The problem is not that they’re crying, or experiencing emotion, it’s that it’s emotion that hasn’t really been earned. They’d barely introduced us to the characters, and given us no reason to like or identify with them yet, and yet, they expected us to be all distraught at the character’s emotional breakdowns.
No, sorry, you can’t just tell me I’m supposed to care. You have to do the work to make me actually care. Show me why the hero is the hero, then put them through the wringer a bit, so they earn their Great Dramatic Moment. Disco never did this. We were simply assigned a main character, and told to care about them, even if they were objectively awful (see remarks above about starting a war, for instance).
I have also been on a Trek rewatch lately. Near the end of DS9 last night I watched the episode with the serial killer. It involves a projectile gun with a tiny transporter on the barrel and a piece of lucite stuck over an eye that allows you to see through walls and apparently is telescopic. You can pick your target in a different room from a distance, fire the gun, and the bullet is beamed to just in front of the target. This is a incredibly dangerous combination of two hugely disruptive technologies, and I don’t think any of it has ever been used again.
I have yet to decide whether Star Trek: the Orville is worth the trouble to watch. I think I have seen about a dozen episodes, and it is uninspiring. That one other series with the pizza delivery guy seems much better (and uses a lot more real science).
The Orville was trying to be a stupid comedy and sci-fi in the first season. By the second season it became, in my (non-sf fan) wife’s words, “What those other Star Treks should be.”
Yeah that first season was clearly aiming for that Galaxy Quest sweet spot between tribute and parody and not quite pulling it off, but once they committed to a direction, it became at least a respectable facsimile of what an updated TNG might look like.
Sisko was far more outwardly emotional than any of those three, but he always kept his dignity about him. I could see him crying, but rarely, and certainly only privately.
Janeway had a severe bout of depression in one episode, but like Sisko, she remained dignified.
Burnham just doesn’t comport herself properly as a starship captain. A captain should seem in command and in control. She’s just embarrassing.
Star Trek TOS adhered to the '60s scripture of episodic television, intended to allow randomized syndication of the show. There were really only three significant characters who appeared in more than one episode: crewmember Riley, Dr. M’Benga and Harry Mudd, and those episodes made scant, if any, reference to the other episodes in which those characters appeared. Basically, any episode was meant to stand on its own, which explains why things encountered in TOS were not useful in other episodes.
As far as TNG+ is concerned, that is a little different. Why no exploration of things like the Talosian mind control abilities (or the tech depicted in The Squire of Gothos, Catspaw, The Gamesters of Triskelion, Spock’s Brain, Spectre of the Gun, or The Savage Curtain) was not more deeply studied is difficult to accept.
I’m convinced that Seth McFarlane always wanted to make it a straight sci-fi show, but being who he is, the studios would only invest in it if it was a “comedy”. So he made it a comedy, but with the intention of transforming it into an actual sci-fi show, much as we saw happen. It was a massive bait-and-switch.
The humour would have been grating if it had been in the family guy style, but, for me at least, the jokes landed and made the crew seem more relatable (which is also something star trek tries to do).
I don’t know if it’s yet been mentioned but there was a TNG episode where they used the transporter to literally remove a disease from someone. This genuinely astonishing ability isn’t mentioned again. If it were a thing, logically every sick bay and hospital should have a transporter to just beam a person from one bed to another whenever you want to remove a pathogen.
The transporter in Star Trek was a writing catastrophe; I am pretty sure they inserted it to save money on sets, but it has required a thousand workarounds and excuses in the franchise to explain why it cannot be used to solve a zillion problems.
In SNW, the transporter can equip the landing party, change thier clothes and even medicate them. It has filters such that anything it doesn’t recognize is automatically filtered out (except when it isnt) and Medical has it’s own emergency transporter that can be used to indefinitely keep someone’s pattern around in the buffer (something they also alluded to with transporters in a battlefield during the klingon war).
All of this was lost to all future iterations of the transporter - even on the ‘same ship’.
Heck, the engineer tried to (and was largely successful with) beaming up part of the magma core of a planet…
In the original series, there was an episode entitled, “The Tholian Web”, in which the Tholian space force was able to literally weave a power grid that, once finished, would entrap the Enterprise until in either ran out of energy or they destroyed it. I could be mistaken, but I never saw or heard of the Tholian Web in any episode after that in any of the series.
My favorite was just a tiny bit where the captain calls two ensigns to the bridge. And then we see them get the call, look at each other, and start running as fast as they can, down hallways, up stairs (because waiting for a turbo lift would take too long), and arriving a bit disheveled and winded.
My understanding is that it was, indeed, created to be friendly to the production budget, in particular so they didn’t need to doing visual effects shots of a shuttlecraft for every episode.
I liked when they were visiting the Xelayan homeworld, remarking at its beauty, and then Gordan says something like “Seeing this makes me realize my family’s trash”.
As someone who grew up in poverty and has seen how the other half live, I can definitely relate to that feeling, as well as it being a funny quip.