Star Trek: Picard, Discovery, Strange New Worlds [Media Notes 73]

I’ve watched the first season of Star Trek: Picard, and bunch of episodes from the first season of Star Trek: Discovery, and two episodes from Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. I like SNW the best of the three, but don’t know how many more episodes I’ll get to at the moment. I’m in an UP phrase in me yearly creative cycle and so have much less time to spend on binge watching.

Picard, well, you know, Patrick Stewart seems just too old to go galivanting around the universe like that. I know, the man’s less than a decade older than I am and, except for the body, I feel young enough. But still... And maybe it’s the baggage it pulls from TNG and whatever else. Things feel too intricate for whatever it is that’s actually going on.

Discovery: I don’t like the design of the Klingons and their spaceships. Too glittery and intricate. It’s like all of a sudden they really are from a different (imaginative) universe. And I wish they’d speak English like the Klingons of old, except for the occasional burst of opera.

Strange New Worlds: Like Discovery, it’s set before the Original Series. And yet somehow it feels more like a fresh start, like they decided to do a new Star Trek with new special effects but without the burden of all the Treks that have gone before. But, if “hit it!” is going to be Pike’s catch phrase, that’s pretty lame, but it doesn’t seem to be contextualized and delivered with the sort of irony that says: “We know it’s lame. That’s the point. Aren’t they all?”