Updated: April 25, 2026

I recently watched season one of Strange New Worlds and really enjoyed it. That series along with the positive reception of the animated shows and Picard season three convinced me to finally go down the Trek rabbit hole. I plan to watch all 880 episodes of every series and all thirteen films. In order. From start to finish.

Now, I've never been much of a Star Trek fan. I'd seen bits and pieces, I knew something of it from parodies like Futurama and Galaxy Quest and my older brothers were fans so I had some knowledge of Trek through familial osmosis. But as a kid in the 2000s, Star Trek was in this weird niche where it wasn't as exciting as Star Wars, as whimsical as Doctor Who or as gritty as Battlestar Galactica. I really enjoyed the Kelvin Trilogy when they came out, but there was no show airing at the time and none of the older series were readily available. Now that all the old shows are streaming and all the current shows are well-received, it seemed like a good time to jump on the bandwagon.

Important caveats. I think it's worth pointing out that I did not watch this show the way it was originally intended. I binged the entire thing in just a few weeks and that's not how 1960's shows were meant to be watched. I'm sure at least one complaint I have wouldn't be an issue if I'd watched one episode per week in whatever randomized release order a syndicated TV show went through back then. Also, I enjoyed the show and plan to watch more, so if I seem overly negative or nitpicky don't take that as an indicator of my thoughts on the series.

The Drip I love the look of Starfleet. It's simple and doesn't look particularly professional or militaristic, but there's something about this crew of Technicolor sweaters and miniskirts that just works. It feels vibrant and colorful and positive. Everyone goes on and on about the hope and optimism of Trek and this aesthetic fits very well. Maybe I'll feel differently later on, but I think adding more black or gray to the outfits drains some of that energy. Plus, this style translates to more modern, bigger budget productions really well. The suits look good here and they look even better in Strange New Worlds and the Kelvin Trilogy. It's kind of crazy how so many of the costumes and wigs are hilariously bad, but the Starfleet uniform was an absolute slam dunk.

The Cast Shatner is great, but I feel like he along with the show in general peaked early and went downhill over time. In season one, he's a good mix of a responsible leader of men and a cool, sexless, SFW TV ladies' man. I really, really like it when he goes on an absolute bender and just rages for a few minutes. But as the show goes on, the character kind of slips. The infamous aspects - weird deliveries, weight gain, etc. start to take over and the character becomes less realistic and, in my opinion, more authoritative. Nimoy, on the other hand, is fantastic throughout. He's so good at the subtleties of Spock that when he does break and show emotion, it's genuinely surprising. He feels so natural in the role that you kind of forget he's just a normal man with a full range. Kelley is also consistently great and Doohan has some good moments. Everyone else gets nothing to do, unfortunately.

Starfleet Isn't Military… Sometimes Something I see people on here say a lot is that Starfleet isn’t military. Maybe that's more of a 90's Trek thing, because Starfleet's role seems somewhat vague to even Starfleet officers in TOS. Sometimes Kirk describes himself as a military man, an explorer, a diplomat. Sometimes he flatly denies being a military man, an explorer or a diplomat. The actual role of the Enterprise herself is to explore and discover, but whether they're pathfinders for an army or a cosmic Peace Corps seems vague.

Roddenberry's Four Types of Stories The repetition of the show is insane. You'll watch an episode where someone snorts a nebula or something and gets godlike powers, then two episodes later the exact same thing happens again. And they seem to come in waves. Like Roddenberry just got really hooked on one idea and decided to devote a quarter of the season to it. I think these are probably the four most common episode types: 1) extremely convenient time travel, 2) godlike aliens put humanity on trial, 3) historical or mythological figure is actually an alien, 4) alien planet turns into a replica of an historical period on Earth.

Get Out of Jail Card Remember that scene in Loki where he realizes the TVA is full of so many all-powerful MacGuffins that they treat them like trinkets? That's how I view the Star Trek universe. They solve time travel in the third episode. And then go on to discover a fucking half dozen other methods of time travel! Just how many godlike aliens are there in this galaxy? You can't swing a dead Tribble without hitting some yoga-clad pseudo-deity who wants to put your species on trial by making one guy do a big fist fight. My point is, how does anything ever go wrong in this universe? If I lived in this universe, any time anything went wrong, I'd use one of the dozens of readily available time travels methods to undo it. Or ask the nicest godlike alien I can find. Or just start exposing myself to energies until I experience an Akira-esque evolution and can fix everything with my mental powers. There is both an abundance of imagination in what can happen and a dearth of imagination as to what the consequences would be.

Decline I think season one is the strongest and most consistent. The first few episodes are roughly made, with the film quality, costuming and makeup varying wildly from episode to episode. Despite that, it feels like all the classic tropes of Star Trek are fully realized in this season and that subsequent ones simply become more repetitive, cheaper and formulaic. Additionally, I feel like the crew are more realistic in the first season. For example, we see little details, like Kirk officiating a wedding or having an awkward encounter with a crewmember he got close to at last year's Christmas party. Little things like that here or there make the characters feel more rounded, but they kind of go to the wayside as the series continues. Normal human interactions get replaced by really forced banter that feels like it's supposed to be followed by a laugh track. Spock is the clear exception as he gets more backstory and development in later seasons.

The Original Series vs Strange New Worlds I think both the Kelvin films and SNW do an excellent job of modernizing the look of TOS, but SNW captures the tone much better. And, having watched all of TOS, I think the changes they made for SNW were exactly right. You can't do a modern series that faithfully recreates the Technicolor cardboard look of TOS. And, while very forward-thinking and progressive, TOS is still very much a product of the 1960's. Which is a polite way of saying that it's way too sexist for the 2020's. Female Starfleet officers are forced to wear miniskirts, aren't allowed to captain ships, and it's outright said that they'll be in Starfleet until they find a man and settle down. The role of women in this show is just so weird and inconsistent. I mean, the boys live and work on a co-ed spaceship but every time a woman comes on board, they act like they haven't seen a lady in years. TOS is mired in this weird limbo where it's trying to be a progressive meritocracy but it can't quite shake the culture the creators grew up in. So, I don't mind when SNW uses more modern dialogue or builds a more realistic bridge set or redesigns a species or lets the women wear pants, because I don't think a slavish devotion to TOS would work. Honor the spirit of Star Trek, but not the letter.

Random Stuff:

I like it when someone blows up at Spock and goes "Dammit, Spock, a man is dead! Don't you feel a thing you, pointy-eared hobgoblin?" I love how the crew's entire job is to make first contact with aliens, but they can't wrap their heads around the one thing Spock's about, despite knowing and working with him for years.

Ricardo Montalban was a bodybuilder, so it was believable for him to play a superhuman in the 1960's. But everyone is so fit and beautiful nowadays that the current Spock looks like he could snap Khan in half. It's kind of bizarre how an attractive woman in the 1960s would still be attractive in the 2020's, but the standards for men have completely changed since. I wonder when the shift happened. Probably around the time Fight Club came out.

I love it when we see other Starfleet ships in action with the Enterprise. It makes the universe feel more real and expansive and reinforces the idea that we're just watching the adventures of one ship in Starfleet.

Given how famous the interracial kiss is, I was surprised by how bad the actual episode was.

Trying to capitalize on the popularity of your futuristic space adventure series by making a modern day spinoff set on Earth where 33% of your main cast is a cat is such an insane thing to do.

Paramount+ only has a version of TOS with updated CGI over the models and I didn't really like that. I want to see what they saw in the 60's, just in high definition.