If you didn't like Lower Decks you probably really never liked Star Trek. Strange New Worlds and Starfleet Academy also happen to be better than... a significant portion of the classics (DS9 will never be surpassed and that's okay).
Lower Decks in traditional Trek fashion had a rough season 1 but was stronger later. SNW an Academy had probably the best two season 1 performances of any Star Trek shows ever produced. There's one gripe about Academy that you can grant: The theme song sucks. Other than that, perfect.
There's some legitimately challenging writing decisions in Discovery and Picard, but if the three shows you mentioned ruin Trek for you, you never got it in the first place.
I love Lower Decks but it’s not like TOS at all. It’s more like a love letter to TOS. Strange New Worlds is VERY much like TOS.
If I had to stack rank:
(1) TOS (1) TNG (2) lower decks (3) the animated series?
But, I watch it for the science fiction. The other series were hardly the same genre.
DS9 was trying to be babylon 5 / sanctuary moon half the time. The lack of science research on voyager still works my spouse into a rage.
Hey! Dont try and mandela effect sanctuary moon into existence, you almost had me.
The 2nd worst thing about the series is seeing those clips. The first worst thing is, of course, disambiguating the machine's gender. Until the live action show this was the only popular book series I'm aware of where a reader could project and never glitch. For both the gender and the show, enabling our projection is a key conceit and device.
Strange New Worlds and Starfleet Academy are different than a significant portion of the classics. If you think they're better, than it might be you who never really liked classic star trek. Which is okay, once you phrase it as a preference rather than an objective standard that everyone has to agree with.
There's taste and there's product quality. I don't like Game of Thrones, but it's well-produced.
I actually like Discovery, but I can also point out a bunch of problems with it. Disappointing mystery boxes, questionable commitment to canon continuity, so much focus on a single character that many of the most interesting characters get no screen time. The fans often had better ideas about where the story is going than the writers did.
I also really like DS9, TNG, and Voyager, but you can easily also admit seasons 1 and 2 of each are... on the weaker side. They take time to warm up to the quality SNW and SFA nailed in their very first seasons. And bear in mind, we're working with ten episode seasons now, so even Strange New Worlds is barely past it's "season one" in classic show terms. Go find a single episode of Strange New Worlds or Starfleet Academy that's "Code of Honor"-worthy bad. You won't find one because there isn't one.
Lower Decks, Strange New Worlds, and Starfleet Academy are vastly better shows than Discovery or Picard. But more than that, LD, SNW, and SFA are some of the most classic-style Star Trek content you can get. We're talking largely episodic shows which heavily draw from TNG and TOS storylines and plot design, and often focused on discussing the very core of what Starfleet, and Star Trek in general, is about. If people are still griping about the Star Trek produced today, it's because they aren't watching it.
The weird part is these criticisms if pointed at Discovery or Picard might have held weight! But it's directed at shows which are a complete non sequitur for the claims made.
I'm not sure what you're responding to, but it's certainly not anything that I said.
I couldn't get into Lower Decks. And I love Star Trek, so maybe you don't understand the full range of Star Trek fans. I personally love NG but couldn't get into DS9 or Voyager. I disliked Discovery but I love SNW. There are all kinds of Star Trek fans.
DS9 is a good litmus test for determining what kind of Star Trek fan you are. It broke a lot of the optimism and continuum of how Star Trek had worked previously, where hyper-competent people just always seem to come out okay. It smashed reality into the faces of sci-fi fans by building an actual war-narrative into the character arc (an episode of DS9 deals with GWOT PTSD better than almost any other network TV show did) and so it's not really surprising that DS9 was a little controversial when it aired. I stopped watching Discovery after "the burn" event because it didn't make any sense, and it was obvious the writers wanted to start from scratch. Space fungus powers the ship? A character has a panic attack and any ship with a warp drive is blown up? Not a serious sci-fi show and one of the worst entries into the Star Trek catalog. I hope Paramount takes a pause and we don't get any new Star Trek for 5 years, so the writers can grow up.
DS9 raised the bar so high that it's past the Oort cloud. I've watched everything up to Enterprise and I will say that I enjoyed all of them despite their flaws. I tried watching the newer trek series: lower decks, discovery and picard. Lower decks was an instant turn-off and I fell asleep on the first episodes of the other two, twice. The free month of paramount ran out before I bothered trying to watch them again. I should give them a go one day.
Glad someone else felt the same. Discovery started well but the whole "burn" thing was... stupid. There are a million narrative devices you could use to break the ability for ships to travel via warp and they chose the least sciency of them all.
Keep up with the grade a gatekeeping, lest someone not really liking it watches some of it.
