3/15/2026 at 8:57:11 PM
While I'm definitely going to give this a chance, I'm not going to get my hopes up. Firefly was a perfect storm--it was the combination of Wheadon, Tim Minear, and the entire cast. Personally, I think the writing is what made Firefly work, and without Wheadon or Minear, I don't know if it will rise to the same level.Moreover, I felt Serenity was a good conclusion to the original mythology (River, Alliance, etc.). If they introduce a new mythology arc, it might not quite have the same resonance. And if they just do a bunch of monster-of-the-week episodes, it won't be enough.
But I don't want to criticize what I haven't seen. They know way better than I do, and even if the only result of this is that the original actors have a lot of fun, then I'm all for it. They deserve to take a shot.
by GMoromisato
3/15/2026 at 11:27:19 PM
The benefit of it being animated is that if it sucks we can just ignore it, if it’s good we can embrace it.If they went the full live-action route there’s a higher chance it tarnishes the legacy of the original.
I didn’t like Star Trek: Lower Decks but it didn’t make me feel like Trek has been ruined like Strange New Worlds and Starfleet Academy did.
by throwatdem12311
3/16/2026 at 5:45:16 PM
Came for the Firefly. Stayed for the Trek flame wars. Anyone else feeling all warm and cozy like its the 90s again?by MisterTea
3/15/2026 at 11:36:45 PM
If you didn't like Lower Decks you probably really never liked Star Trek. Strange New Worlds and Starfleet Academy also happen to be better than... a significant portion of the classics (DS9 will never be surpassed and that's okay).Lower Decks in traditional Trek fashion had a rough season 1 but was stronger later. SNW an Academy had probably the best two season 1 performances of any Star Trek shows ever produced. There's one gripe about Academy that you can grant: The theme song sucks. Other than that, perfect.
There's some legitimately challenging writing decisions in Discovery and Picard, but if the three shows you mentioned ruin Trek for you, you never got it in the first place.
by ocdtrekkie
3/15/2026 at 11:41:15 PM
I love Lower Decks but it’s not like TOS at all. It’s more like a love letter to TOS. Strange New Worlds is VERY much like TOS.by BoxOfSnoo
3/16/2026 at 3:19:49 AM
If I had to stack rank:(1) TOS (1) TNG (2) lower decks (3) the animated series?
But, I watch it for the science fiction. The other series were hardly the same genre.
DS9 was trying to be babylon 5 / sanctuary moon half the time. The lack of science research on voyager still works my spouse into a rage.
by hedora
3/16/2026 at 7:00:33 AM
Hey! Dont try and mandela effect sanctuary moon into existence, you almost had me.by worthless-trash
3/16/2026 at 1:02:07 PM
The 2nd worst thing about the series is seeing those clips. The first worst thing is, of course, disambiguating the machine's gender. Until the live action show this was the only popular book series I'm aware of where a reader could project and never glitch. For both the gender and the show, enabling our projection is a key conceit and device.by Terretta
3/16/2026 at 4:11:28 AM
Strange New Worlds and Starfleet Academy are different than a significant portion of the classics. If you think they're better, than it might be you who never really liked classic star trek. Which is okay, once you phrase it as a preference rather than an objective standard that everyone has to agree with.by cwillu
3/16/2026 at 6:10:04 AM
There's taste and there's product quality. I don't like Game of Thrones, but it's well-produced.I actually like Discovery, but I can also point out a bunch of problems with it. Disappointing mystery boxes, questionable commitment to canon continuity, so much focus on a single character that many of the most interesting characters get no screen time. The fans often had better ideas about where the story is going than the writers did.
I also really like DS9, TNG, and Voyager, but you can easily also admit seasons 1 and 2 of each are... on the weaker side. They take time to warm up to the quality SNW and SFA nailed in their very first seasons. And bear in mind, we're working with ten episode seasons now, so even Strange New Worlds is barely past it's "season one" in classic show terms. Go find a single episode of Strange New Worlds or Starfleet Academy that's "Code of Honor"-worthy bad. You won't find one because there isn't one.
