I have a soft spot for the original series as I grew up watching TOS and TNG side by side, and even the TOS animated series.
But I'm with the majority here, TNG was the high-point of the Star Trek franchise. Honestly though, it didn't really find its footing until season 3. Some of the early episodes are a chore to get through.
I didn't like DS9 at the time it was showing, probably because, "it wasn't TNG," but I've come to appreciate it and set it in the third place spot.
I was willing to give J.J. a chance since I understood the 2009 film was an attempt to reach out to a wider audience but after Star Trek Into References the Abramsverse is dead to me.
If Star Trek is to exist it needs to be back on TV where it can develop its characters and tell the kind of stories it was always best at telling.
And we need a Star Trek or something like it, we need more optimistic science fiction these days where most of our futurist entertainment has become mostly grim and often post-apocalyptic. I feel like now more than ever we can use a really upbeat view of the future, however even Star Trek itself has become decidedly dark in the hands of Abrams.
Pulsar_t wrote:Am I the only one who garners less enjoyment out of far-future sci-fi that's got terribly dated? I mean sure there are stories set in alternate universes or post-apocalyptic worlds where technological progress drifted into different areas, but with Star Trek it's obviously on a continuum concurrent with our own and a lot of the time you'd find yourself lamenting that the characters were acting so 20th century, especially with the gizmos and apparel.
That's part of the charm to me. Star Trek has always been about us and has always been sort of a snapshot of the times. I don't know what that says about us in regards to the new movies. (Although I could make the argument that Star Trek is
not us since it exists in a universe where we fought a series of wars with genetically altered supermen in the 90's and will be embroiled in WWIII soon. Then again I guess the Eugenics Wars are happening in our timeline, we just call it professional sports
).
It certainly does require a lot of suspension of disbelief but to me it's more surprising how much of the material still holds up and resonates today. Like anything that exists a lot of it is crap and at its worst it can get really bad but when it's good, it's incredibly good.
And it's fun for me personally to see the things we have today (cell phones, tablets, computers in general) that were the stuff of fantasy when the Star Trek episodes were being made.
