Risa

I've been a bit wobbly on Strange New Worlds. It's had some rough episodes, though overall I'm liking it and it's had some stellar episodes as well. Not as consistently good as Lower Decks, though.

I enjoy this image immensely.

Boom.

I fully agree, but I also think that there's too much focus these days on official canon. Copyright might mean that only one big giant corporation is allowed to make stories "set" in a particular universe, but that shouldn't mean that fans can't decide for themselves "nope, that was lame, I reject that particular bit." And if enough fans share that opinion the big giant corporation might want to listen to them.

For your second point, you can do that without worrying about canon. In fact it's easier if you don't.

For the first one, that can be interesting for a single coherent work with a single writer or team of writers that planned out at least an outline of a story beforehand, but there are rarely questions about canon for those kinds of stories. For something worked on for over half a century by hundreds if not thousands of people many of whom have very different visions for what it should all be about, in my experience it just leads to people getting mad at each other based on which of those visions they like more, and lots of self-contradictory nonsense crammed into the story to try and make it all work. That is just my opinion though. You are free to like different things than I do.

I totally got the hate at first. I thought early Discovery and Picard were terrible. What I don't get is people who have made hating new Trek such an identity, they're unable to ever shift position despite Discovery picking up from S3, Picard blowing it out the water with S3 and all the other new shows hitting the gate running. Not being able to change your view in the face of new evidence is the least Trek thing you can do.

I'm not going to lie. I had the same issue with the klingons at first. Not over their appearance, funnily enough. I thought it was an interesting take and considering the fact that klingons in TOS just looked like dudes I waved away an alien race looking a bit different. The thing that enraged me was the language. Either the dude who played T'kuvma had no time to practice Klingon or he had a truly terrible false teeth set that made it impossible for him to speak Klingon.

I did completely discount Discovery until Season 2 started and I decided to give it another shot by starting from the top. I'm so very glad I did. I have critiques of all the shows, and I mean OG and Nu, but I still love them all the same. Me being a gay dude and finally getting proper representation in Star Trek does mean that Discovery did get into my good graces very quickly. It's just nice to see a character that's like me for a change instead of sitting through the 17 trillionth heterosexual love story.

Clowns to the left of me, Jokers to the right...

No, that was spillover when his girdle started to fail