Lower Decks, Strange New Worlds, and Starfleet Academy are vastly better shows than Discovery or Picard. But more than that, LD, SNW, and SFA are some of the most classic-style Star Trek content you can get. We're talking largely episodic shows which heavily draw from TNG and TOS storylines and plot design, and often focused on discussing the very core of what Starfleet, and Star Trek in general, is about. If people are still griping about the Star Trek produced today, it's because they aren't watching it.
The weird part is these criticisms if pointed at Discovery or Picard might have held weight! But it's directed at shows which are a complete non sequitur for the claims made.
by ocdtrekkie
3/16/2026 at 6:24:53 AM
I'm not sure what you're responding to, but it's certainly not anything that I said.by cwillu
3/16/2026 at 1:09:27 AM
I couldn't get into Lower Decks. And I love Star Trek, so maybe you don't understand the full range of Star Trek fans. I personally love NG but couldn't get into DS9 or Voyager. I disliked Discovery but I love SNW. There are all kinds of Star Trek fans.by GMoromisato
3/16/2026 at 5:14:41 AM
DS9 is a good litmus test for determining what kind of Star Trek fan you are. It broke a lot of the optimism and continuum of how Star Trek had worked previously, where hyper-competent people just always seem to come out okay. It smashed reality into the faces of sci-fi fans by building an actual war-narrative into the character arc (an episode of DS9 deals with GWOT PTSD better than almost any other network TV show did) and so it's not really surprising that DS9 was a little controversial when it aired. I stopped watching Discovery after "the burn" event because it didn't make any sense, and it was obvious the writers wanted to start from scratch. Space fungus powers the ship? A character has a panic attack and any ship with a warp drive is blown up? Not a serious sci-fi show and one of the worst entries into the Star Trek catalog. I hope Paramount takes a pause and we don't get any new Star Trek for 5 years, so the writers can grow up.by remarkEon
3/16/2026 at 5:40:12 PM
DS9 raised the bar so high that it's past the Oort cloud. I've watched everything up to Enterprise and I will say that I enjoyed all of them despite their flaws. I tried watching the newer trek series: lower decks, discovery and picard. Lower decks was an instant turn-off and I fell asleep on the first episodes of the other two, twice. The free month of paramount ran out before I bothered trying to watch them again. I should give them a go one day.by MisterTea
3/16/2026 at 10:54:21 AM
Keep up with the grade a gatekeeping, lest someone not really liking it watches some of it.by wink
3/16/2026 at 5:04:10 AM
Academy deliberately set out to "be different" and fans of Star Trek are reacting accordingly. The show sucks, its set design and writing are trash, and all Paramount is doing here is counting on actual Star Trek fans watching the back-catalog on Paramount+ to juice the value of the other actual Star Trek IP (ugh Academy is bad, I'm going to re-watch DS9 for the 15th time, or maybe Voyager).Academy is so bad that I have to wonder if there are people involved who deliberately want to destroy Star Trek so they can "re-boot" it from scratch later.
by remarkEon
3/16/2026 at 5:14:16 AM
All of this is fundamentally wrong enough you can just say your blogs said it was too woke so you didn't watch it.The recent Star Trek shows have their problems, most often whiffing the delivery of a satisfying conclusion to the season arc. (Discovery and Picard both had terrible mystery box seasons where the mystery ended up being dumb and disappointing.) Academy nailed it. The characters, the conclusion, the resolution to different subplot threads, all extremely solid.
Like, you can generally like or dislike a given show, but there are valid criticisms and then there are very invalid ones. And it's very clear you did not actually watch the series.
by ocdtrekkie
3/16/2026 at 5:35:15 AM
Academy is a show about incompetent people being drug along by the plot. It is diametrically apposed to TOS, TNG, DS9, and VOY. In just the first episode of Academy, one of the characters eats her communicator, and then the show moves on as if this is something normal that goes on. Does this sound like the usual competence porn that the prior iterations of Star Trek were known for?It certainly does not to me. This is supposed to be, ya know, the academy that the best of the best enter into in order to commission into Starfleet. The rest of Academy is one incomprehensible plot hole after another, followed by awful (and at times disrespectful) callbacks to prior shows.
