Warning: spoilers up to Discovery S05E07 within.
Cards on the table: I’ll watch anything if it has Star Trek in the title. Hell, I’ll happily watch Enterprise, which infamously ditched the franchise branding for its first two seasons in an ill-advised attempt to modernise. It was a bit pants – an ill-fitting prequel series where the ship seemed way more advanced than Kirk’s and had a captain unfit to lick his boots, in the shape of Quantum Leap’s nice boy Scott Bakula. At the time, we all thought Star Trek could scarcely get any worse. Oh boy.
Star Trek, much like its hyperactive younger sibling Star Wars, has succumbed to a fate that befalls many legacy IPs in that those in charge of it are so terrified of alienating its existing audience that they rarely, if ever, invent new stuff. And so every new addition to the canon becomes an exercise in navel-gazing: where Star Trek used to be about exploring strange new worlds, it is now mostly about Star Trek. Star Wars is less about the star war than it is about the same twelve lads kicking sand on Tatooine. New Ghostbusters is an expensive eulogy for Old Ghostbusters. Even Doctor Who has favourite versions of himself. The list goes on.
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