If these cunts actually knew ANYTHING about what the fans want it's that we want something far more akin to the old Trek. None of this gritty grim shit that they've been pushing. We want to see mankind at our best, especially after recent years when we've seen ourselves at our worst. We want hope for the future, not despair. And that's all they're giving us.
Futuristic escapism that doesn't make you want to rinse your mouth with 00 buckshot? Quite a concept.
Now, I enjoy gritty Sci-Fi like Alien or The Expanse as much as the next guy, but Star Trek should, at its core, try to inspire and encourage us to be the best we can, to strife to do the best we can and to built something great and magnificent together.
Star Trek would be the perfect backdrop for current political hot-button-topics like climate change and diversity, if it was done right. It would be preachy, but at least it would be emphasizing why it's positive to attempt to change for the better, instead of beating us over the head about how terrible everything is if we don't. Why do I need to watch a bunch of assholes dropping f-bombs in a shipyard on Mars like they were in a ghetto in Detroit? Why does everything have to be so bleak and unappealing? Why does everyone have to be an asshole to everyone else?
Hollywood has a weird fetish for showing whatever they don't like in the most stupidly and childishly negative way and trying to beat into the audience some sort of negative reinforcement. Rather than having a positive message for us to be better, they have a negative one warning us not vote Trump or whatever.
I want Starfleet to be a place that accepts everyone, that allows everyone to grow and thrive. Why not highlight that point? It boggles the mind.
If you want to have a gritty show, just make it on the fringes of Starfleet space, where people need to be a bit more roguish to survive. How about setting it in an earlier time, before Starfleet could really force-project enough to prevent scummy people from doing scummy things. TOS is full of weird places settled by humans who just do their own thing independent of Federation rules or Starfleet meddling. That would be the perfect place to have something very akin to Firefly.
Star Trek can be gritty, but only in small doses and for good reason. The setting should never devolve to the shitfest that is STP, cause it invalidates the core aspects of the humanist message of the setting and what Starfleet and the Federation should be about. You can tell STP just did it for its own, fart-huffing sake, there is no complex message beneath it, it's navelgazing and preachy on a really shallow level.
And now we get yet another shitty movie that'll try to forcefeed us muslim tranny lesbo-dicks or whatever shitty minority-of-the-week Hollywood decides to push.
One of the biggest problems I'm seeing with the new Trek is that it's a lot less episodic. There's this insistence that everything must be part of some overarching plot, like the Romulan-Synth shit. Star Trek is always at it's best when you free yourself up to do whatever the fuck you want, and sticking to a set story for an entire season with no room to breathe is the best way to fuck up Trek.
That, in itself, isn't that much of a big deal to me. Overarching plots allow for more character growth, more intricate storylines and slow burns that pick up speed over time. Again, The Expanse did this in a great way.
Purely episodic shows have the advantage of being able to just pick up at a random episode, but many things feel a lot more static.
Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex did it best imho. The show is seperated into "standalone" episodes with a storyline contained in the episode and "complex" episodes, that drive forward the overarching plot about the Laughing Man. The "standalone" episodes never feel like filler, since they still serve the point of fleshing out characters and the setting and they never feel like they grind the plot to a halt, they just feel like something that happens in between the overarching story progressing.
Meanwhile, the "complex" episodes were their own self-contained chunk of the storyline, so they could be enjoyed on their own, but in order to really understand what was going on, you at least needed some basic knowledge of the overarching plot and what was going on there.
Star Trek would do well to adopt that system. Have half a season worth of an overarching storyline, use the other half to flesh out characters, setting and give some self-contained episodes for the audience to just tune out to every once in a while.
