Tarhiel: Well, if you mean the Star Trek reboot (from 2009), I actually like that movie and direction they took it in, although many of the old fans didn´t and I can see why.
These were made by someone who explicitly stated he never liked Trek. I still gave it a chance, and I nearly walked
out of that movie in the cinema back then and refused to watch any more of his Star Wars movies wearing Star Trek skins. Even though, if those hadn't been the starting point for everything that came after, I wouldn't even care too much about those today.
Tarhiel: it seems to me you prefer quality over quantity and coherent writing building on what was established before instead of destroying it - and I fully agree with you.
Indeed.
Tarhiel: What do you say at the new Pickard TV series?
It's not Star Trek. It's a disgrace to what
TNG stood for and portrayed.
It really got my hopes up when it was announced. Shot me down so hard.
Only Kurtzman Trek can come up with the idea of the multi-cultural Federation somehow becoming
isolist and xenophobic, its technology somehow devolving, synthetics having no rights, slavery being a thing, ...each of these topics have repeatedly been dealt with in Star Trek before, with entire smart episodes dedicated to these concepts, all of which made decades ago. And in b4
"that's the point and what they're fighting for", well it should not have been possible to come to this situation unless everything about humanity and the Federation that was canon before was just a hilariously massive facade, devaluing everything.
TNG made people think. It inspired young and old alike to study for and get a job in science and engineering, it was philosophical and intelligent entertainment.
4x21 The Drumhead, 2x09 The Measure Of Man, 5x25 The Inner Light, ... I can't even list all the brilliant episodes TNG had because there were so many. And the same goes for
DS9 episodes and
characters. I mean. Garak, anyone...? Garak just rolled a hard 20 on charisma whenever present, despite never stating
anything outright or literal.
Picard on the other hand is nothing like these shows. It's an entirely different universe with different characters. Actively going against everything
TNG did as if none of it had ever happened or held any meaning. And, technically speaking, that's exactly what it is - a somewhat similar, but different parallel universe / timeline. They may try to muddy the waters and suggest it's all the same, but canonically and even legally speaking, it's not. The new movies (JJ) and Discovery legally had to be "25% different" to be made, even to the point of requiring extra licensing fees for each original Enterprise appearance in
Discovery - and by now, it's a deliberately confusing mix of that new universe they created with the old universe, creating a third. It's... really complicated.
Picard is brutal, it's tribal, vulgar, postal and dystopian, it's big explosions and edgy violence - it's so utterly backwards. Especially in current times, you'd assume we'd need something more hopeful, uniting and more scientifically sound, rather than taking a once smart show and devolving it into just another show full of senseless violence.
Also, how exactly does an entire consciousness "live on" from one single positron...? The showrunners don't even seem to know that positrons are literally just the antimatter counterparts of an electron. Which is a subatomic particle, nothing more, nothing less. I don't even know
where to start with that utter nonesense, and that's just one of the countless other issues that show has, for that being such an integral element of its main plot. The writers either didn't care, or didn't know. Neither of which is good.
Discovery, Picard, Lower Decks... each of these shows are made by people who don't care about Star Trek, for people who don't care about Star Trek. Both JJ and Kurtzman repeatedly went on record saying they never understood why Star Trek was considered to be so good and had so many fans.
Tarhiel: When it comes to Doctor Who, I have to agree - I think the best ones were the ones with David Tennant and Matt Smith (series 2-4, 5-7)
Yeah those were awesome. There were blunders throughout, but
very few ones. I greatly enjoyed that show, even a fair share of Capaldi's episodes, despite the writing dwindling here and there, and token characters showing up, indicative of what was to come.
...
Man, stop making me rant so much about these things.
I can only rewatch TNG and DS9 so many times, you know.