The Official Star Trek Thread

[Dereich]

Voyager is the best ST of all time and Captain Janeway is one fine mother F.

Reported for being a Janeway fanboy.

I will grant that of all the ST captains she's been the most antiheroic, which in some ways made her well suited for the 1990s.  The basic problem ST:V'ger had was despite giving the crew a well-defined goal, get back home, it never embraced it or had even the outline of a plan of how it would happen. It also had the misfortune of starting before American television was generally willing to accept episodic television with continuing story lines. However, the dreadful writing of the show led to an overreliance on time travel as a deus ex machina to get them out of scrapes and/or destroy the ship without consequence.

Kate Mulgrew did good with the character she played, but Janeway was very one-dimensional and stereotypical and easily the least interesting of those who've sat in captain's chair in Star Trek (with the possible exception of Discovery which I haven't watched as even if had gotten rave reviews, I still wouldn't have bothered paying for CBS:All Access.).  Commander Shelby in two episodes was far more compelling than Captain Janeway in seven seasons.

You say that, but just as Voyager was getting going DS9 was dramatically and permanently changing its status quo with the Dominion War. If DS9 could do a dramatic overarching plot while still maintaining an episodic formula, there's no good reason Voyager couldn't have tried harder to do the same thing.

[Dereich]

In addition, SNW portrays a rather optimistic vision of the future again while Discovery and Picard tend to be very bleak and pessimistic (DIS in particular).

DS9 was dark too compared to other Trek shows of the time but I didn't get the feeling that it was that dark all the time... more like "realistic" as opposed to the optimistic TNG and Voyager. DS9's "Dominion war arc" in the beginning of Season 6 was pretty bleak but that was only for like six episodes and then came Jadzia's and Worf's wedding episode.

It's no revelation to say that the utopia that Star Trek envisioned and built upon came out of massive darkness. TOS and TNG mentioned the Eugenics War and WWIII. SNW actually went one step further and mentioned a Second Civil War in the United States.

With Picard, it makes perfect sense how the Federation became isolationist and xenophobic. It's the Federation less than a quarter of a century after multiple Borg incursions, a war with an enemy that became an ally that became an enemy once again, and the Dominion War (and we don't even know what happened in that intervening period). It's also not just attacks on the Federation, but attacks deep into the core worlds of the Federation. Earth was attacked multiple times and Betazed was outright occupied by the Dominion. The Federation went through so much during the 2360s-2370s that it's quite extraordinary it remained as well as it did.

Picard is different in that it presents those issues as endemic to society in a way that older series (even DS9) did not. I'd compare its society to the excellent DS9 two-parter Homefront/Paradise Lost. It certainly is dark; fear of the changelings leads to a coup to depose the civilian government and enact martial law. But in the end, the coup supporters aren't willing to go all the way and virtually all involved end up agreeing that its not worth sacrificing the "paradise" of the Federation out of fear. Or the Bell Riots in the Past Tense two-parter; there's plenty of emphasis there on how humans have mistreated each other in the "past" and the struggle to grow past that. DS9 shows its humans struggle with societal flaws that earlier series made it seem like had already been conquered. But in DS9 the message is still that we as a species can and have improve past our worst instincts, even if we still have to deal with them. Picard to me doesn't try to show a future better than the present. Its just the present with fancier tech.