[NGTM-1R]

No, I'm not confused about what Star Trek was.

Yes, you are. Otherwise you would understand that this is really very much TOS given a budget and some decent writing, not whatever you think it actually is, and certainly not a close relative of the first two movies like you're arguing.

[MP-Ryan]

It really rankles that Beyond is getting tarred with the same brush as JJTrek when it fixed so many of the problems with it.

Other than "hey, there's a nebula, hey, we got through it in a minute, hey there's a planet" and the reverse when the baddie left it.  Rankles a bit that the Federation would build a giant deep-space facility with millions of inhabitants on the doormat of a chunk of space nobody ever bothered exploring.

So yeah, even in Beyond - which I really liked - the new Trek movies have abysmal scaling, which is all the more glaring as I've just finished re-watching all of TNG, DS9 (still Best Trek, though I prefer TNG crew), and am working my way through Voyager now, all of which do scale pretty damn well.

But let's face it, no Star Trek has been remotely as good as Babylon 5 when it comes to scale.

[AdmiralRalwood]

Voyager[...]all of which do scale pretty damn well.

I suppose if you just mean "relative scale within the span of a single episode", then maybe, but they had absolutely no consistency.

[Mongoose]

Also lol @ the idea that 'dumb trek' is something JJ invented when we had ten years of systemically, dryly dumb Voyager and Enterprise to kill the series before him.

I may have something of a soft spot for Voyager regardless of objective quality, but I stand firm in my belief that the final season of Enterprise was some of the best Trek ever produced.

[Luis Dias]

I've watched all Star Trek asides from Enterprise and I must say that I really tried. I mean, I really really tried. But after enduring bad episode after terrible episode after horrible episode from season 1 and 2 in Enterprise I finally figured that sadomasochism wasn't my thing. You really endorse season 4 that much?

[Deepstar]

Also lol @ the idea that 'dumb trek' is something JJ invented when we had ten years of systemically, dryly dumb Voyager and Enterprise to kill the series before him.

I may have something of a soft spot for Voyager regardless of objective quality, but I stand firm in my belief that the final season of Enterprise was some of the best Trek ever produced.

Yes, i like ENT's 4th season also very much, for me it is also one of the best seasons in trek history.
Because it was a prequel finally... that leads to all the other series. This was, what i expected from this series from the beginning.
 
But also i think, that Voyager was a good TNG successor. I liked it much more than Deep Space Nine.

But like any other newer Trek series, it get well only from season 3 onwards. I never liked the first two seasons of VOY, TNG, DSN and ENT. Even they still have some good episodes.
But all the series getting better and better after that. Even the peak was often a few seasons before the ending. I remember a very good 4th and 5th season of TNG and VOY, which were the best seasons for me personally.

[Luis Dias]

VOY only begins to be interesting when 7 of 9 gets on board. Because ahhh, she was an interesting concept character. Yeah. That was it.

[Bryan See]

7 of 9? Is she formerly a human named Annika Hansen?

[AdmiralRalwood]

But also i think, that Voyager was a good TNG successor. I liked it much more than Deep Space Nine.

You have just given yourself away as an alien infiltrator, because no human could possibly think Voyager was superior to Deep Space Nine.

[Deepstar]

The better Deep Space Nine played in another Universe and was named Babylon 5 

[AdmiralRalwood]

The better Deep Space Nine played in another Universe and was named Babylon 5 

You get no points for recognizing that Babylon 5 is superior when you think that Voyager was better than Deep Space Nine. Sorry, alien infiltrator, but you can't distract us that easily!

[Luis Dias]

VOY is a completely different beast to DS9. DS9 takes ST positive tropes and twists them to almost-BSG gritty like grey landscapes. VOY tries to keep TNG's positivity in both a plot and a time where it simply didn't fit anymore. I understand people being enamored with TNG's positivity and holding VOY as its flag carrier, but it doesn't quite work. DS9 tried to go into the grey mud as best as it could and it did come up with brilliant moments. Then again, we have the whole prophecy arc, which will tarnish it forever in my brain. A similar stupidity would befall BSG later on.

