I guess you can always remember the skin balloon from Doctor Who… unless you’ve never watched Doctor Who, in which case forget I ever said anything.

If you go to their website, there is a picture of a Tendi, but it is mildly terrifying. You have been warned.

I just wish there were no mysterious threats…

They’ve said it’s coming in early this year - there’s literally a clip of it out: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=llvMv5-ydyQ&t=150s&pp=2AGWAZACAQ%3D%3D. It definitely looks near done.

Also, season 4 seems to already be in pre-production.

I think that’s partly why I love and gravitate towards DS9, from the culture wars allegory to analysis of imperialism to the ethics of terrorism and beyond.

I think the beauty of DS9 is you have very different characters evolving together and shows people with different world views can still develop working respect and friendship with each other.

I agree in some senses with the stand-alone part, but not necessarily the animated part. I feel like it would just need to be marketed right. Executives are convinced for the most part that animation is either only for kids or for irreverent adult comedies, when it really should be viewed as a general medium.

I think Infinity Train is the best evidence of my point (look it up if you don’t know); it really transcends the typical bounds assigned to animation. Book 3 especially is truly just a great fantasy/sci-fi drama. However, it was basically killed by executives who wanted a tax write-off and couldn’t see its potential outside a “kids show”. Now some of the series is purchasable on various online storefronts, but the only legal way to watch all of Book 3 is to pirate it.

If executives and people alike would liberate themselves from the stigma of animation, I feel like you could pull off high-quality, TNG-length seasons that allow less rushed charater development for a reasonable budget compared to an expensive live action streaming show. In some ways, Prodigy was an example of this - I felt like I got more time with the characters than almost any other modern Trek (granted SNW is still going on).

I’ve never met a person where I mentioned Star Trek and they went, “Ew, Discovery. I’m never watching any Star Trek ever again”; I think Discovery had its flaws (and strengths), but it made little impact on franchise popularity.

Usually (which you touch on), it’s more like they’re just bamboozled by the cannon. Like, I was watching DS9 once, and my roommate asked if it was the original, which then brought a long and complicated explanation from me. I think you’re right that it’d be very nice to have a Star Trek show that one could show to people where when old lore is brought in, it’s delivered in such a way that people can pick it up as they go.

Un-cancel Lower Decks. 😉

Honestly, though, I feel like most media groups in general forget why the streaming model worked in the first place. They want Office-level hits, but forget that The Office wasn’t immediately successful. Not immediately killing it just because of that gave it time to find a fandom.

Most shows should automatically get 2-3 seasons, and they often aren’t getting that.

As for the whole “none of them knew what Star Trek was” anecdote - I find that a bit exaggerated. I’m a college student, and I wore a Boimler costume for Halloween- most could identify that I was something Star Trek. Around other people my age, they can at least think of Spock or Patrick Stewart.

How I got into Trek as a kid was my mom would be watching it, and she’d let us join even though we were supposed to be doing homework. TNG was the one I saw the most during that.

P.S: As I’ve floated around this forum several times, I think an animated anthology series of strange new crews would be awesome.

I really wish we’d gotten more T’Lyn time. She needed at least one more episode focused on her.

Amateurs. (I think I’ve watched almost every episode 3 times at least. The main exceptions are a few random season 1 episodes and “A Mathematically Perfect Redemption”.)

But what about those kids in TOS who all joined a cult and murdered their parents for fun or something?

Also, I feel like an awesome Star Trek series would be a (preferably animated) semi-anthology where you have a few crews a season that then meet up in a finale subplot, sort of like taking LD:”Wej Duj” and focusing on each individual crew and culture more. My ideas are:

• “Cetacean Ops”, which would take place on the USS George and Gracie (or something), a starship (either prototype or refit) built for and staffed by aquatic/cetacean life forms, except a few engineers. Besides exploring what cetacean life style is like in the Federation and Starfleet, as well as how they avoid isolation between aquatic and non-aquatic crew.
• One that’s literally just the Archimedes from the Lower Decks Season 2 finale. I really liked that crew for some reason and want more.
• Several non-Federation species vessels, like a Ferengi starship or a post-Dominion Cardassian vessel.

