It was briefly syndicated, I think; I watched the first season on the local ABC affiliate. In my area a tiny little TV station in the middle of a cornfield got the rights to TNG and I honestly think that’s what kept that station afloat. The affiliates fought over DS9 and VOY. There was a UPN station in my region but it was too week for me to watch it OTA.

I feel like they tried to learn from BSG without bringing in Ronald D Moore for insight, and just said, hmm, yes, the things that make BSG work so well are depression and alcoholism.

If you like that one and you’ve never seen the original Rat Pack Ocean’s Eleven movie, do yourself a favor and watch it. It’s not deep, it’s not fantastic cinema, but it’s entertaining as heck.

I’m also going to give a curve ball: M*A*S*H.

Movie recommendation: Run Silent, Run Deep. It’s a WW2 Pacific theater submarine movie with Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster. But it’s directed by Robert Wise (Star Trek: TMP) and the story beats will be recognizable by fans of both TMP and Wrath of Khan. It also focuses pretty heavily on the lower decks crew.

Oh lort. You just gave me flashbacks. One of my kids bought one of those $200 Chuwi laptops and it would barf all over itself about once a month, so badly it would require a reinstall.

Go back and rewatch TOS. Spock is emotional.

Yeah, basically they took the intro Dennis McCarthy wrote for TNG, and replaces his theme with the TMP theme

https://youtu.be/jzpeulsbv8o

Good Lord they established that Pike and Batel have a relationship in the first episode.

Rigel 7 is literally a callback to The Cage

You know, I can’t argue with most of this. I think other than TAS, Discovery S1 is about the only Trek I’ve never rewatched. It doesn’t really fit in with the era it’s meant to be set in, it brings back a lot of things I don’t really care for in Trek (Mirror Universe, Section 31, etc) but it mostly knows what it is and where it’s going.

Season 2 might be, but I’m not sure. The Enterprise was revealed at the end of S1 of course and by golly it sure seems like Anson Mount hit the ground running as Pike.

I seriously wish the beginning of S3 had been Rod Roddenberry doing a soft reboot of Andromeda. He’s talked about how one of his “jobs” is taking his dad’s ideas and pitching them as new shows, and I feel like Andromeda could have been an interesting direction for Star Trek to go. I’d love for more resolution on Calypso. I’d love more talk about how the ship’s computer got taken over by an alien AI and they’re just sort of letting it do its thing as a part of the crew. But at a certain point the show just…sorta…trailed off.

And despite liking that it felt like a soft Andromeda reboot, it simultaneously felt like they used the time shift to not deal with why Discovery looked nothing like any of the other ships of the era, and to ignore the “black ops” nature of the ship.