I just honestly recommend sticking to everything ENT and before these days, and if you want something new and exciting in the canon, I’d start reading the myriads of novels in the lit verse (although those are hit or miss).

All of these attempts at making Star Trek some kind of middle-of-the-road relatable mainstream-appeal quippy entertainment franchise is the exact opposite of what it should be in times like these. Star Trek in 2023 should be written, directed, produced and acted by a radically progressive counterculture to the right-wing swing across the world, attract major controversies and boycotts by conservatives and network executives to the point they wish they could blacklist actors for being commie sympathizers again. We need more Ira Steven Behr and Hans Beimler, and less JJ Abrams. We need more flawed, genuine working-class people like Bashir’s parents or Miles O’Brien, or General Martok or Damar, and less characters who are relatable to the upper-class yass-kween American writing rooms. We need an internationalist view on space politics again, not Elon Musk worship.

Instead, we get toilet humor, sanitized and Americanized versions of the future, and CIA apologism in the shape of a sympathetic Section 31 and the Federation engaging in regime changes. Not that golden age Trek was always better, but at least they tried. It’s just more of the same like DIS, PIC and SNW (Lower Decks is often fun though).