I liked the last episode more than any other in the season, despite it being maybe the least Star Trek one?

Previous one was ridiculous. Oh, these “kids” are traumatised by a bad experience? Let’s fix that with theatre! All together, 'cause of course everyone can heal with the same “therapy”.

I still hope this series can turn out to be good, after all TNG itself didn’t start out great. But it seems they want to bash you over the head with emotions and ideas, rather than make you feel and develop them yourself.

I think Strange New Worlds found its feet and has a good thing going. I hope Starfleet Academy will as well. I think the weaknesses of the first season have been foot-finding for the most part.

It’s clear they’re going for a younger demographic and I think there’s a bit of “hello fellow kids” and some misguided writing, but I’m generally willing to put up with it.

I’m not a huge fan of the touchy-feely more-talk-than-action thing in Discovery / SNW / Academy… but… eh, I can deal with it. It’s not all bad, it’s just a lot.

But Star Trek to me has never been hard sci-fi. They’ve not been afraid to be political, and I respect and appreciate that, even when it’s a bit ham-handed sometimes. They do sometimes have some good ideas and give things to think about, but mostly we get the standard tropes of the alien-of-the-week causes some problem that has a solution we’ve never seen before and will never see again. And that’s annoying, but it’s fine for entertainment.

I am entertained. And so I cannot complain too much.

A couple of these eps have been JUST so much about the people/social and I don’t care about them THAT much, but I do care about them enough to root for them in action scenes. heh.

I think overall the series is pretty good. Very dark. But that’s just the current way of things. I did like the bright Orville better, but there really are some pretty visuals in here, so… fine. heh

…one example of how Trek is not hard sci-fi: In the most recent ep, there was a series of things surrounding some planets. It was described and depicted as a “ring” when space is three dimensional and it should obviously be a sphere. But that’s hard to depict, explain, think about for most people, so they collapse everything to 2D and… it’s… it’s fine. It’s really, just fine. Annoying but fine.