ds9 really stepped it up though. more political critique of the human condition (space lizzard nazis and space jews). but b5 did the same thing in a totally awesome way, without all the baggage associated with the previous series that trek had to deal with.
Being a Bablyon 5 fan really made me see DS9 with a much more hostile mindset than it deserves, which is why I have a rather negative opinion of it, even though I have to admit it stands rather well on its own. One thing though I personally didn't like as much, is that the main focus went from exploration to war and diplomacy in a more static setting. Not that they didn't have other elements in it, or that this is necessarily a bad development, but I really didn't quite like it in the context of Star Trek.
Also the Babylon 5 "they stole our concept and took our money"-drama that surrounded it. I really have to admit that I treat many works of fiction unfairly like that, when something in the context '"ruins" it for me.
There have been VERY little attempts at showing an alien culture, cognition or anything that would actually be alien. Hence why trek is another one of those cheap Sci-Fi shows.
Are you talking just about the original series or about TNG as well? Because, hey man, crystalline entity, borg, Q continuum, that thing that thought the Enterprise was its mother, several energy beings, that race in the center of the galaxy exploring by pulling other races towards it, the list goes on.
If you exclude the energy lifeforms and random stuff like that, and just think about aliens with bodies as we have
Oh, OK... fair enough...
But even then, I guess while most of them looked human, mostly because that cost less, they were really there to either reflect some aspects of us or to introduce a new and alien concept that was still similiar to us. Like when those one aliens abduct Picard and replace him with a lookalike to learn about hierarchy and command structure. Sure, they looked human-like enough, but they served the role of exploring something about the human condition anyway, and they were sufficiently alien in their ways to make the thing interesting.
The problem with trek aliens is that they are all just humans under make up. In fact, Roddenberry said himself that the show was a "Wagon Train to the Stars"
The show is about exploring ourselves as humans... while talking to humans dressed as "aliens."
Exactly like that. While I love the dramatic tension and especially that diplomatic insight that a setting like B5 provides for example, and I technically love a setting where huge starships fight each other with stellar explosions, I'd really love to see a humanist masterpiece like TNG again
as well. And Star Trek had been the franchise you'd expect to go exactly there, and the franchise that was basically created with that purpose in mind.