Thanks! I don’t know if I’ll get around to watching it anytime soon, but I always like to see different perspectives… and no one in my family watches this stuff but me.
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Voyager was ROUGH and we only watched recommended episodes beginning with 7of9’s appearance because of her prominence in Picard. When we ventured outside approved episodes, we truly paid a price 
Right after I yelled at the screen yet again, 7 said the same thing to Janeway: “You can get to earth faster and safer if you stop interfering with every culture you come across.” (close enough quote)
Seriously, though, Voyager had great moments and the holographic Doctor was so very good! At one point he has to work with another hologram played by Andy Dick and it was hilarious 
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Just watched the new episode of Lower Decks and it was very funny as usual. This one has Klingon and Vulcan “lower-deckers” also. The previous episode had Jeffrey Combs (various aliens in various series) voice an evil supercomputer that’s under arrest😅
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Finally some love for Lower Decks! It’s plenty amusing on its own and has a ton of nerdy references for the long time Trek fan to appreciate.
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I’ve been a Trek fan for a long time. I grew up on TOS, and fully enjoyed the STtNG, DS9, and Voyager Berman era … though I thought Voyager got a little weird towards the end and Enterprise never quite seemed to hit the right note. I had some hopes for Discovery/Picard, but sadly they have very much fallen prey to what seems to be a very prevailing trend in modern media. Many modern continuations of storied intellectual properties seem to have very little interest in respecting the lineage from which they sprang and instead are hyperfocused on making huge changes that reflect the opinions and preferences of the modern directors and writers. The end result is that the media created from these properties do not really seem like they have much … if anything … to do with the IP they came from. Instead they feel like “Generic Gritty TV Show” that tosses in a reference here and there but really you could replace those references with “Generic Character 01-2QXB” and it wouldn’t matter.
So Discovery and Picard have the Star Trek name … but they really don’t seem very Star Trek at all. Gone are the themes of hope, aspiration, and instead we get the standard grim, gritty, hopeless, violent, ugly, icky dark stuff that you can get in a million other TV shows these days. I’d watch reruns of TOS, TNG, and DS9 a hundred times but you couldn’t pay me enough money to watch Discovery or Picard again … and I have no interest in their next seasons. I can get GrimDark anywhere else but I don’t want it in my Star Trek.
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I’m not well versed in every permutation of Trek, but I’m certainly a fan. I was introduced by way of TOS reruns in the early 80’s, then kept up with TNG. Watching that every week was appointment television. To this day I think the All Good Things episode is one of the best things I’ve ever seen.
I may need to show myself to the door after this, but I could never get into DS9; it struck me as “soap opera in space,” lots of personal drama and whatnot. Maybe I just tuned in at inopportune moments. Conversely, I did get into Voyager for awhile. Didn’t follow it religiously, but I mostly enjoyed what I saw. I’ve never seen Enterprise, Discovery or Picard, but I hear mostly good things about Below Decks.
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My parents have always been big Trek fans. As soon as we were old enough to stay up past 8pm, my parents got us started with TNG on Netflix – back when it came on disc in the mail. Every Friday night, we’d set ourselves up in the living room with our crackers and popcorn and pop in a DVD with four episodes on it, and then come Monday we’d scramble to get it in the mail so we could be sure to get the next disc delivered by the weekend. 
We spent years working this way through everything from Next Gen all the way to Enterprise. And then we did it all over again when we were able to stream them. (My mom still watches DS9 on a loop lol.)
The only one of the old series that I haven’t watched all the way through is TOS. I’ve seen episodes here and there but out of order, because it used to play Sunday afternoons on a random station and we’d watch it over lunch after getting home from church. The new shows I’ve seen some of…Discovery I just couldn’t get into, to me it was too flashy and action-centered. Picard is sort too, but I mainly picked it up because I love the TNG characters so much.
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The random well-known pop-in appearances in Voyager were WILD, I will give it that. Between Scott Thompson from Kids in the Hall and Jason Alexander? So hilarious and strange.
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I am born-and-raised Trekkie – my parents went to some of the earliest cons on the West Coast, and my father helped found the oldest continually existing Trek fan organization. It’s in my DNA!
My favorite of the series is TOS, and I’m currently doing a complete watchthrough of every series in chronological order – currently working through TNG. SUPER stoked about Strange New Worlds.
Favorite characters are Dr. McCoy, Spock, Pike (new version), Data, the Doctor (VOY), Rios, Bashir, Jett Reno, and Saru.
Fave movies are Wrath of Khan, Voyage Home, and First Contact. I like the Kelvin Universe just fine; Beyond is the best of those.
The Enterprise is the most beautiful spaceship ever devised, the various musical themes are pretty incredible, and I would definitely be a blueshirt, somewhere in the historical sciences division.
And hottest take of all…ALL Trek has something to recommend it and I find something to love in ALL Trek. I will never disown any of it. Live Long and Prosper!
(Did I miss any basic opinion questions? )
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I grew up in the Interregnum, when Star Trek reruns were a staple of independent TV stations. TNG came along while I was in high school.