I just realized. They say they’re broadcasting to the entire quadrant - but which quadrant?

Chances are they’ll do something normal and boring like the Alpha Quadrant and create a bunch of canon confusion, but it would be kind of awesome if took place in the Gamma Quadrant and looked at life in the Dominion (or post-Dominion planets) after the war.

I had no idea what Posadism was until you mentioned it. Looking at it, I think elements of it are coincidentally in there, but I don’t think that’s totally what it’s trying to convey.

For one, Boseman, Montana definitely didn’t look that socialist, and yet Cochrane developed a warp drive; it was the new connections and widened view of the galaxy that facilitated the development of socialism. Sure, the Vulcans helped, but it was humans who had to change.

Also, I feel like “aliens helping in revolution” is sort of antithetical to the concept of the Prime Directive.

Overall, I think Star Trek is less about through ufologic socialism and more about peoples figuring out socialism for themselves; space and aliens are mostly just a plot device to explore.

I think it depends. Overall, I think most of Star Trek isn’t solarpunk, but the version of earth depicted in it very much is.

To be fair, the mirror universe in general, even in the DS9 era, is kind of Star Wars-y.

In general, though, it sometimes gets annoying when the franchises swap aesthetics, even back to V when they did bargain bin Mos Eisley (the bar in III was hilariously campy, though). Recently, I watched the first episode of a certain Star Wars series on a friend’s recommendation (I wouldn’t have otherwise), and at one point, I was like, “What the heck! This is supposed to be a rough pirate ship, but there’s so little weathering on the set that this could be a Federation starship!”

I agree with your positions about short seasons and brand new big bads.

However, I don’t think TNG, and classic Trek at large, have a future totally devoid of “the pains and pitfalls of present-day life”. For instance, Captain Maxwell blows up a bunch of Cardassian outposts, and there was that whole incident with the Pegasus and the cloaking device. These are clear instances showing in TNG’s world, we haven’t completely grown out of the darker parts of our nature.

I think the ideal of Star Trek is there is a future where we have overcome many of our problems, and when new (or old, sometimes) arise, we can work together to overcome them and improve ourselves.

In some ways, I think that Lower Decks embodies this extremely well. Because it’s supposed to be a comedy, it liberates the show from a lot of modern sci-fi conventions; this allows a largely utopian environment for our Federation characters where they’re free to help each other evolve far beyond the borderline insane sitcom archetypes they started the show as.

I think you give valid examples and make your point well.

However, another weird thought is perhaps we’re always slowly dying to some extent. For instance, you at age 7 is dead; today, yourself at age 7 cannot speak or act or think. For instance, in a situation where your young self may have tried to buy a toy, you have different wants and make different decisions - you cannot perfectly replicate what that past self would have wanted.

This might be true even of myself from five seconds ago - I hadn’t thought of a certain wording of this concept yet, and so might have worded it differently under different circumstances - that “me” is gone and can’t do anything. This could be true even a millisecond ago, or a duration approaching either an instant or perhaps one cycle based on whatever the “clock rate” (if there is such a thing) or the human brain is.

However, to function, we need a convenient abstraction for what life and death are. I think my definition of life would be when one particular sum of experiences permanently terminates its (mostly) granular evolution.

Thomas and Will Riker both evolved from the same sum of experiences of the original William T Riker; since those sums of experience are still evolving, he is, within our convenient definition, alive.

Our family actually has a bunch that an aunt sent once.

Was about to cite TNG Tech Manual as well - although that also said that holodeck characters’ bodies were replicated meat puppets, which I think they didn’t stick with.

That might me it - when I search older media, say The Andy Griffith show, sure enough there are a crap ton of plates.

It might be a sort of Venn diagram thing - Trek/Wars plates came at the dusk of the commemorative plate era, while the fans were more likely than others to buy collectibles like plates, making them seem unique from other fandoms.