The Orville was never funny, and it got much better when it stopped trying to be. Star Trek has a pretty good track record with humour. Especially where Newsome is concerned.

Huh, I thought I’d heard Netflix cancelled it, but according to everything I see on Google they just haven’t announced anything one way or the other. It’s been long enough that I wouldn’t hold my breath, though.

Sure, I’d understand your sentiment more when all those shows were being announced, rather than after they’ve all been canned. Right now we’re looking at ten episodes plus the Section 31 special in the coming year, which doesn’t seem like over doing it to me. But I was raised on seasons of twenty-plus episodes, so maybe I’m spoiled.

They’ve cancelled Discovery, Prodigy, Picard, Lower Decks, and you’re worried they’re going to over-do it? If they do it much less, there wont be any Trek left!

Yup. We also laughed at Shatner’s get a life sketch, and dozens of gags from Futurama and Family Guy.

The ways humans engage with their personal fascinations are often inherently ridiculous, and everybody ought to be able to laugh at that.

Hot take: it’s a great movie, but not a great Star Trek movie. Too militaristic, gives you the impression that Starfleet is at odds with scientists instead of made up of scientists.

Obviously, though, to each their own.

I like helping people, but not with what I do for my day job. Ask me to shovel your driveway or help you move or proofread your emails or anything but more of what I’ve already spent all day doing.

Yeah, definitely not. Picard and Discovery were very serialised, as were the later seasons of DS9, but outside of those you can pretty much dip your toe in to almost any episode and not worry about getting sucked into a whole arc. It’s probably best to keep a low-commitment mindset and skip around a bit until something really works for you.

Since you’ve already watched the relevant parts of Discovery, I’d recommend SNW. It spins off directly from Disco season 2, but it’s more episodic and has a wider tonal range. Some episodes are dark and serious, some are plain goofy. Overall you’ll find it much more light hearted and adventurous than Disco.

Otherwise, I’m a big supporter of starting at the beginning. Give a few episodes of TOS a try. Yes, it’s a product of it’s time, but it still holds up as great TV. It’s also one of the few Trek shows that really hits the ground running quality wise - the '90s series tend to take a few seasons to rev up.

Maybe not literally, but the season 3 episode where Discovery arrived in the future went hard on the western vibes. I think they even included swinging saloon doors at one point.

I grew up with this variation on my C64. Good times. https://gaming.trekcore.com/startrekc64-1/

I’ve also come across this mashup with 25th Anniversary, which looks like great fun: https://emabolo.itch.io/super-star-trek-25th

I’m talking about situations where my meaning would become clear if I weren’t interrupted before I finished what I was saying.

It’s fine, though. I’m learning to front-load my main points. Instead of trying to say “Hey, I know we said we’d clean the basement this weekend, but I think it’s more important that I spend that time fixing the car,” and getting interrupted with thoughts about the basement before I’m able to mention the car, I try to say “I’d like to work on the car this weekend. I think the basement can wait.” Takes practice, though.

My partner does this all the time. Unfortunately, they’re often completely wrong about what I was trying to say. Suddenly we’re having two completely different conversations simultaneously.

Now see, if they’d had Jokester Data drop that pun right before the credits rolled, I’d have forgiven the whole thing.

I thought the crossover element of Generations really brought it down. The original cast had a far better farewell in Star Trek VI, and I don’t think the writers of Generations had enough to say about Kirk’s character to justify the tortured story logic that brought him in.

Give me a Kirkless cut and I’ll be so much happier. All the pure TNG elements work fine for me, McDowell is great, and the D looks beautiful with cinematic lighting.

I was raised a Trekkie, can’t rightly say what my first contact was. My earliest memory of it was me expressing a preference for “the one with Spock” over TNG, the only other option at the time.

Canon is a little tweeting bird chirping in a meadow. Canon is a pretty flower… which smells bad.

That footnote points to an uncredited trekplace article from 2004 that itself has no citations. There was never an “original vision" that Klingons have bumpy heads, that was an idea entirely original to TMP.

Anyway, how do we feel about the Star Trek III redesign? In TMP it was one hairless bump that was supposed to represent a spinal column, running all the way from the back over the cranium. TSFS and onward, suddenly it was a flatter, wider set of ridges that was localized only to the forehead, with a full head of hair behind it. For some reason I’m always seeing people act like those are the same design, but to me the differences are glaringly obvious.

TV and movie productions are collaborative efforts undertaken by a huge number of creative people, and I don’t think any of them make their decisions for no reason. The “original creator” of the Klingons was Gene L. Coon, who had nothing to do with their portrayal in TMP.

Who wanted a visual reboot of the Klingons?

Gene Roddenberry, I guess. IMO the guy really fell off when he turned Trek into a saturday morning cartoon show. But yeah, sweaty orc is right, just look at these monstrosities: