The primary entertainment value of Star Trek is its a formula show. They try to mix it up so its a little less obvious, but its a formula show. At some point the non-red shirt characters will have to do something sciencey and reconfigure the main deflector dish (again) or program some button to save the day. And then forget about that trick forever and ever because then you can't watch the show out of sequence and that science trick PROBABLY violates the consistency of the Trek-verse bible.
At least it was scifi on TV and it got kids thinking about engineering during those crucial years, and that's its most important contribution. It showed kids they could be more than burger flippers. In my own employment history I've done my share of burger flipper jobs. I've also stepped up as an engineers assistant and made suggestions that got incorporated into real devices. Of course, in an honest company I would have been on the patent and I'd be getting a share of that $$. It was a thief I talked to, so he kept it all for himself and now I have another entry on my T.O.O. list. Ask a military person what that means.
Trek-verse has a lot of flaws. Its badly run, with its leadership evil, incompetent, or controlled by space worms. Their clothes don't even have pockets so people have to carry around stuff in their hands all the time. They never take advantage properly of scientific discoveries and as Cracked pointed out, they're exploring space to find novelty because their own culture is so oppressive nobody is doing creative things anymore. Its like the Hippies lost out to the Berkeley Totalitarians (two primary divisions of the Liberal Left) and the BT's have killed or brainwashed everyone who didn't want to think their way. The Trek-verse is a terrifying dystopian nightmare of a place. I wouldn't want to live there. Even back in the 19th century, when Scifi was still being invented as a genre, they knew that Utopia stories were dystopias warning of the failure mode that dominates them, and why Utopias are really evil Totalitarian dictatorships, a point that even Avatar the Last Airbender (cartoon, not movie) made about the Earth Kingdom, which was using mind control and murder on its own citizens to prevent panic over the Fire Kingdom being outside the walls of their capitol city. Trek is like that too, with a group of Black Ops that kills people all the time, plus another group that fights wars through time like an evil Dr. Who.
The reason that I watched it is that it was Sci-Fi on TV. The reason I came to love Stargate is that it parodied most of the Scifi that had been broadcast or turned into movies. And it hung lanterns on its objections to really bad/lazy writers in those shows, often mocking those bad ideas as actual plot points and showing how easily they could defeat poor logic. Since some of those episodes were written by members of the prior Star Trek episodes, they were registering their logical complaints against that committee. Stargate was Scifi revenge. It was often hilarious, but you had to know the show or movie they were referencing/parodying to get the joke. Col. O'Neil was often mentioning the Simpsons, which is his big cluehammer for the audience. Simpsons is all about mocking others stupidity. It is my generations response to bad govt and hypocrisy in the Baby Boomers.
I don't write by committee. This is a big part of why I don't care much about feedback and I don't troll for suggestions on what I should write next, thus why I don't participate on the boards so popular with scifi geeks, like Spacebattles.com. They do turn out some funny ideas after pages of geekery argumentation on some aspect of a ruleset. I think most of them are actually computer programmers or future programmers, since programming languages are really about rulesets in virtual worlds, and they have the right obsession with detail for that kind of thing. Spotting failure modes in every single scifi episode of shows like Star Trek, and mocking that failure makes sense with their debugger approach to everything around them.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer mocked the monster movies and "lets split up in the spooky building so we can all be picked off one by one" logic that ends up killing the entire cast. Buffy was good that way. If you'd seen the movies, you'd get the joke. The lantern hanger characters like Xander and Cordelia were all about pointing at the huge blatant plot holes, and it was refreshing to have a villain (Spike) that was smart enough to run away and try a new tactic rather than monologuing and being defeated in an utterly corny way.
Why are these things so popular? Because fans of scifi and fantasy are sick to death of these crappy tropes being used again and again. Its a big part of why I watch anime. Asia uses different tropes. The heros slaughter the innocent and feel really bad about it, or see their lover die on the cusp of victory so they're never truly happy again. Try that in Hollywood. They change the ending till its happy because the lousy Marketing goons don't recognize the hatred for "seen that before" young audiences have, and unfortunately, the only people who buy tickets to movies anymore are welfare kids, and their needs and histories are completely different from the Geeks who's parents both worked and whose Dad was either an engineer or a programmer. We've given up on Hollywood because it no longer entertains us, and we don't find Reverse Discrimination funny. Nor do we think Blaxsploitation to be funny either. That's just another bit of racism at work, racism from Hollywood which is as far distant from Us as they can be. Hollywood is trapped in a hall of mirrors and all they can see is reflections of themselves. This is why the interesting movies are being made by non-Hollywood studios, with none of those Eterna-Fail marketing firms who only make movies for black people and those who hate them.
