Star Trek really could do more with Lovecraftian horror. To quote Carl Sagan, "The universe was not made for us." It's why I was really interested in the Aliens crossover; if anything could upset the hotel-like complacency of Picard and his crew, it's the Xenomorphs.
I brought them up, not as an example of something Lovecraftian, per se, but as an example of how "the universe is not made for us." How the universe should be full of things that are deadly and cannot be reasoned with. 80s Trek and beyond forgot that. 60s Trek was much weirder, and the universe felt more alien and more dangerous.
I'm not really sure what Ridley Scott's idea behind the Engineers was, and at this point it probably doesn't matter. I think of Alien: Covenant as "a Star Trek story gone wrong." There's a distress signal, there's a Strange New World, there's the ruins of an ancient civilization... and then everything goes off the rails. I like it a lot.
Yes, Prometheus shifted to a more darkly philosophical, meaning-of-life-stuff ethos (well, more meaning-of-death), but audiences didn't react super-positively, so Prometheus II turned into Covenant, where an Alien film impregnated Prometheus's storyline and exploded from its chest. Metaphorically.
I'm still pissed they canceled the Alien/TNG crossover, that had a ton of potential.
