^That describes the latter years of the Berman era to me. Voyager and Enterprise, rather than truly embracing their concepts, they just tried to recreate what worked for TNG, resulting in stale and repetitive storytelling.
I wonder who makes these decisions - I'm under the impression that the "it's got to be about Spock's sister visiting the Mirror Universe and fighting Klingons" or "it's Pike watching The Menagerie and going 'aaah' when he sees himself in a wheelchair, and his security officer talks about Space Seed and Arena" type stuff comes from a single showrunner, and the writers are just stuck working inside that framework.
The new writers are capable of writing solid middle-of-the-road Star Trek that's relatively standalone and not reliant on callbacks, and showed they could do it with parts of SNW S1, it just seems that the machinery that produces these shows is often working against that.
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It's an accusation aimed at actual people rather than a comment about the show. When you talk about people and say you know what they think, it's a stretch to say hey, that's just my opinion, man.
I think you are misunderstanding what I am saying and taking it in a different direction than what I intended.
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Actually, you can. Words and context matter. If you’re not pleased with the production of the current team making Trek, it’s totally fine to say so. You are speaking of your views and perceptions.
However, accusing the team of “not caring” about the quality of their work without any evidence of the lack of care itself isn’t an opinion, it’s an unsubstantiated allegation. A more careful framework for the observation can go a long way towards eliminating, or at least greatly reducing, a condescending tone.
There was no condescending tone in my statement, at least, to me it didn't sound that way. I don't see what the problem is with what I was saying so I'm not going to make a big deal out of it and continue to bring attention to something that wasn't my intention at all.
If you don't like what I was saying, that is fine, you are entitled to your opinion. We'll just agree to disagree.
Well, this is the key part that I may or may not be misunderstanding.
Every interview I've seen or read with the people who make the show, whether producers, writers, cast, or others, convinces me that they care very much about the quality of their work, that they're actually enthusiastic about it. And since they work in a business, obviously they have to care about how the viewers will react.
What am I missing?
I would absolutely call TOS Forbidden Planet: The Series, and have no problem at all with that. (Obviously it became more, but it certainly was that in its essentials.)
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Got to say, Starfleet Academy feels pretty different from Strange New Worlds, which feels pretty different from most of Discovery, which feels pretty different from Picard, etc.
Which is why Heinlein is so good. Many take place inside our solar system, granted with a far more pulp version of the planets and habitable atmospheres but much more interesting.
'Star Trek' without FTL would just be 'Trek', as the stars would be unreachable.
Eh. Space Trek, then. Instead of hundreds of star systems with improbably humanoid aliens and weird yet relatable cultures, it’s hundreds of O’Neill cylinder colonies, asteroid settlements and colonized-centuries-ago Kuiper Belt dwarf planets with human-descended populations and by-now-weird yet relatable cultures. Should work fine.
Star Trek has canonically slower-than-light vessels.
The DY-100 in "Space Seed". According to the episode, it was designed for interplanetary travel, at a time before interstellar travel was considered practical, and that type of craft generally took years to travel from planet to planet. The Enterprise encountered this craft roughly 200 years after its launch, near the Ceti Alpha star system. In real life, Alpha Ceti (called Menkar) is about 250 light years from Earth.
There are other examples.
The DY-100 in "Space Seed". According to the episode, it was designed for interplanetary travel, at a time before interstellar travel was considered practical, and that type of craft generally took years to travel from planet to planet. The Enterprise encountered this craft roughly 200 years after its launch, near the Ceti Alpha star system. In real life, Alpha Ceti (called Menkar) is about 250 light years from Earth.
There are other examples.
Honestly, I've been thinking that we should've had a bit more Expanse, Cowboy Bebop and Firefly in Enterprise.
Thing is, you do that too much and it’s not really Star Trek anymore — you do need both the “naval” element and the “visiting strange worlds” element (even if you’re largely stuck on a space station). (You can certainly do that in the Star Trek universe, it’s just that the feel would be that of a different subgenre.)
That said, it would have been fine to indicate that, sure, the Solar System is teeming with orbital colonies and such, even if our stories mostly leave all those behind the same way we leave Earth behind. I think that’s true even in the later eras, in fact more so (since by then there’ve been that many more centuries for them to expand and multiply). People in Trek are usually born on either Earth or Alpha Beta Colony, never on one of hundreds of cities orbiting Earth or one of the other Solar planets.
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