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Is any New Trek good? Or is it just all "Pew pew were a prestige TV gritty action show now." stuff?
(hexbear.net)
I'm curious to creck some of the new stuff out but it all looks so not Star Trek
By New Trek I mean Discovery, Picard, Strange New World and Lower Decks
Wow that's a lot of series.
I like the optimism of Star Trek and apparently a lot of New Trek kind of abandons that? 
Lower Decks is the best Trek anything they've made since the 90s. I haven't watched Strange New Worlds but i hear it's okay. Picard was fucking terrible. Discovery had the same writers so probably also not good.
For the longest time I resisted watching Lower Decks for various reasons. Then I did the give-it-three-episodes-at-least thing. I was sold on it by the end of the first episode. This wisecracking boatrocking social butterfly who's talked up as some sort of combat badass is, in fact, a combat badass - but a traumatized one who's doing the what-you-are-in-the-dark thing as a whole new career. Smuggling free farm equipment to locals she may never see again, for no reward whatsoever, just to better the lives of those strangers? That is totally an Ensign James T. Kirk kind of move.
Mariner is the kind of character that could easily have been written very badly, but the Lower Decks writers accomplished a miracle and made her work. She's an incredibly compelling main character for a Star Trek series. Easily the best since Sisko. And Tawny Newsome is a ridiculously talented voice actor. I have to believe she's a trekkie in her own right because when Mariner makes commentary leaning into meta commentary territory, Newsome puts the perfect tone of voice into the line. Mariner feels like one of us!
And the show as a whole has the heart of Trek. It's not about massive space battles or YELLING AS DRAMA. It's about our reaction to discovering the wonders of the universe, the potential of humanity to do great things if we could just stop murdering each other, about personal ethics and principles, how sometimes right doesn't mean legal and sometimes legal doesn't mean right, all that good stuff.