Trek writing has never been consistently good. Half of TOS is unwatchably bad. TNG sucks until Riker gets more hair. DS9 sucks until Sisko gets less hair. Voyager’s all over the place (even though it’s my favorite). Enterprise is mostly bad. Only the even numbered TOS movies are good. Only the first two TNG movies are good.
I say this with a genuine love of Star Trek, but the quality of the writing has varied greatly over each individual series.
Which is one of the reasons why Discovery and Picard at least are problematic (I haven’t seen Academy).
As you say, a lot of the old stories aren’t really that good. What happens when they had a bad story, or maybe less ‘bad’ and just didn’t engage with you? New one next week.
With Discovery and Picard? Well the whole season is the story, so if it doesn’t engage with you, you are pretty much out for the season.
Personally, I never felt there was really enough narrative “meat” in their stories to warrant a season long arc, and so it felt a bit stretched for time for the perceived “a story needs to fill a binge” market.
Strange New Worlds primary win was returning to episodic, to give a story a chance to shine or fail in a digestable amount of time and move on. Was at its weakest when Season 3 kind of devolved to a weird arc.
As a Star Wars nerd, I feel this so intensely. It sucks when you love the setting, but the actual writing is a crapshoot.
You hold up Andor, Rogue One, and the Animated Clone Wars Saga next to the Sequels, the Christmas Special, or Revenge of the Sith, and it makes your heart hurt.
Agreed. Season three TNG is peak Star Trek. That said, and at the risk of being flayed by the Star Trek community at large, I think DS9 was the best series, taken as a whole.
Subjectively agreed, although ds9 is not as suitable for random watching since some characters have like real arcs and there’s a plot (which we can probably thank b5 for)
Star Trek writing just depends on making sure the main characters have exactly the right hairstyle. They tried real hard to find it in Discovery, maybe with a few more seasons we would have got there.
Trek writing has never been consistently good. Half of TOS is unwatchably bad. TNG sucks until Riker gets more hair. DS9 sucks until Sisko gets less hair. Voyager’s all over the place (even though it’s my favorite). Enterprise is mostly bad. Only the even numbered TOS movies are good. Only the first two TNG movies are good.
I say this with a genuine love of Star Trek, but the quality of the writing has varied greatly over each individual series.
Which is one of the reasons why Discovery and Picard at least are problematic (I haven’t seen Academy).
As you say, a lot of the old stories aren’t really that good. What happens when they had a bad story, or maybe less ‘bad’ and just didn’t engage with you? New one next week.
With Discovery and Picard? Well the whole season is the story, so if it doesn’t engage with you, you are pretty much out for the season.
Personally, I never felt there was really enough narrative “meat” in their stories to warrant a season long arc, and so it felt a bit stretched for time for the perceived “a story needs to fill a binge” market.
Strange New Worlds primary win was returning to episodic, to give a story a chance to shine or fail in a digestable amount of time and move on. Was at its weakest when Season 3 kind of devolved to a weird arc.
As a Star Wars nerd, I feel this so intensely. It sucks when you love the setting, but the actual writing is a crapshoot.
You hold up Andor, Rogue One, and the Animated Clone Wars Saga next to the Sequels, the Christmas Special, or Revenge of the Sith, and it makes your heart hurt.
…holiday special: don’t colonialise life-day…
Agreed. Season three TNG is peak Star Trek. That said, and at the risk of being flayed by the Star Trek community at large, I think DS9 was the best series, taken as a whole.
Subjectively agreed, although ds9 is not as suitable for random watching since some characters have like real arcs and there’s a plot (which we can probably thank b5 for)
Star Trek writing just depends on making sure the main characters have exactly the right hairstyle. They tried real hard to find it in Discovery, maybe with a few more seasons we would have got there.