waiting for my spaceship to come back for me

But I don't think it would be a total panacea. For one it assumes they do that instead of extending the serialization to twenty episodes, but many of the problems are tonal. Star Trek Discovery season one is only five episodes shy of twenty, and I don't think five more episodes would fix how badly it wanted to be Game of Thrones. I think it would be five more episodes of a Star Trek show on a grim and gloomy starship where nobody trusts anybody and they're stuck in the Evil Universe and not like, TNG 2.0. by dint of the magic extra episode count. Strange New Worlds would benefit, because it is already episodic, but that makes it more doubtful the increased count would fix its problems since it has them while already episodic. They would do the episodes we like and the episodes we dislike and then make ten more of them.

Of course, a new show with 20 episodes would be conceived from the ground up with that in mind and maybe dodge some of these problems to begin with, but I think the thematic and synergistic concerns that lead NuTrek into being what it was would still be there. After all, it would still lack the sense of a building universe that existed from the tie-ins between TNG, DS9, and early Voyager, since all the shows are set in different eras

(I am convinced Prodigy is going to enjoy a resurgence in a few years as people find their way back to it.)

Both of those shows were unapologetic about developing their own voices and their own ideas; Prodigy set out from the get-go as a YA adventure series that was both going to succeed where Voyager failed, and do some really weird, gonzo, cosmic shit more usually associated with something like Star Wars or even Andromeda than Star Trek. Lower Decks set out to be "what if an office comedy, like 30 Rock or Brooklyn 99, but also Star Trek?" They both COMMITTED to this, and they both succeeded at it.

For that matter... I dislike DIS, and I don't think it was ever really what you'd call good. But DIS got a lot better when they decided "no, fuck it, HARD RESET, we're going to nope the fuck out after two seasons and basically make an entirely new show." Many of the ideas they put forth were bad ones (I have real issues with the stewards of creative properties deciding ad nauseum "the most interesting thing we can do to our setting is destroy it," that's a failure state in my eyes) but the writing notably improved when the writers were no longer struggling with the constraints of "we gotta slot this into the past timeline and do Spock shit and Klingon shit and Section 31 shit and bleh."

I digress.

Neither Prodigy nor Lower Decks ever really hit the high highs of the very best of classic trek; neither has a "Balance of Terror," or "Measure of a Man," or "In The Pale Moonlight." There aren't any S-rank episodes in there, and perhaps that's a failure... but there are PLENTY A-rank episodes in both of them. Hologram Janeway's speech, and her death, in "Supernova" is in my opinion the best fucking thing they ever wrote for Kate Mulgrew, delivered impeccably, animated beautifully.

Lower Decks gave us "wej'Duj," which I would place solidly as a Top 50 Trek episode, and "Empathological Fallacies," which... actually, you know what? Fuck it, I'm going to call "Empathological Fallacies" S-rank Star Trek. I will set it against ANY of the top-tier Vulcan episodes, any single one of them, "Amok Time," "Sarek," any of them, and call it as good. It's an absolutely ridiculous premise of an episode featuring horny Betazoid cougar commandos and a cannibalistic Caitian, and it delivered the most raw experience, and the most affirming uplift, of being a Vulcan in the whole fuckin' franchise, and was an especial breath of fresh air in the context of the 21st century, which has attracted a long and baffling series of writers to Trek who seem to hate Vulcans very much.

(It also gave us the best Star Trek tie-in product ever made, Warp Your Own Way, which in a just world would have won a Hugo.)

Lower Decks could pull shit like that off because it had top-caliber writers who all had a clear, unified vision for what the show was gonna be and executed. It consistently delighted us for five years and could easily have done another five. Prodigy had trouble finding an audience but it was equally unapologetic about being what it was and god, did that pay off creatively if not commercially. Both it and Prodigy also delivered on the aforementioned sense of building a universe that existed between TNG, DS9, and early VOY.

This isn't the first time something like this happens to the franchise, either. TOS had room to grow and experiment because it was literally inventing the franchise, and DS9 had room to grow and experiment because the networks and studios cared more about VOY. In both cases the (comparative) lack of expectations was the best thing that happened to those shows.

You might know him from a thread where he was getting wowed by free appetisers in a Mexican restaurant.

Firstly: He is doing a bit pretending to be a wandering samurai. It's a joke and his posts are all made up. This is very obvious if you actually look at his account and website:

He does purport to be Japanese but based on some of the other content he posts there's reason to believe he's British.

Which brings me to my second point: his Samurai content is interspersed with posts like this:

And this:

Yeah this is also the guy from the truck thread going around. That's what prompted this post and in retrospect I should have said so explicitly.

He claims he just uses AI to translate his posts from Japanese. He also says the art on his website isn't AI generated. I think he is full of shit on both counts.

I only gave a couple of examples but even on a brief look through his twitter it was apparent that he posts a LOT about UK politics to the point where he's quite patently British. He is a Restore supporter which is a party that split away from mainstream far right party Reform due to feeling they weren't right wing enough.

It might not surprise you to hear he does not seem to know shit about Japan? Both the salsa story and the truck story failed the smell test for people who are familiar with Japan. There's also a story about going to a potluck where he seemingly couldn't come up with a single Japanese dish for the character to cook??