this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2025
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I'd argue that it was hurt by specifically trying to fit TNG-era Star Trek, or people expecting that of it.
It would have worked perfectly fine as a TOS/TAS show, since they never really shied away from there being unexplainable magic with the science out in the universe. Witches, wizards, and the devil are all real, and one universe away, so too is actual magic.
Whereas TNG and post-TNG would always try and hammer that into the work of a godlike entity such as a Q, or some grounded science. Q abilities are the work of highly sophisticated subspace interactions that have yet to be technologically replicated. There are particular neurotransmitters, psychology, and brain structures involved in telepathy, and it's not simple ESP/psionics.
And people wanted the latter. This is most notable with the cause of the Burn. People hated it because the idea of a child being able to psionically disrupt dilithium galaxy-wide would have been silly in TNG, without them being a child Q, or something like that.
But as a TOS/TAS plot, it fits in fine. Lazarus briefly caused the entire universe to blink out of existence, and Charlie X, due to the powers bestowed upon him needed to keep him alive, could explode ships either his mind, and would have destroyed the Federation if left unchecked.
TL;DR: It worked as Trek, but people basically wanted TNG and got TOS.
I find that's a fairly reasonable assesment of 'science' versus 'magic' sensibility, but the main thing for me is that the arc concept due to the modern "binge" sensibilities is rough.
When Babylon 5 and DS9 did arcs, they did so carefully embedded in generally episodic series (people couldn't "binge", maybe you would tape it if you felt like it, but people weren't always that engaged, so you catered to people that may miss some of your airings). So you had nice, digestable pieces and the underlying big thing plays out a bit at a time sometimes taking over for 2 or 3 episodes, but generally letting other smaller stories take the foreground for the episode.
But with "binge mentality", there's an inclination for showrunners to go nuts. Picard and Discovery produce a season that is pretty much just one story. The story doesn't have enough meat to really drive that much runtime, but they make the pacing pretty torturous to fill the time. Also, with episodic, if you don't like a particular story/execution, you kind of forget it because there's a whole new story with new execution the next week. When you have a season you don't like, well that's harder to overlook.