yeah that was my big issue with Voyager in the day, it struck me like they just got "technobabble, fire the blue ray, technobabble, fire the green ray" but didn't really get the idea that the technobabble was supposed to be in service to the plot, not the plot itself
jfc I'd join the Maquis out of sheer shame. No whales in space.
They still got the details wrong, however. The Enterprise crew went back and got humpback wales. That obviously is a bowhead whale.
The current Trek shows are pretty much an over-reaction to the criticisms that were aimed at Voyager and the early seasons of Enterprise. We've gone from shows that had too much technobabble and were too slavishly loyal to Roddenberry's vision, to shows that have too much blowing shit up and piss all over what Star Trek is supposed to stand for.
From what I understand, everything in this show that isn't an identifiable location in LA is filmed in Canada. It's actually a pretty common technique for shows filmed in Canada but set in warmer climes to tint the footage orange, to make it look warmer than the overcast conditions you usually get up there.
I can't imagine them not fucking this up horribly. About the only unqualified positive would be getting to see de Lancie reprise the role, but that's completely outweighed by the sheer fuckery of these show runners probably ruining the character forever.
Even minus the politisperging, season 1 was just not very good. It was like they really hadn't figured out what to do with these characters yet.
Holy shit before seeing this comment I thought "holy shit she looks like the ugly stacey Abrams" and it is.
That season –and those parts specifically– were cringe, but the characters still were portrayed as rational people who had "evolved" from our savage ways and tried to see the best of others and themselves. Sure, socialism works for them because they can conjure food out of thin air, kinda.
Well...they really hadn't. Even RLM has pointed out that a lot of Season 1 was kind of an experiment, where they tried out new concepts before settling on what worked, and those would wind up being common features/tropes of all future Trek series.
Tbf, Yar getting actual backstory or characterization wasn't a thing, full stop. All that we ever really found out about her was that she came from a really shitty world and that she was implicitly a former addict - and even the latter was the completely accidental result of the showrunner deciding to use her as the mouthpiece for an anti-drug speech.
