I will admit Lower Deck is always a bit crass and that element never goes away, but the characters develop really well and it’s impressive how attached they get you to them in a total runtime shorter than TNG season 1, and the show gets surprisingly emotionally sincere as it goes on.

And I’d say seasons 3, 4, and maybe 5 have what I’d call legitimate contenders for some of the franchise’s best episodes. Honestly, if it’s really hard for you to watch season 2, just skip to Wej Duj and watch from there.

But honestly, if you can’t get past the crasser elements, I get that.

Bang, bang, Mak’zel’s silver hammer came down upon her head. Bang, bang. Mak’zel’s silver hammer made sure that she was dead.

I agree with my sister that it should have been a flashback later in the season; they didn’t need to tell us so directly in the first episode.

Then again, DS9 did the intro text thing explaining Wolf 359, so…

Really? I think the show’s so gosh darn horny in that disgusting Rick Berman way all the time that I’d take almost anything over it.

Why does the Enterprise D bridge look like the interior of a 1990s car stretched out?

And being a former Vegas resident, DS9 accurately pictures being in one of the more run-down Vegas casinos.

Also, honestly, I think modern campus architecture has embraced this “casino look” you describe, weirdly enough.

You only watched season 1 of LD didn’t you?

I think part of it too is 32nd century Trek has already done a lot of sociopathic, who’s-gonna-stop-me, “because I’m evil”-type villains, and we need someone a little more gray, or at least psychologically compelling; as seen with Gul Dukat and Kai Winn, you can still pull off interesting but pure evil characters.

His consciousness is uploaded after death into a torture simulation by a curious computer with emerging sentience for several hundred years a la I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream; when the computer finally learns its lesson and builds a new body for O’Brien’s backup consciousness, he just gets right back to work, centuries of technological progress be darned.

It would use fields or something to do different things for different people; an escalator for some, a wheelchair life for others, normal stairs for those who choose, but for Miles O’Brien’s transporter clone stuck in the 32nd century, it sets the gravity to 10x and forces him to crawl with all his might to the stairs’ control panel. This happens once a week.

But maybe they’re magic sci-fi stairs…

I kind of disliked Giamatti’s character, honestly; just a bargain bin Harry Mudd.

Otherwised enjoyed it.

https://startrekviewingguide.com/lo-fi-print-ready-listing.html

Y skinnee Picard?

True. At my tech helpdesk, I’ve seen people who keep their Macs on very old versions even if their hardware supports much newer (and non-Tahoe) versions and suffer problems because of it.

For instance, the other day, a woman’s Microsoft Office quit working because she was still on Ventura, which no longer gets security updates. This was on what I believe was a 2022 Macbook.

I think something is seriously wrong with Apple’s update system. I mean, the Windows approach is objectively wrong, but automatic update systems need to be at least a bit aggressive.

Lucky for me, I upgraded both my desktop and laptop to 2TB SSDs before they decreed that the peasants can’t have SSDs or RAM anymore.

I get the complaints of lackluster writing in SNW S3, but also, you haven’t seen truly bad media until you’ve watched either Twisters or Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, which makes Discovery season 2 seem downright straightforward and well-written by comparison.

It’s not the best consolation, but it could go much worse. Also, I feel like if I had a choice, I’d take being strapped to a chair and forced to watch SNW season 3 looped 2.5 times over the same for TNG season 1.

Unless it does something egregious, I’ll probably push myself through it no matter what for the sake of completionism.

Speaking of which, I need to do that for Disco’s last couple seasons before I start the show.

I read it through my library, which keeps a good stock of Trek comic volumes. I think I now also have a PDF of it from a Humble Bundle.

You forgot somebody, and he’s very mad:

My biggest worry is what they do with the Klingons in the 31st century; they’re probably going to talk about how war-torn and poor Qo’Nos is or have the planet have gotten blow up or something dumb like that.

I’d love to have it so that either Qo’Nos surprisingly has had its crap together and managed to avoid brutal civil wars post-burn, with the result being in defiance of all expectations, it was one of the better planets to get stuck on after the Burn.