Can you link some blog posts? I'd like to read them. Not on social media these days as I gave it up for Lent a decade ago and never went back, so I'm probably missing some more comprehensive criticisms of Academy.
by remarkEon
3/16/2026 at 5:49:02 AM
So your gripe is that a barely recurring character is used in a joke, and you didn't find it funny. Gotcha! Unfortunately, not every joke lands for every person.It's important to understand that generally speaking, Academy standards are probably a lot lower than they used to be, the show, actually goes into this a couple times! Because, you know, the destruction of a large part of society and such. It is a school, and if the characters didn't need to learn something, they probably wouldn't need to be there.
You're generally going to find competency in the command staff/professors, and you generally do. Captain Ake is in at least one episode, orchestrating the entire episode behind the scenes, and in the following one, it doesn't say it explicitly, but it is most plausible that she also did as well. Episodes where the senior staff don't know what's happening, it's clear they know something is up, they just haven't determined what yet. I am not positive I can think of a spot where the officers in the show were anything but incredibly competent, and the show also avoids classic tropes like "the admiral is a jerk/evil", Starfleet is, in fact, led by an extremely competent and reasonable admiral.
by ocdtrekkie
3/16/2026 at 6:12:24 AM
I don't want to watch a science fiction show about children. That's what Academy is, a show about children. It should have been a show about young adults getting ready to be officers.It's fine that you think this is entertaining science fiction, and are grafting perceptions of "competence" on characters in this show. I don't want to nitpic everything in your response, except for this:
>Academy standards are probably a lot lower than they used to be, the show, actually goes into this a couple times!
The explanation for this makes no sense. This is the 32nd century (allegedly). The amount of advanced technology one would need to understand to be functional in this environment is extreme.
As an aside, and maybe this is the best way to explain my aversion to this show, the ship design is awful and makes absolutely no sense. I forget which "tech the tech" explanation there was for this, but every starship in Academy is a) hideous because the warp nacelles just float out in space for some reason, and b) makes no sense canonically. Star Trek used to actually respect engineering. Academy says "nah, fuck it, it's all magic now".
by remarkEon
3/16/2026 at 6:21:39 AM
TNG suggested kids in elementary school were learning calculus but honestly I'm not sure that's a reasonable thing developmentally. Just because the technology improves doesn't mean humans get smarter faster. The cadets here are college students, and generally speaking, pretty competent ones. (God, college kids were dumb everywhere I went to school.) Also technical talent and emotional development are separate topics. I'm also not sure I agree technical understanding has to continue to grow with technology.Computing technology is much further today than it was twenty years ago, but kids these days understand less about them because the technology is abstracted away better. (People use iPads now with no idea how a file system works.) In the 32nd century stuff feels magical, a lot of people probably don't need to know how it works to use it.
Floating nacelles make plenty of sense if they're independent drive units with all necessary components in the nacelle, consider they create a warp bubble around the entire assembly, but you can obviously wirelessly control a separate structure and the ships can manipulate them with force fields and such. Think about how many times a ship in earlier shows scraped a nacelle and exploded, separation is good design if technology now allows it. And remember... this is like many hundreds of years after Starfleet had timeships that could beam a person to and from any place in space and time. If anything the technology in this series feels a bit not magical enough for the time period.
by ocdtrekkie
3/16/2026 at 6:29:36 AM
Yes, I understand that you have ways to convince yourself that Academy is a good Star Trek show. I'm old at this point, and, for me, it's bad.by remarkEon
3/16/2026 at 12:36:40 AM
Agree, Whedon's script is essential to the popularity. I'd love it happen tho if they can do a good enough job. As well as River etc, I'd like to Shepherd Books back story.by emmelaich
3/16/2026 at 12:20:08 AM
Lets be real - Firefly was very good. But the reason it holds "magic" status as far as series goes is mostly because of its rarity, and the final movie where a major likable character was killed off, with everyone wishing for a sequel.Its same with anything really - car enthusiasts obsess over limited runs of older cars because they are rare, not because they are good, and people were lining up at McDonalds when they re-released Szechuan sauce (which is literally soy sauce and ketchup).
