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Star Trek
r/startrek: The Next Generation
Star Trek news and discussion. No slash fic...
Maybe a little slash fic.
New to Star Trek and wondering where to start?
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Upcoming Episodes
Date | Episode | Title |
---|---|---|
11-28 | LD 5x07 | "Fully Dilated" |
12-05 | LD 5x08 | "Upper Decks" |
12-12 | LD 5x09 | "Fissue Quest" |
12-19 | LD 5x10 | "The New Next Generation" |
01-24 | Film | "Section 31" |
In Production
Strange New Worlds (2025)
Section 31 (2025-01-24)
Starfleet Academy (TBA)
In Development
Untitled comedy series
Wondering where to stream a series? Check here.
I mean, I do like so-called "Nu-Trek", but at the end of the day this is kind of a tail-wagging-the-dog response. You can explain just about anything in lore after the fact, but when the rubber hits the road the real explanation is that someone in a Hollywood design team said "We want it to be BIGGER," and then left it to the people who cared enough to find a reason why it would be justified.
Far easier to just suspend your disbelief a bit further, I think. Yeah, Discovery is weirdly big. It also flies through space by a man infused with a giant tardigrade's DNA sending the whole ship from place to place through willpower and a mushroom trip. If you can accept the second one, it kind of feels like the fact that the ship is a larj boye isn't that much of a stretch.
Is this... is this Dune?
I have not yet watched Star Trek Discovery, so this description just reads like Dune and the good old spice.
I guess I just fundamentally don't agree with the need for a "backsplanation". I am of the camp that I'm totally OK with the Klingons looking different in TMP than in TOS because it wasn't a 1960s TV show anymore and they wanted the aliens to look more alien, and that's all the explanation that I need. The Enterprise is different between SNW and its appearance in Discovery because it's a different show and they wanted to tweak its appearance some to make it more of a "hero" set. Spock and Sarek never mentioned his having an adoptive daughter/sister in spite of being in two series and a half dozen movies because Michael didn't exist until Discovery and the writers thought it would make for an interesting tie-in.
I have enjoyed the series since TNG in the 80s, and I'd love for it to come true some time in the future. But it's a TV show, it's not a history book. It's fine if there are inconsistencies, none of it is real anyway.
God the Klingon thing was silly. Do we need an explanation as to why the TOS ship had plastic, 1960s themed furniture? Do we need an explanation for improved camera resolution over the years? Why did we need a silly explanation for the improvement in makeup artistry so many decades later? And the explanation doesn't even work. Genetics don't work like that. It's taking themselves too seriously. Either ignore it, or hang a lantern on it with an inside joke once, and be done with it.
@VE3MAL @Basilisk Warf's explanation to Sisko in that TOS time travel episode was so perfect. Nothing else was needed.
It's like Lucas making a whole Solo movie to explain the Kessel Run and how he was "right" all this time.
The ENT mini-arc "explaining" the difference between Klingons "then" and "now" was absolutely unnecessary, but I do have to admit to finding it cute that the reason why Klingons became smooth-foreheaded instead of bumpy-foreheaded turned out to be a combination of all three of Bashir's guesses in that scene.
Facts and memes. A wonderful combination.
I wasn't a fan of discovery at first, but by the time Pike and Spock came in it was obvious they had gotten some people involved who cared about the universe. I feel like it has recontextualized TOS, and added a lot of depth to the characters we've known for the longest time. And they've done a fantastic job of making the shows intelligible to new people, while adding heaps of depth, backstory and context for the rest of us with the simplest things, like Picard holding his flute at the beginning of season 3.
People can completely ignore the new stuff if they like, but I like that they're taking some risks. The alternative is what we got with the last star wars trilogy. Perfect casting, fantastic acting, excellent world building, and a story that meandered, found the safest route, and ended up not leaving much of its own mark. Or anyway, that was my opinion.
@Stamets I thought naming the lead engineer after the foremost authority on mushrooms showed a remarkable amount of commitment to the utterly bonkers tech. There’s a ‘anything can happen day” quality to the show that really helped the 60 year old franchise.
@Stamets Huh. I didn’t catch that, probably because I spent most of the first season gobsmacked by what they were doing. Had to pause for a second to confirm if you were actually Paul as I kinda used to know him when I worked at his publisher.
TOS. 😎
Yes. And the characters. They have depth, and it feels like you know them, which makes putting lgbtq and neurodivergent characters on the screen that much better. I understand their motivations, and i'm autistic so that's a real accomplishment.
I'm not caught up on all the shows, because i don't always have the energy for the active watching that something like Picard warrants, but they've managed to make even something as silly as lower decks have character development, depth, and add a completely different view of starfleet. Like, the whole chest alien conspiracy from TNG isn't so wild when you see that there's a wide range of people in starfleet that's not so obvious from following around their absolute best and brightest.