Heh... if I ever made a fan film, it would assuredly be the most awesome fan film ever.
And the totally new canon! 
Spoilers Variety about the future of Star Trek
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Heh... if I ever made a fan film, it would assuredly be the most awesome fan film ever.
And the totally new canon! 
Hardly. To the vast majority of them, it's a just a job.
I think it can be both.
Only in modern times. And while that does work out some times, like with Mike McMahan or the Hageman brothers, a pretty compelling reason against giving fans authority over the franchise is Terry Matalas.
A mix is good. Moores and Bragas.
It's hardly an objective fact that Matalas is a bad showrunner. In fact, according to IMDb voters he wrote and directed the best Star Trek episode ever made!
(Well okay, it's tied with In the Pale Moonlight, just like the next highest episode of Picard written by him is tied with Trials and Tribble-ations).
Obviously any site that doesn't recognise Lower Decks as being the objectively best Star Trek series has some flaws, but there's a lot of love out there for Matalas' work, and the rating graph reveals it's not just Discovery haters messing with the score.
Yes. But in no form are they the only ones making each of the various mass market products. We tend to celebrate the fans who get jobs in Trek. Be it writers, directors, art departments, even actors. But most of the productions aren't made up by fans. The bulk tend to be people who might have a casual knowledge of Trek, but not fans. It's nice to have some who are, as expecting a new hire to be familiar with nearly 1100 hours of produced material isn't reasonable. But having knew people bring fourth new ideas and a perspective thats outside the box. And thats also very desirable. Not to mention the reality of production, that makes it easier for an outsider to let something go because its not worth time, money versus a fan who might be more emotionally tied to those small details.
But enough about Picard season 3.
Or Lower Decks!
I genuinely believe that a franchise will produce its best work when it has a good mix of fans and newbies. The fans bring their innate understanding of the tone and rules, along with an encyclopaedic knowledge of what has come before and a bunch of ideas about what threads they want to continue. The newbies tell the fans that their story ideas are way too nerdy and obscure for new fans and they need to make it more grounded and relatable.
And they all need to be talented enough to do the job.
Yes, but can you repeat that season?
Once was enough.
But, I have it on good authority that this is what fans want.
So..... Strange New Worlds?
There are always exceptions
It was a one-time trick.
Strip away the nostalgia / 'memberberries and I don't see what's left to be so impressed with. Picard ran roughshod over all my favorite antagonists - Q, The Borg, The Dominion / Founders.
The pleasure seems to stem from simply seeing the familiar again, rather than a story featuring the familiar that was actually, erm, good!
I think Trek's all memberberried out.
Yup, that’s the thing I think that gets misunderstood about fan service and memberberries: they should be used as grace notes and flourishes that enrich the plot. They shouldn’t become the plot.
When Redlettermedia said that Andor is too good for Star Wars, that's what I want to be hearing about a new Star Trek show.
Everything since Discovery is by-and-large ok, but not phenomenal. They only seem to work because of Star Trek, rather than working despite of it.
One only needs to look at the state of Star Wars post TROS to see how slavish fan writing doesn't always translate to a good story.
My hottest of hot takes is that one doesn't need to be a fan with encyclopedic knowledge to make a good Trek series. In fact, I'm at the point that is almost prefer someone come in cold turkey and only learn the broad strokes of the franchise because then they'd actually WANT to give us anything new.
Prodigy is the one show that seems to get this. All the many, many, maaaaaaaany characters we have from other shows work to tell the story at hand and the callbacks serve to further the plot of *this* show, not just "Hey look, 'member this thing you like? *Insert sounds of jangling keys*" Jellico is there in the same capacity he was in his appearance on TNG for example. Okona was there as a shift grift to teach Dal a lesson about standing with his team.
I give Lower Decks a pass because it's the one show that was intentionally designed to be Memberberries on steroids and it's an absurdist workplace comedy. But once that's over, I'll be happy to take a break from that sort of thing in the more grounded shows.
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Alternatively, I would suggest that PIC S3 would probably be far more impressive without the nostalgia.
At its core, it's a conspiracy thriller. It's Invasion of the Body Snatchers meets Hunt for Red October. That, in itself, is an impressive foundation. You might say its derivative, and I would agree, but where would Star Trek be without Horatio Hornblower?
Let's strip out the TNG cast, Moriarty, Project Phoenix and the Enterprise D. You're left with the USS Titan, fresh out of dock. A disciplined crew, a familiar first officer (we have to keep Seven) and Captain who is plagued by his own past. The antagonistic relationship between Seven and Shaw is what the Discovery writers wish Rayner and Burnham was, and it could've filled a lot more run time than it did. I'm picturing Hackman and Washington when i think of how far it could've gone.
Raffi could've been the main link to the conspiracy plot, captaining the Eleos and enlisting Seven's help without Shaw's permission. Then pretty much everything would play out as it did, including the cat-and-mouse submarine-style action and the paranoia-soaked plotline.
You can even dump the Borg and the Dominion, replacing them with other shape-shifters and a techno-organic main antagonist. Perhaps the extra-dimensional tentacle bots from PIC S1? I don't know, the sky is the limit.
It can work, without the memberberries, absolutely. In fact, I think a lot more people would get behind a 25th century continuation if it had been this way.