If they would have done Season 2,3, and so on, it wouldn't be held in such a high regard as it is now.
by ActorNightly
3/16/2026 at 12:50:59 AM
> Lets be real - Firefly was very good. But the reason it holds "magic" status as far as series goes is mostly because of its rarity, and the final movie where a major likable character was killed off, with everyone wishing for a sequel.Strongly disagree. The Firefly series was always exceptional. I watched it on DVD around the time it came out (maybe just after it was cancelled) and waited for the movie. The movie was actually a net negative, in my opinion, for killing off Wash (Tudyk), who was essential to the chemistry they had going.
I actually think the movie killing him off (and to a lesser extent, killing Book) hurt the momentum for further movies or other follow-ups.
> If they would have done Season 2,3, and so on, it wouldn't be held in such a high regard as it is now.
It's always possible that it could have gone off the rails. But the original Star Trek only ran for three seasons and spawned countless other shows and movies. I think if it had gone for two more seasons with the same cast, crew it, and general quality level it could potentially have been another Star Trek.
by D13Fd
3/16/2026 at 1:03:35 AM
I never got the impression there was much momentum for any more sequels anyway, Serenity felt like the bone they were willing to throw. This was a time before show revivals (rather than remakes/reboots e.g. BSG) were common, it was very surprising when they did it for Family Guy.by Dusseldorf
3/16/2026 at 6:03:15 AM
Firefly has a rabid fan base, but it's not very large. The movie did... okay. Enough to pay for itself, but not enough to interest anyone in making more content in that universe.When the show was first released it was cancelled after half a season because it was expensive to make and couldn't compete in the ratings with slap-dash, almost free to produce "reality TV".
by laughing_man
3/16/2026 at 1:15:33 AM
I agree with you. Star Trek TOS only had two good seasons. Season 3 was widely panned. And it still spawned a massive franchise.Plus there have been dozens of one-series sci-fi shows (Almost Human, Terra Nova, Space:Above and Beyond, etc.) and none have the same pull as Firefly.
by GMoromisato
3/16/2026 at 2:36:44 AM
Interesting that all those you specifically named aired on Fox, which is where Firefly aired.Other science fiction shows Fox killed after not more than one season were The Lone Gunman, Harsh Realm, Minority Report, Second Chance, and John Doe.
Others did make it past the first season but not past the second, such as Dark Angel and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
Even shows that make it longer often have trouble on Fox. Futurama for example was put in terrible time slots that often got preempted by sports which made it hard to grow its audience, and most of the time the creators had no idea if the current season was going to be their last. They had to keep trying to write season finales that would also be good series finales if they got cancelled between seasons.
They also do this to shows in other genres. Lucifer for example got cancelled after 3 seasons, with season 3 having ended on the biggest possible cliffhanger there could be for that show. That was very annoying.
My rule has now been for a long time that I will not watch any new scripted series on Fox that has any kind of ongoing story. If there are enough good reviews and word of mouth to make me want to watch it I'll wait until complete seasons are available on streaming, and then only if there exists some N such that if I watch to episode N and stop there won't be any cliffhangers or important ongoing story arcs open.
by tzs
3/16/2026 at 6:48:34 AM
We can't really rate any art something as exceptional, because beyond good it all comes down to personal preference. For example for music, people can agree that some composition, whether its rock or dubstep is well produced, but individual style and preference will make someone either like it or not like it.Beyond that, its called hedonistic adaptation, and its a real effect. If you get something good in a small amount, you are going to inflate how good it is. If you get that good thing in larger amounts, its going to seem less good.
by ActorNightly
3/16/2026 at 1:37:35 PM
I think you almost have it, one of the big reasons why Firefly has such an exalted status is that it only had one season. But it's not a rarity thing, it's that they spent that season doing some interesting world building that caught people's imagination then didn't have an opportunity to totally fuck it up in subsequent seasons.by some_random