Or are we again comparing the Abrams films to some fans idealized version of Star Trek that never existed to begin with?
Bingo. Whenever I get sucked into these debates, I often feel like we're talking past each other because we're talking about at least three different STAR TREKs.
There's the actual show that ran on NBC in the sixties. There's the latter-day spin-offs from the 80s and 90s. And, yes, there's some idealized notion of what "Star Trek"
ought to be that often bears little or no relationship to the original show I grew up on.
It's weird. Just the other day, on another board, somebody was insisting that "moral dilemmas" did not belong in STAR TREK because, apparently, you don't have thorny ethical issues in Trek's utopian future. Star Trek, he insisted, was "all about science and exploration."
Huh? That was so wrong-headed it made my jaw drop. Kirk having to kill his best friend to save his ship isn't a moral dilemma? Picard having to rule on whether Data is a sentient being or a toaster isn't a moral dilemma?
Okay, that's an extreme example, but it's also a textbook example of how some fans seem more invested in some abstract notion of what Star Trek is "all about" than, you know, the actual shows. So that they end up comparing the latest iteration not to the previous versions, but to some pure, platonic ideal that never existed . . . .