Star Trek isn’t Star Trek Anymore

The new show Star Trek: Starfleet Academy just aired its premier episode on YouTube for free and as of 2 days after its premiere, it’s at 114,000 views. By way of comparison, YouTube movie and television critic, The Critical Drinker, garnered 151,000 views in half that much time with a clip of an episode titled The Utter Disaster of Starfleet Academy. I do wonder how many of those 114,000 views were people watching the Star Trek premier just so they could tear it apart online.

Star Trek isn’t Star Trek anymore.

As someone who grew up on Star Trek: The Next Generation, this makes me sad. It was avoidable. Maybe someone with a good head on their shoulders could take it over and make something good, something that actually looks and feels like Star Trek. If you want a good example of what I’m talking about, watch the first two seasons of Picard, and then compare them to season three. Season 3 of Picard, especially the last couple of episodes, shows that the creators can learn their lesson. Even so, there’s so much bad will from the fans at this point that even a solid new entry to the franchise might be met with a collective yawn. Also, the Picard series relied heavily on nostalgia, especially the third season. They could not have achieved that same effect without pulling in the entire original cast of TNG. No one was there for new faces.

There is, however, some good news. There are some pretty decent novels that were written for the Star Trek universe. I want to shout out Star Trek: Destiny by David Mack as a must for Star Trek: The Next Generation fans. This is a three book series that tells the beginning and the end of the Borg. Unlike the recent show Picard, it actually does them justice. David Mack has written other Star Trek novels and, as I recall, they were good.

For more good stories, just Google “best Star Trek novels.” There were quite a few forgettable entries, but also a few gems.