[Bryan See]

Like in Caprica and Blood & Chrome. Ronald D. Moore was a writer in Star Trek before BSG and Outlander.

[NGTM-1R]

Voyager is terrible television, terribly written. When it was good, when somebody who knew what they were doing and had a consistent vision of the cast was in charge, you got things like Scorpion and Living Witness, episodes that deserve to stand in the best of Trek. When it was bad, you got Threshold and Tattoo and Twisted, episodes that were insultingly terrible and tarnished all other Star Trek merely by existing. And when it was average, you were watching Season 1 of TNG in all its incoherent, annoying, arrogant glory.

[Luis Dias]

Yep. 100% with you there. And yet I couldn't help myself but watch it. I guess I *am* a masochist.

[MP-Ryan]

Thing is, with Star Trek post-TOS is that none of the shows found their feet until at least season 3.  Rewatching the first two seasons of TNG was physically painful at times, even if the TNG crew remains my favourite cast of Star Trek characters.  By season 3, they had it right and TNG has the distinction of keeping a consistent "average" in quality across episodes.  There were some bad, and some brilliant, but most were of a reasonably high average quality.

DS9's first two season were also not very good.  They tried an arc, and foreshadowed the Dominion, but they get no points for that as Babylon 5 did it at the same time and did it far better (at least, to the end of season 4 of B5).  But again, with seasons 3 and the addition of the Defiant, DS9 finally got legs.  While it was also of high average quality, it never quite managed to be as even as TNG.  It did have far more absolutely brilliant episodes than TNG, but it had a lot of pretty irrelevant ones as well.

Voyager... well, as I said I'm rewatching it now so I'll have a better idea in a few weeks, but it truly does suffer from some awful technobabbly writing that gets in the way of what could otherwise be a pretty decent show.  It also lacks the consistency of its predecessors, and its quality average looks more line a sine wave shifted slightly below the 0 on the Y-axis.  Kate Mulgrew is quite compelling as a captain, but her supporting cast is not of the quality that TNG/DS9 had.  Voyager is especially annoying as it started as a Trek with an OBVIOUS series-spanning arc, and they botched it.  Horribly.  Beyond horribly.  This is especially tragic given that they had an example of a sci-fi series with a planned arc to look to as an example of how to do it right.

Enterprise I quit watching after season 2.  The show was an atrocity.  Star Trek was always at its worst when it invokes time travel plots (note to science fiction writers:  stop writing time travel.  It's lazy, tired, overdone, and is done badly far more often than it is done well. Don't. Do. It.).  Enterprise was a whole ****ing series set in a horrible time travel plot.  I may - may - consider watching season 4 since I have heard good things about it, but in general I'm skeptical.

I dearly hope that Discovery turns out well.  Space-oriented science fiction on television hasn't been very good for years, and even then sci-fi on TV has been pretty lacking as of late.  Since the demise of Fringe (which I enjoyed, though I grant the final season was a hot mess) there hasn't been much.  Even Doctor Who lost my interest since Matt's departure.

[Luis Dias]

I've read some synopsis on season 4 enterprise. First few episodes are really facepalmworthy material-wise.

So the first two episodes are "Go back to World War 2 Earth! With a twist!" - I love when Star Trek goes original like this.
There's a filler episode afterwards.
And then there's three other episodes that are about a different branch of "augmented" people who steal a ship and go on with a mad plan of theirs.
...

And IIRC, there's a "mirror mirror" double episode somewhere around the end of the series. No, really.

Now, the execution may well compensate for this, but I gotta say, it's hilarious. Just those synopsis of the alledged "best" season of a show shows exactly why it was the last Star Trek show for quite a while. It just didn't have anything interesting to say anymore.

[Phantom Hoover]

Also lol @ the idea that 'dumb trek' is something JJ invented when we had ten years of systemically, dryly dumb Voyager and Enterprise to kill the series before him.

I may have something of a soft spot for Voyager regardless of objective quality, but I stand firm in my belief that the final season of Enterprise was some of the best Trek ever produced.

7 + 4 = 11 though so im still right

[Hades]

The Sisko is the best captain of the best Star Trek show (though that isn't a high bar)

[Bryan See]

And what about Picard?