Acquired Tastes - When the parodies are better than what your franchise has become

You can put Picard in the final panel as well.

Modern Trek is a complete travesty that goes against everything the series used to stand for, all while bringing nothing meaningful to the conversation. It's dark, depressing, jaded, cynical and downright unpleasant to watch. If I want grimdark I'll turn to Warhammer 40,000.

I'm not saying Star Trek can't explore darker themes or challenge established notions about the franchise. Deep Space Nine did exactly that, and it's rightly lauded as a fan favorite by many (myself included). The key difference however is that it actually had something meaningful to say about it, all while never losing sight of the series' inspirational message of a better, brighter future.

And that's not even getting into the more nitty-gritty complaints, like how modern Trek shamelessly rips off other shows and movies or has absolutely no regard for continuity (I'm fine with bending canon here and there for the sake of storytelling, but they can't even get the basics right). Alex Kurtzman is a hack who has no idea what he's doing.

In my opinion the issue is that lower decks and discovery are incomplete. They both focus on one half of the star trek universes appeal that being silly sci-fi and serious sci-fi. The issue is that star trek was built to be a merger of the two. Discovery tries to hard to be a prestige drama and lower decks tries to hard to be a adult cartoon.

Without balance the series just fall apart from either the pretention or the lack of a point