The style of New Trek? In general: the production values, the directing, the pacing, being unafraid to embrace late-20th/early-21st Century culture, looser with the language, things like that.
Pacing is one thing, but the criticisms of "ADHDTV" don't seem to be too far outlandish. The increase of profanity combined with "culture" is also amusing, since I don't think we know too many people that overtly say the S- and F-words as freely as said people say "let's get something to eat", not even close. Under duress, possibly, then the duress really has to be sold. Especially after 178 episodes of the most we got was "merde", and only early on because the censors didn't know that was French for the S-word. Even then, Picard wasn't emoting like a teenager. There's a unique nuance to the character, but as in season 1 he's also called "J-L" because he's now hip... that's an impressively large leap for anyone. Instead of showing us his life as a kid, show what got him to become hip with the lingo and San Fran it up with J-L cuz otherwise it's like sus and stuff... never mind the dumb bottle trick to summon a Q with (apparently the Q that J-L there wanted must be that particular chord that Guinan could whistle out of the bottle before drinking it. The audience probably needed a drink after that scene, that's for sure...)
My favorite New Trek besides PIC Season 3 are DSC (all of it) and PIC S1 itself. So, it's not like I was screaming for the return of Berman Trek in the Berman Style. But I didn't mind what started in Berman Trek being continued by someone else, and I at least feel like I got that with PIC S3.
But is season 3 truly in "Berman Style"? Not completely. Nor was Meyer directly copying Roddenberry/Coon/Freiberger/Wise. But Meyer did see what made the characters work, then applied his own style but without making characters and interactions so incredibly different or unbelievable. In short, Matalas is to TNG what Meyer was to TOS.
On top of my always thinking, from way back, the TNG Movies could've been handled better.
Even in the 1990s, the bulk of the TNG films felt like cast reunion parties but they forgot to tell compelling stories. Oh, some set pieces are interesting, but they're often less than the sum of the parts, and a couple of the films are so lightweight with frivolity... Segueing back to PIC season 3, it feels exactly what the 90s flicks needed to be. Again, Matalas really is to TNG what Meyer was to TOS. Kurtzman did start the ball rolling, but something seemed missing or off the mark.
My reality: I went to my high school reunion IRL in 2017. It was fine. Then it was done. It wasn't this horrible thing. PIC S3 was just another version of that. As a viewer.
Interesting perspective.
For the TNG characters themselves, they're a tight-knit group.
Exactly that. TNG was an ensemble. To us, they started as a group and could any really hold a sequel show alone?
It's like my friends from college IRL. We keep in touch and we still get together from time-to-time to this day. So I can buy it. Yes, we all moved on with our lives, but we still keep in touch and we still get together.
Some friendships can be lifelong. Even PIC season 3 addresses the crew that were separated, and infinitely better than what the movies did to contrive to get them back onto the 1701-E. Not that it would take much as the 90s movies pretty much never bothered*, but PIC3 nails it with stringing together the events and characters and impressively so.
* In the movies, starting with STFC: Worf is saved just after salivating over ramming the ship designed to fight the Borg that quickly gets konked out**, so he's back on the ship and the first thing he whines about is if the ship is okay. A little inconsistent or not, at least it's not hard to buy into how he could show up. INS's reason was so asinine that I'd forgotten (something about being on leave, so what does he do? Show up for no reason, in uniform. Okey dokey then.). NEM didn't even have one shown and should a deleted scene count? Meh... Worf may as well have appeared on the bridge out of thin air due to Riker snapping his fingers, in just the same way back when Uncle Arthur snapped his fingers and *pop* his joke of the episode appears in full display. (For the record, Arthur's gag about bringing in a cow to get fresh milk for baby Tabatha because he found it impossible to milk the refrigerator always has me rolling, but YMMV...)
** on top of being a discontinued prototype for having a serious defect where it will literally fly apart at higher warp speeds, something quickly forgotten in DS9 and, no, O'Brien didn't add redundant gussets to it because it was a discarded prototype where they went back to the drawing board to make something larger that could also be more easily maneuverable around a gigantic cube. What saved the DS9 episode was Sisko's jubilance in making lemonade out of the lemon as the ship was generally still quite useful... you know, if Sisko chose to be a movie critic instead of commander, he should have found Ensign Ebert. You know,
Sisko and Ebert!
