision and immediately her subordinates stand up to her to preserve the same federation values we saw in 90's trek and prevent her from following through with it. In a corrupt power structure the entire crew would have been arrested for not following Cornwell's orders and imprisoned without a trial, instead they were given medals for their actions to maintain federation values and principles and Cornwell realised how wrong she was to give in to fear. The crew stand up to Cornwell in the same way that the crew of the Enterprise-D stood up to Admiral Pressman.

What does the Captain have to do with anything? Like seriously? We saw Captains do questionable stuff all the time in 90's trek. Picard was willing to let an entire civilisation die not once but twice, Sisko nuked an inhabited planet and was complicit in the assassination of a foreign dignitary which lead to a sovereign nation being tricked into a joining war, Janeway was willing to torture a starfleet crewmen to get information, Archer stole from an alien crew and basically left them to die without warp drive. Going by you're way of thinking, these actions would classify the Federation as dystopia.

As for 'giving your life for the captain' You don't have to convince the audience of any such thing, that is utter nonsense. A writer has to make a character relatable and likeable sure, but there isn't much drama in completely saintly, likeable characters. A good writer gives you characters you like but might not always agree with. Anyone who would give their life for a fictional character needs to get a dose of reality. It's a goddamn tv show.

Also who is the 'we' you speak of? A utopia is quite literally a perfect state. That is the definition and not this vague, arbitrary and nonsensical meaning that you have chosen to give it. It's a fictional universe, what sacrifices would one make for it?

If you're going to be critical of the show at least watch the fucking thing and don't rely on angry fandom menace youtube videos. Also, learn the actual god damn meaning of words if you're going to try arguing about them.

 

[The Old Mixer]

You're living with an outdated idea of the concept.

The human brain is no longer magic, you can stick electrodes to your brain and figure out which parts of your brains activate when watching something.



This is semantics game. If you want to have some convuluted definition of art go ahead, at the end of the day Star Trek is a product.

You're throwing about some mental gymnastics to evade the point. Not all things are created equally, and you can objectively quantify the performance of something. This isn't the 1970s, we now have a good enough understanding of the brain to know our perceptional of art isn't some magical snowflake event.

People have relatively predictable reactions to things, these things are quantifiable.

Burnam just comes across as blatantly narcissistic, I'm not sure how you can take it for granted a character with a strong set of narcissistic traits is suppose to be likable.

FYI I thought the STD cast was great at the start of season 1, and it was a downward decent from then on out.

The daughter thing was directly because the writers were freaked out by the popularity of an obviously fascist psychopath.

And I think it's easy to say that almost all of season 7 was far too dark.

This is incredibly easy.

We know the federation has control over almost everything in canon trek.

We assume that control is a good because federation ships feel like cruise ships. Obviously things are truly as great as they appear if you have holodecks so on and on.

In STD we still have an obvious societal structure that is based on ideals that give a lot of power to a hierarchy, a hierarchy where the military has a pivotal role.

I say a military because the entire plot of the first season was based on a war.

In that hiearchy you have a women so corrupt she'd sleep with an obviously psychopathic mirror universe character. In turn his entire crew is comprised of "I was only following orders" types.

Your lead voice of opposition against that character is a person that obviously comes across as a total narcissist.

Saruu has very obvious traits of cowardice and enabling behaviours that makes him come across as a "I was only following orders" type.

You have a power structure that is corrupt as can be, one that seems to be unchecked by any principles found in 90s trek.

By the definition you give it's 1+1 = dystopia.

STP same logic applies.

Star Trek as a concept is entirely dependent on the idea that things are relatively Utopian, as it's a given the state has a large influence over the lives of its people.

The captain is your catch all authority on almost any aspect of life and philosophy. That's a lot of trust and it quickly becomes tyrannical if you can't trust the guy at the top.

For this to not be a dystopia, you need to ensure that surrendering control to the captain isn't some illusion of prosperity. You need to illustrate it episode after episode.

Having an actor read a line like "the federation is great I really feel like I live in a utopia" doesn't make it a utopia.

Having a bad admiral once a season doesn't mean it's a dystopia.

What matters is the overall day to day experience.

You have to convince the audience that they personally would surrender control of their lives over to the ships captain. And in return this whole process would give the audience a much better life.

When we say Utopian it doesn't have to be some ideological state of perfection.

It has to be something that the audience wants, and is willing to make sacrifices for.

And with STD I don't see that being a thing. It seems to me that the majority of fans have no interest in actually being in that environment, seems more like a lot of these people really like to watch people suffer.

Please use the multi-quote function instead of posting more than twice in a row. Thanks.

 

[Steve Roby]

Burnam just comes across as blatantly narcissistic, I'm not sure how you can take it for granted a character with a strong set of narcissistic traits is suppose to be likable.

Citations needed. A woman who's convinced she's fucked things up in the worst way imaginable and believes she deserves to be punished, and is surprised to get a chance to turn things around, hardly seems like a narcissist to me. So feel free to cite specific instances of her alleged narcissistic tendencies.

I think only time will tell if Star Trek has gone in the wrong direction. I don't enjoy the new shows as much as I did the older ones. But it's a common enough trait in people of my age to say that things were better in my day and wear rose tinted spectacles.

How old are you? I'm 58. I like new Trek just fine. The last time I was anywhere near this happy about the state of Star Trek on TV, DS9 was still on the air.

It would be 'fascinating' to know how many people are actually tuning into Picard and Discovery - from my perspective, they haven't entered the zeitgeist in the way that the older stuff has.

Well, being someone of my age, I remember that the way TV worked when Star Trek was at its peak of popularity as a TV series was a hell of a lot different from the way it is now. That was nearly 30 years ago. The Next Generation was much more popular than DS9, Voyager, and Enterprise were. Those three haven't entered the zeitgeist the way TOS and TNG did, either.

I actually really enjoyed the first two Kelvin movies and would have maybe not had such a problem with Picard and Discovery in particular, had they been set in that timeline.

I don't understand this. If it's a good show, it's a good show. If I can accept TOS and TMP Klingons, if I can accept Worf's head changing between seasons, if I can accept that TNG Trills and DS9 Trills are both the same thing, I can accept the changes in the new shows. I don't need an excuse like "it's a different timeline." I already have the perfect reason: Star Trek changes the way things look sometimes, and always has. They couldn't even keep the Klingons looking the same across three seasons of TOS.

I think the 'modern' Star Trek series really miss out on what made TOS and TNG so special in the first place. The unbridled optimism and humanist viewpoint of Gene Roddenberry. This seems to get diminished with each passing series. Now, for me at least, there's little left to distinguish the show as something special and different.

TOS and TNG did not have the same vision. Roddenberry's philosophy changed over the years, and his idea of what Starfleet, the Federation, and humanity are all changed from TOS to TNG. In TOS, they were working for a better future and being active about it. In TNG, they were saying they had attained perfection and could therefore let lesser civilizations die out. From DS9 onwards, whether admitting it or not, every Star Trek series tried to get back more to the TOS version.

I'm looking forward to 'Strange New Worlds' - hopefully, and for the first time in ages, Star Trek will once again be about 'discovering strange new worlds and new civilisations' - rather than war, or generic space battles.

You didn't watch season three of Discovery, did you? Or Picard? The former gives us many new worlds and the redeveloping of the Federation. Lots of exploring and optimism. In Picard, we see the beginning of a new group of ex-Borg finding a new way forward and a new android civilization. That's some classic Star Trek right there.