This post makes me feel very old

I always had the sense that the Enterprise E was a well liked design

Looks lego compatible or at least inspired to me. I’m wary by default from experience with other lego-compatibles. There’s definitely something nostalgic about their catalog but I wish the sets were more detailed. On the other hand the sheer number of different ships they have is pretty cool

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

It’s very easy to take a point of view that makes it look like mysogyny whenever a show with a woman-led cast gets canceled but let’s face the simplest facts first: Paramount+ is a shit streaming platform with a limited library. Prodigy is a kids show and kids shows don’t drive subscribers. If they really wanted the show to succeed they would have put it somewhere with an actual audience.

When it comes down to it, Paramount+ itself was an idiotic play. They should never have tried to go solo but all they could see was a gold rush, now they are finally starting to see that they were actually late and are stuck scrabbling for scraps with their limited offerings

to be perfectly honest, order doesn’t really matter. There is a small amount of interplay between TNG and DS9 and that’s about it. Watch it in whatever order fancies you, as long as you don’t watch Enterprise first because it’s high level of boredom might turn you off

Trust me when I say that if Trek strikes your fancy, you probably will want to devour the rest

personally I would suggest starting with TNG, that one definitely qualifies as the “most universally loved”. Plus, if you liked Lower Decks, then TNG-era Trek is likely to be your jam anyway

after TNG, watch DS9 and Voyager in whatever order you want. They ran concurrently originally, with DS9 having started a couple years before Voyager. You can watch the TNG movies anytime after finishing TNG bearing in mind that First Contact has minor consequences in DS9 (you will mainly notice a uniform change that coincided with the release of that movie)

watch the TOS movies at some point! they are much easier to get into than TOS proper. Just bear in mind that the even numbered ones are generally better liked than the odd numbered ones.

the thing about Enterprise is even at its worst, it’s not an entirely bad show - the supporting cast is good, they are set in an interesting time period, and the premise is ostensibly interesting.

The main problem for me is that, setting aside the fact that the main theme comes straight from the Patch Adams soundtrack, the show is straight up boring. They came so close to something really interesting with Archer being flawed because he was the first, and perhaps even not really the right guy to be captain. But then the writers had to make him a mary sue, he fails is way to success every episode, and becomes like the ship’s alcoholic dad, constantly getting into the dumbest yelling arguments with his wife first officer — who he is also canonically racist against by the way. You would think/hope they were setting him up for some growth on that, but, instead they chose to try to make a lot of the show indirectly relevant to 9/11

By the time the show finally set the stage to become interesting the majority of its audience had already been alienated

What Paramount ought to realize about it is that Enterprise failed because of the writers and producers and not because of the cast or setting and it should not be very difficult to do significantly better than the original

It feels unfair to all those people to put a kid on the bridge instead of an adult in the middle of their career.

It’s partially a testament to what a prodigy he’s supposed to be, but it’s also an artifact of Picard’s friendship with his mother and late father, and a soft character progression for both of them because up to that point no children were allowed on the bridge with him at all

Trek fans in that era got hung up on some weird stuff for sure. I knew several people who hated Neelix for basically the entire Voyager run mainly because of that one early episode where he acted jealously even though he got over it by the end of the episode lol