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

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:

deleted by creator

Yeah, I’m facetiously comparing the 1979 arguments over bumpy headed Klingons to the 2017 arguments over cone headed Klingons. What’s “new” keeps on changing, but the arguments about it stay eerily familiar.

NuTrek started when they did a full visual reboot, including completely changing the look of the Klingons: TMP.

Then it got worse, when they followed that up with a grimdark shoot-em-up that felt nothing like Trek. These people aren’t even fans of the show!

The distinction is lost on me, but cheers.

I like to think that, whatever it is that earns O’Brien that distinction, it had already happened by the end of DS9. Probably some technical wizardry he came up with while hacking together Cardassian and Federation technology. Just something he did to get the job done, but that would be fully appreciated as a genius piece of work with huge applicability sometime well after his death.

Picard is super relevant, though. If we’re talking about an alternate reality where Picard S3 never happened, then yeah, I’d agree that complaints about nostalgia are a little over blown. I don’t see why that would be a discussion worth having, though. Picard did happen, and so did a whole lot of discussion about a possible Legacy show, and if you’re wondering why you hear complaints about nostalgia, that’s a big part of why.

That’s not the entirety of it, though. Outside of Picard, I’ll say that Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks absolutely trade heavily in nostalgia. I can’t agree with your view that either don’t count. Having a fresh style doesn’t change the fact that SNW is set on the classic Enterprise and is continuing to introduce more and more classic Trek characters. And Lower Decks built a whole episode around the reuse of a specific cave set from TNG, of all things. A huge amount of its humour and appeal is definitely based in nostalgia.

I will say that it looks like Starfleet Academy on a good course to do it’s own thing, Picardo notwithstanding, so I’m not saying the franchise has gone completely bankrupt or anything. I just think there’s enough nostalgia going around that it’s pretty valid to feel a little put off by it if one is so inclined.

It’s more about the trajectory of nuTrek than the whole of it. Discovery and the first two seasons of Picard did try to do new things and move the franchise in new directions, but now Discovery is cancelled in favour of SNW and Picard season 3 discarded so much the first two seasons had done in order to dive into nostalgia hard - and its success led to a lot of speculation about a “Star Trek Legacy” series that would double down on the fanservice approach even further. So it does feel like there’s a trend towards “safer” nostalgic content.

And sometimes even fairly minor things just rub me the wrong way, like the Daniels reveal in Discovery. They just feel so arbitrary, and make the universe feel so mush smaller for no purpose.

If anyone earned their retirement, it’s Miles O’Brien. Maybe he could show up for one scene, where he lets the rest of the team know that, just like Wolverine did in First Class.

Last season’s Charades also supports the genetically encoded notion. Which goes against everything we know about Vulcans, but makes for fun comedic episodes, so they’re probably going to just keep doing it. Psychosomatic is as good an explanation as any.