If it tells you anything about me, my favorite TOS episode has - and always shall be; “Arena”.
I love the more episodic format of Strange New Worlds. I love Pike. I love the old-school aesthetic of the sets. I love the entire cast (shout out to my homie Hemmer. RIP). I just freakin’ love the entire show. It’s exactly what new Trek should be.
However, I have to admit the new Gorn kind of bummed me out. I prefer the goofy-badass-Gorn over the scary-quick-incubatin’-Gorn.
I prefer the goofy-badass-Gorn over the scary-quick-incubatin’-Gorn.
They’re iconic for a reason.
I agree with basically everything you said, although I’ve found more things than just the Gorn in SNW to be cranky about. While TNG era never TRIED to get science and engineering right… they tried WAY harder than SNW, which is saying something and NOT a good something. It’s like TNG’s attitude was “We know we’re goofy, but we DO have technobabble consultants, and we try to link some of what we’re doing to real physics and engineering” while SNW is like “We don’t even like, bother man… rule of cool in a Hollywood hipstery writer way, we don’t really know what we’re talking about, nor do we care… hey can we get mocha lattes to the writers room ASAP?” Major pet peeve of mine.
Also, I love Carol Kane as an actress, but she’s just Lillian in space, and honestly, I really didn’t ever need that. It feels out of place, but shoe horned in anyway.
Certainly, some of my joy in the show also just has to do with it just being better than Discovery (for which I’m like…oh thank god) and just gratitude that at least they’re trying to make something LIKE Star Trek.
Lower Decks was a better show. So was The Orville.
‘Discovery’… the main contribution from that distraction was giving us Harry “Dwight” Mudd & ‘Strange New Worlds’.
As soon as we got a chance to evacuate that starship, we took it; and joined up with a better crew.
You’re definitely correct about the writing on TOS. To expand upon your point - look at the widescreen monitors and flip phone communicators, the earpiece devices and other things that they use. Those didn’t even exist yet, not really. I’m sure in some ways these things informed the development of the real-life equivalents, however ~ you can’t deny the writers did a lot of things as realistically as possible (given the setting). I can’t remember ever seeing fire in the vacuum of space in TOS. However, on ‘Discovery’ we had plenty of whacky-not-in-a-fun-way scenarios.
Lillian in space. Thanks for the chuckle.
I liked LD okay, but the bleeped cursing bothers me. Either fucking cuss or frickin’ don’t. It happens too much to not be distracting for me. The Orville felt like classic Trek, which is my understanding was on purpose. Seth was a real member of Starfleet, albeit minor.
