Television

I think Strange New Worlds found its feet and has a good thing going. I hope Starfleet Academy will as well. I think the weaknesses of the first season have been foot-finding for the most part.

It's clear they're going for a younger demographic and I think there's a bit of "hello fellow kids" and some misguided writing, but I'm generally willing to put up with it.

I'm not a huge fan of the touchy-feely more-talk-than-action thing in Discovery / SNW / Academy… but… eh, I can deal with it. It's not all bad, it's just a lot.

But Star Trek to me has never been hard sci-fi. They've not been afraid to be political, and I respect and appreciate that, even when it's a bit ham-handed sometimes. They do sometimes have some good ideas and give things to think about, but mostly we get the standard tropes of the alien-of-the-week causes some problem that has a solution we've never seen before and will never see again. And that's annoying, but it's fine for entertainment.

I am entertained. And so I cannot complain too much.

A couple of these eps have been JUST so much about the people/social and I don't care about them THAT much, but I do care about them enough to root for them in action scenes. heh.

I think overall the series is pretty good. Very dark. But that's just the current way of things. I did like the bright Orville better, but there really are some pretty visuals in here, so...... fine. heh

....one example of how Trek is not hard sci-fi: In the most recent ep, there was a series of things surrounding some planets. It was described and depicted as a "ring" when space is three dimensional and it should obviously be a sphere. But that's hard to depict, explain, think about for most people, so they collapse everything to 2D and....... it's....... it's fine. It's really, just fine. Annoying but fine.