Credit Where It’s Due

Credit where it’s due

Even good-faith non-haters of Discovery and Picard were like “enough with the grimdark already” after a couple of seasons—and look at the Star Trek slate now:

Discovery is an LGBTQ safe space where the computer’s your friend and everyone gets free therapy;

Picard S2 was a fever-dream mashup of “Tapestry” (TNG), “Past Tense” (DS9), the One with the Whales, and “Unimatrix Zero” (VOY), if you took all the lesbian subtext in “Unimatrix Zero” and made it actual, literal text;

Lower Decks, a whole-ass sitcom which also feels like a genuine sequel series to TNG, my ultimate comfort watch;

Prodigy is arguably the darkest series they’ve got going right now, and that’s literally an animated show for kids;

Strange New Worlds, which isn’t afraid to get dark, but which is even less afraid to get silly.

And… I think we won, y’all. We said “Star Trek, please lighten the fuck up”—and it did. At this point I’m almost willing to let Michelle Yeoh’s Section 31 series have a few war crimes—you know, as a treat. 😈️