Academy deliberately set out to "be different" and fans of Star Trek are reacting accordingly. The show sucks, its set design and writing are trash, and all Paramount is doing here is counting on actual Star Trek fans watching the back-catalog on Paramount+ to juice the value of the other actual Star Trek IP (ugh Academy is bad, I'm going to re-watch DS9 for the 15th time, or maybe Voyager).
Academy is so bad that I have to wonder if there are people involved who deliberately want to destroy Star Trek so they can "re-boot" it from scratch later.
All of this is fundamentally wrong enough you can just say your blogs said it was too woke so you didn't watch it.
The recent Star Trek shows have their problems, most often whiffing the delivery of a satisfying conclusion to the season arc. (Discovery and Picard both had terrible mystery box seasons where the mystery ended up being dumb and disappointing.) Academy nailed it. The characters, the conclusion, the resolution to different subplot threads, all extremely solid.
Like, you can generally like or dislike a given show, but there are valid criticisms and then there are very invalid ones. And it's very clear you did not actually watch the series.
Academy is a show about incompetent people being drug along by the plot. It is diametrically apposed to TOS, TNG, DS9, and VOY. In just the first episode of Academy, one of the characters eats her communicator, and then the show moves on as if this is something normal that goes on. Does this sound like the usual competence porn that the prior iterations of Star Trek were known for?
It certainly does not to me. This is supposed to be, ya know, the academy that the best of the best enter into in order to commission into Starfleet. The rest of Academy is one incomprehensible plot hole after another, followed by awful (and at times disrespectful) callbacks to prior shows.
Can you link some blog posts? I'd like to read them. Not on social media these days as I gave it up for Lent a decade ago and never went back, so I'm probably missing some more comprehensive criticisms of Academy.
So your gripe is that a barely recurring character is used in a joke, and you didn't find it funny. Gotcha! Unfortunately, not every joke lands for every person.
It's important to understand that generally speaking, Academy standards are probably a lot lower than they used to be, the show, actually goes into this a couple times! Because, you know, the destruction of a large part of society and such. It is a school, and if the characters didn't need to learn something, they probably wouldn't need to be there.
You're generally going to find competency in the command staff/professors, and you generally do. Captain Ake is in at least one episode, orchestrating the entire episode behind the scenes, and in the following one, it doesn't say it explicitly, but it is most plausible that she also did as well. Episodes where the senior staff don't know what's happening, it's clear they know something is up, they just haven't determined what yet. I am not positive I can think of a spot where the officers in the show were anything but incredibly competent, and the show also avoids classic tropes like "the admiral is a jerk/evil", Starfleet is, in fact, led by an extremely competent and reasonable admiral.
I don't want to watch a science fiction show about children. That's what Academy is, a show about children. It should have been a show about young adults getting ready to be officers.
It's fine that you think this is entertaining science fiction, and are grafting perceptions of "competence" on characters in this show. I don't want to nitpic everything in your response, except for this:
>Academy standards are probably a lot lower than they used to be, the show, actually goes into this a couple times!
The explanation for this makes no sense. This is the 32nd century (allegedly). The amount of advanced technology one would need to understand to be functional in this environment is extreme.
As an aside, and maybe this is the best way to explain my aversion to this show, the ship design is awful and makes absolutely no sense. I forget which "tech the tech" explanation there was for this, but every starship in Academy is a) hideous because the warp nacelles just float out in space for some reason, and b) makes no sense canonically. Star Trek used to actually respect engineering. Academy says "nah, fuck it, it's all magic now".
TNG suggested kids in elementary school were learning calculus but honestly I'm not sure that's a reasonable thing developmentally. Just because the technology improves doesn't mean humans get smarter faster. The cadets here are college students, and generally speaking, pretty competent ones. (God, college kids were dumb everywhere I went to school.) Also technical talent and emotional development are separate topics. I'm also not sure I agree technical understanding has to continue to grow with technology.
Computing technology is much further today than it was twenty years ago, but kids these days understand less about them because the technology is abstracted away better. (People use iPads now with no idea how a file system works.) In the 32nd century stuff feels magical, a lot of people probably don't need to know how it works to use it.
Floating nacelles make plenty of sense if they're independent drive units with all necessary components in the nacelle, consider they create a warp bubble around the entire assembly, but you can obviously wirelessly control a separate structure and the ships can manipulate them with force fields and such. Think about how many times a ship in earlier shows scraped a nacelle and exploded, separation is good design if technology now allows it. And remember... this is like many hundreds of years after Starfleet had timeships that could beam a person to and from any place in space and time. If anything the technology in this series feels a bit not magical enough for the time period.
Yes, I understand that you have ways to convince yourself that Academy is a good Star Trek show. I'm old at this point, and, for me, it's bad.