sometimes star trek really was just "captain planet" for teenagers.
Hey! You keep that shit in the politics thread where it belongs!
But I will confess, I don't hate Lower Decks as much as I hate STD, JJ Trek, or Strange New Worlds..
I like lower decks, which I'm certain I've said before. Crippled as it is by the environment in which it was created, it still has something that all the other nu-trek lacks: it's made by people who actually enjoyed the older series. Even the callbacks, obnoxious as they can be, come from a place of sincerity, or at least not the abject disgust that picard or STD showed for the past. Lower decks even got something right that the other nu-trek shows keep getting wrong: Vulcans. Discovery and strange new worlds seem to operate on the assumption that vulcans are genetically logical, rather than just having spent a lifetime training to be that way (the snw episode where a bunch of the crew were turned into vulcans with magical science juice is the best example of that: they all became coldly logical an unemotional, which made no sense to anyone who actually understood vulcans). Meanwhile, in lower decks, vulcans are shown the correct way, as creatures who have spent a lifetime mastering their intense emotions, which means they can lose control if the circumstances are right.
Oh I could rant about how vulcans are portrayed, post-enterprise. That was the last show to get them right; everything since then has been the normie "I remember doctor spock from that space show!" idea of vulcans. It drives me potty just knowing those people are writing star trek now. What else are they getting wrong? Are they even getting anything right? Why are they obsessed with making everything bigger and louder?
Basically, I like it because it remembers where it came from and what the ideals of star trek were, unlike all the rest. Even if it's not very good at living up to them, it at least
tries. That seems to be the underlying theme of the entire show as well; people who aren't the effortless elite, who want to be better than they are and actually reach for it, rather than just whining about ideologicalisms and fucking white males. I like to believe it would be a lot more popular if it hadn't been saddled with all the baggage of the wider kurtzman trek dreck.
I also subscribe to the belief that Kurtzman
hates it, as much as he pretends otherwise. He's clearly the reason it's getting cancelled, despite its ratings being consistently high. To me, it's obvious he farmed off all the trouble-makers to the show, the people who actually like trek, and expected it to be a one-season flop so he could get rid of them on the back of its failure, and has spent the last five years seething that it didn't work.
