Then why care so much? Obviously I’d like Trek to maintain a sufficient audience to keep getting produced, but beyond that I really don’t care. I want it to be good, not popular. I’ve loved plenty of shows that stayed pretty niche.

So to actually speak to quality: Kurtzman Trek has absolutely been a mixed bag, but I appreciate that he tries a lot of different approaches to the franchise and seems to be pretty hands off on most of them. It means we occasionally get some dreck like Section 31, but also some great stuff like SNW and, so far at least, Academy.

I got a note like this once (minus the condom). When I had parked in the morning, there was an inch of snow on the ground so I could only park a reasonable distance from the person beside me. By afternoon, the snow had melted and the lines were visible. Sometimes people are just looking for a reason to be mad.

I believe I initially also chose merch sales

Ah yes, the true worth of a piece art lies in how many action figures it sells. Silly silly me.

Not with inflation

Yes with inflation.

But sure, you might be able to find a list that places it in second place instead, depending on their method. That hardly defeats my point. Are you really trying to argue that Into Darkness performed badly?

Nothing else you said is relevant if we're judging Trek installments based on viewership, which is the metric you chose.

Kurtzman was writer and producer on the highest grossing Star Trek film of all time. Popularity is a shitty proxy for quality, but if that's what we're going with, I think Kurtzman comes out looking pretty okay.

It’s extremely telling that, for all the nonsense people are finding to condemn Academy for, I haven’t seen anyone leveling "Mary Sue" complaints at Caleb.

He’s been living on the streets since he was a child, but he has a heart of gold. He’s great at hand to hand combat. He’s an expert hacker and can effortlessly penetrate Starfleet computer systems. He’s the best debater in class by a mile. The school chancellor is obsessed with him. The visiting space princess falls instantly in love with him.

But instead of ragging on the objectively OP main character, it's all about Ake and how she sits wrong. Meanwhile I'll never stop hearing about how perfect Michael Burnham apparently was, even if her series showed her to be a perennial fuck up. The double standard is legitimately insane.

I wont say too much to spoil it, but my feelings on Picard's first season is that it started out with a huge amount of promise, then moved at a strangely slow pace for long enough that there wasn't any chance to properly resolve everything at the end. So a mess, but it had ambition and even those messier episodes had some lovely moments.

Oh, I hate it. The labourious mind-numbing action, the "we aspire and they don't" hand-wave resolution to the half-assed philosophical premise, the dozenth mind rape of Troi and Picard's callous response, it's all trash.

Don't get me wrong, it had some OK scenes. You had to learn about them after the fact, though, because they were all cut from the film! Cutting Picard's discussion with Data from the start, and the crew's visit to his quarters at the end, is as good as cutting the Kobayashi Maru and funeral sequences from TWoK. They wouldn't have saved the thing, but they would have given Data's death at least a little emotional weight.

Left a bad taste in my mouth for twenty years. Thank goodness Picard came along to revisit these characters. It was a mess, but I'll take any season of Picard as a superior send-off to the TNG era than this movie.

But it just looks unprofessional to me in the captain’s chair.

That's what I love, though. A boss today might feel the need to cultivate a "professional" work environment to maintain discipline among their underlings, or to appear trustworthy to their clients.

Ake doesn't doesn't need to worry about discipline among her officers. They aren't working for a paycheck, they're there because they feel a calling and a duty to be there. She trusts them implicitly, and is confident enough in having their respect that she can enjoy her time on her bridge. And her "clients" are university age kids, who generally don't respond to the pomposity of performative professionalism.

I chill in chairs like that all the time. It’s comfy. Don’t be so self conscious you let schoolgirls have all the fun.

There you go, accusing people of being sexiest and racist just because they have a meltdown every time some piece of media prominently features a woman or person of colour. I’m sure it’s just a highly predictable coincidence.

Riker happily slapped his ass down in the weapons console so he could chat up the prettiest subordinate on duty. Not sure why we’re suddenly supposed to be pretending Trek ever maintained a stern and solemn work environment.