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I am a Star Trek fan. I have always been and always will be a fan. It pains me I have to lead with that prior to criticizing the thing I love, as if being constructively critical about a thing means you are either a hater or worse, a misanthropic son of a bitch. I am neither. At least, I have evidence to the contrary, but you may make your own opinion. There isn’t just one thing that irritates me about the present Trek trends. It’s a multifaceted complaint. Even in this, I recognize how complicated it all is.
For example, the Klingons used to look human. The movies changed that. I was okay with the change, and it carried me through TNG, and I liked the episode of Deep Space Nine, “Trials and Tribulations” that answered it without answering it. Discovery has changed the Klingons again, not because we needed to revitalize our adversary, but because human beings and corporations have intellectual rights and an inability to agree forced changes most people didn’t want. It required, out of legal necessity, a break with cannon. No one in the ‘Enterprise’ and ‘Discovery’ creation team could talk about Romulans. Why not? If we used the Original Series as cannon, which it should be by definition, a 100 years before Kirk there was a 100 year war with the Romulans- an enemy no one saw the face of until Kirk confronted them. “Balance of Terror.” Who owns the Romulans and why can’t we agree that cannon isn’t a bad thing? There are lots of potentially good prequel concepts available.