These days its the video games, most of which are heavily influenced by the Japanese programmers and thus Asian tropes, that are leading the way. These days we're seeing a lot of geeky kids getting into video game design, though getting a job after is tricky. I find the really well done games impress me a lot, particularly the ones with really well designed environments (landscapes). Its the nooks and crannies, the details that make it pop, the unnecessary stuff that steps it out of the rail-gunner (plot so linear its like its on rails) and offers a lot more options and exploration. There are starting to be games for puzzles and I'd love to see ones that are about exploration, about going outside so the idea isn't so alien and those inner city kids can be directly reminded there is a world beyond the freeways and ghettos.
You really can't take the Trek-verse and make it realistic. There are too many place it is broken, or a quick solution to a corner the writers forced the characters into actually breaks their science if used again, and breaking the universe just leads to horrible Implosions!
I'm kinda glad that Scott Bakula did such a good job of destroying the entire Star Trek franchaise. Or rather the writers for the Enterprise show did. Its not really fair to blame Bakula himself. He was just the star of the show, the captain of the last Trek TV show. Now Star Trek went Alt-Universe through time travel and we've got some grittier characters but the biggest problem with any story that includes time travel is that time travel becomes the primary plot point. ALWAYS. Its that scab you can't stop picking at, for writers. You know its going to leave a scar. And time travel way back in Star Trek 5 introduced the Temporal War and instead of using satellites to record history for later. In ST Voyager they just used it to shoot laser beams at each other or destroy civilizations in utterly contemptible genocide, without a single comment on how evil that is during the show. And this is from Hollywood, where survivors of the holocaust live. Is the irony lost? Really? ST can be really horrendously hypocritical.
Also, I'm counting the hours till the Gaza ceasefire fails again. Typically cease fires last a few days, then the shooting starts again. In the Middle East there are two states of war: 1) Firing! and 2) Reload. That's it. This is my biggest objection to any religion from there. If religion is why they're killing each other, and God is supposed to be about Peace, clearly they're worshiping the wrong God. Ergo, anything coming out of the Middle East that isn't burned is bad for you, particularly anything having to do with how you should live your life. They clearly have no idea, since they're shooting each other with rockets and tanks.
The Trek-verse is in several ceasefires with its neighbors, all of which are constantly being cheated on by both sides, then the survivors blackmailed into silence so war won't break out. This denies the honest cause of their real conflicts: war over resources caused by overpopulation. You would think in a universe so huge, and with interstellar FTL so cheap they'd be doing a lot more terraforming than fighting each other, but Trek is all about the flashy space battles, not realism. Realism is boring. Raising families is boring, to scifi writers who apparently don't have kids of their own. Building things, which most fans of the show end up doing in their real lives, seems to bore the writers of the show, since none of them are engineers. They're writers who get paid to make flashy and cheap CGI explosions and soap-opera moments.
The real engineers of the world were busy creating the Internet and making The Future happen. A future they'd watched on Star Trek. Your basic smartphone is more powerful than the original Tri-Corder. And the smartphone can be yours for easy monthly payments. We don't have flying cars, but Airbus or Boeing will take you to other cities quickly enough. And we have electric cars if you're willing to deal with paying large sums of money to get stranded on the side of the road. Our real-world personal computers are massively more powerful than the punch card models from the original Star Trek, and our engineers are way smarter than those envisioned by the writers of the show.
I doubt we'll ever see a realistic scifi show. Cheating the endings is so much more fun, and engineers don't generally write scifi. They have better things to do, solving real world problems. Star Trek did a great job creating more engineers, and I kinda hope something else comes along and replaces it, something that captures the imagination of kids but is a little less about war and a little more about building good things in the world that lets people raise their kids in peace instead of throwing artillery shells into buildings on the Gaza Strip.We just don't have the resources to continue these ridiculous wars on slight differences in local religions. The Irish have wisely given it up, ending the general support for the Troubles. They still get a few extremists, but the general population is fed up with the whole thing. They'd rather have a second beer at the pub and toddle off home. The coming decades in Ireland will be great times for creative works. George Bernard Shaw comes to mind.
Only the extremist members of the USA's parties still care about abortion, which is really about whether its baby killing or not. Having just visited my 2 year old nephew, who is at that adorable age of limited communication and mobility, I am baffled by people who kill their own babies but its not for me to say. If the Conservatives were more realistic they should be Pro-Abortion since the ones getting them are folks they'd rather not be paying for anyway. Wanna cut down the costs of Welfare? Duh! Abortions are cheaper than AFDC benefits or college diplomas. If the political parties were more consistent, the Democratic party should be anti-abortion because it gives them more dependent voters and the Republicans should be pro-abortion because it kills off those same dependent voters. Why is the world so perverse? I'm thinking this is yet again the fault of those Middle Easterners. And their insidiously evil Trek-verse that actually includes massive genocide and a dark age as part of their setting.
And somehow a ban on pockets.
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