TOS was my first love, followed by TNG. I loved DS9’s more complex world. Voyager started heading into lazier writing, and Enterprise even more so (except for most of the last season, when they brought in a much better showrunner and then cut him off just as it was getting decent). None were perfect. (I should know, my name’s among the credits of The Nitpicker’s Guide for Next-Generation Trekkers.)
Discovery… is MST3K bait, particularly for Trekkies. It’s Star Trek by people who don’t understand Star Trek. People who think that decades of established canon is an inconvenience. Picard is better, but still missing the spark. Discovery… we can’t watch that without involuntarily riffing it. The writing is just too dumb for modern streaming TV.
Lower Decks, on the other hand, is among the best Star Trek ever, even as it parodies itself. It manages to lovingly make fun of the franchise while still telling great TNG-era stories. (This seems to be a great formula for good Star Trek, since prior to Lower Decks, The Orville was easily the best Star Trek of the 2010s, and it wasn’t even actually Star Trek.) I didn’t think I’d like Lower Decks. I’m glad I stuck with it; it’s still a bit silly but it’s silly out of love, and it’s more than that too.
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I did NOT expect to love Orville as much as I did. It’s pretty much if my friends and I ran a starship, and I love it. That show also has some of the best space battles I’ve ever seen on TV.
Discovery I try to take or leave on its own merits, but it gave us Saru (one of my fave Trek characters ever) and Anson Mount’s Pike / Ethan Peck’s Spock. And given how psyched I am for Strange New Worlds, Discovery is allowed to exist for that reason. 
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Oh, there’s good things about Discovery. But the more of a Trekkie you are… the more the “to heck with the canon, who cares about that stuff” attitude creates nerd rage.
Case in point: last season’s plot line where all the dilithium in the galaxy is damaged, ending the use of warp drive. Okay… but TNG nerds like me are left thinking, what about the Romulans? Their warp drives don’t use antimatter and dilithium, they use artificial singularities. So shouldn’t they be zipping around at will and taking over? Because dilithium is just a means of focusing power, not actually part of the warp engine itself.
It’s writing that’s not just lazy, but disrespectful of the material and the audience. If they could get past that, Discovery could be so much better…
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I think that Discovery is mostly interested in telling Michael Burnham’s story to the detriment of anything else, including continuity and worldbuilding. It’s one of Disco’s biggest missteps because I cannot STAND that character. (No shade thrown on the actress, who is amazing, but the character GRATES.)
As with most Trek, when it hits, it hits…and when it misses, hoo boy, it misses!
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DS9 > TNG > TOS > ENT > Picard > VOY > DIS
Picard started off great, but the conclusion really blew it. Turning Picard into an android was completely unnecessary, felt like cheating, and robbed the series of the chance to have him confront his own mortality over the course of the following seasons. His disease should’ve progressed gradually like his doctor predicted, not so suddenly.
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I caught the first two seasons of Discovery. Have they stopped repeating the plot gimmick of like everybody being somebody else in disguise? Talk about lazy writing. You get to do that exactly once in your tedious soap opera, but they flogged it several times like it was the only junior writers summer camp trick they remembered.
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Lower Decks’ second season was just as strong, if not more, than the first. I wish they were making the RITOS shirt in my size.
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I still regret that Bryan Fuller bailed on Discovery before the show got off the ground. I love most of his TV work, especially Pushing Daisies, and would have LOVED a Fuller-verse Trek.
That said, I, too, absolutely HATE Michael Burnham. She’s reckless and disobedient, and shouldn’t be in command of a pet turtle.
But I did love Anson Mount’s Pike and am drooling over Strange New Worlds, too, and hope they don’t mess it up.
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If I turn on TNG and Riker doesn’t have a beard, I turn it right off again.
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I grew up watching TOS in syndication. I had a full set of the original action figures as a kid (Spock had one foot nearly chewed off by my dog), with a bridge diorama including the spinning transporter. I was a huge Star Trek fan, and was in the Air Force when TNG came out. Luckily I was not the only fan in my dorm, so the TV in the Day Room played every new episode weekly, and no one dared change the channel. I watched the odd episode of DS9, including a few story arcs, but never fully embraced it when it was on air. I was one of the outliers who mostly enjoyed Voyager. There were some great characters on the show, but I do think that it never really found itself as a show, and suffered from some weak writing. My wife is a big fan of Enterprise, so I have watched a lot of it with her, and it has it’s high points, but is one of my least favorites.
As far as the new series are concerned, The Orville has been my favorite even though it is not really Star Trek. I enjoyed Picard, and don’t feel at all that it portrayed Picard badly, or is somehow not worthy of being called Star Trek. Star Trek has struck a variety of tones over the decades, and represents much more to me than the original vision of Gene Roddenberry, as much as I respect him. I have enjoyed Discovery far less, and every time I think they are starting to right the ship, they do something stupid again. By far the best thing to come of Discovery has been Captain Pike and crew. I really hope Strange New Worlds does him justice, and am quite looking forward to it.
I recently started watching Lower Decks, and it seems great. I have also been watching the remastered TOS on Paramount+. Some of the early episodes I had only seen once or twice, and it was great to see them again. The updated special effects and formatting also make it a bit of a treat for an old TOS fan. I plan to stream DS9 from start to finish soon as well, as I feel like I may have missed out on quite a bit there.
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