Lately, I’ve felt that I need to raise my nerd cred just a little bit and so have been skimming through the the Star Trek series…es. This is a little difficult because it turns out that I don’t really like Star Trek. Some of the episodes are good, but most are not. They rely on technobabble way-way-way too much and the acting in all of them is highly uneven. But anyway, Star Trek in a nutshell:
Original Series: Bad acting, bad writing. The Original Series is a line of mostly shitty moralistic tales of some kind and the even the ones that don’t have morals still make me feel like I’m supposed to be learning something.
The Next Generation: Fairly decent acting, bad writing. This series suffers from a lot of ridiculous situations solved by ridiculous solutions and often relying on technobabble as a cheap Deus Ex Machina. “Ah, shit! We can’t save the Calimondarians from the Endoplasmic AntiDecay Disease? Well, good thing we can cross polarize the anti-phrapiton beam in the patter matrix of the transponders so that we can beam the endoplasmic virus right out of them!”
Voyager: Uneven acting, good writing… with some problems. Suffers from most of the same problems as TNG except that the acting is a little worse. I like the characters more. I’m sometimes confused why they don’t use the Doctor to solve all their problems...
Some notes:
Why the hell do the senior officers of the ships always get sent down on away missions? Wouldn’t it make more sense to send down lower ranked crew members?
The transponders never work when they’re really needed.
For a state of the art battleship, Voyager has a bad tendency of getting crippled by less advanced ships all the time. It’s like watching a Panzer IV shoot the treads off of a XM1 Abrams episode after episode.
All of the shows have the “what does it mean to be human” identity character. OS: Spock. TNG: Data. Voyager: The Doctor and Seven-of-Nine.
That Star Trek is as popular as it is, isn’t really surprising, but for me the good aspects of the shows are overwhelmed by the bad aspects, which is too bad because I really want to like them.