I love character-driven narratives, so DS9 is easily the best Star Trek for me that I’ve seen. I think the only series that I haven’t seen is Lower Decks.

I would claim that Voyager is objectively worse than DS9, though. A big part of it is how many terrible episodes come from each series. With DS9, there are only a few episodes sprinkled here and there that are terrible. With Voyager, it had to be at least 1 out of every 3 episodes that were terrible.

Of course, these two series have completely different standards. Both standards are about whether they deliver an episode that is fulfilling and makes sense.

DS9 is completely serial. A good show has character development and progresses the main plot due to some event or other intrigue that happens. If you don’t like Star Treks where they “boldly stay home”, then all of the Vic Fontaine episodes would be terrible, but Vic was like this perfect tool to try to round out all of the character development at the series end.

On the other hand, a good Voyager episode is a sort of alien of the week. That’s what would make sense, because they were traveling in a straight line home. Yet they nonsensically had all sorts of recurring characters that they came across. Recurring races is fine. In fact, you’d almost expect to have like one or two major races that are the villains per season… but recurring characters? Really??

Voyager could have been the perfection of Roddenberry’s ideal Star Trek. Almost purely episodic. Heroic cast solving problems every episode. They even have the best excuse for taking the ship into the most stupidly dangerous situations. They were desperate for supplies to get home. I don’t know that any Star Trek had such an easy set up. How did they have so many bad episodes??

TNG’s first season can just be skipped IMO. The first time I watched TNG on streaming, I was… surprised… at the quality of season 1.

So you’ve never seen DS9, then.

Still, you’d expect someone who saw it happen to Picard to phrase it better. That’s assuming it’s a direct quote.

That seems like a serious gambit. After all you might be part of the program. Much safer to ask for the arch.

This is unlike Garak at all. He would never close for the week. What about all his customers?!

Nobody says giraffe like that.

If you’ve been to Reddit since the API meltdown, it’s pretty clear that large sections of it were fucked by angry moderators, and still remain that way. I don’t think the fediverse was ready to take over, but Reddit very clearly has fewer people working for them for free.

Specifically, there are several subreddits where they used to be strict about submissions, and now they let anything mildly related in.

I’m honestly pretty surprised that they still haven’t recovered. At this point, I’m hoping that their mediocrity will continue to push people away until Lemmy can catch up.

For holodeck perversion, Barclay has nothing on Quark. And let’s be honest, if holodecks were a real thing, Quark’s programs wouldn’t even begin to touch the depravity you’d see.

Lots of people imagined VR as being the first step to a holodeck, but I think the actual hologram part is not the most important part of the holodeck. It’s the holodeck’s ability to convince people that it’s real.

The holodeck, as presented, uses some sort of AI to generate realistic interactions, and it can imitate the appearance and voice of a human. We currently have similar technology to that with generative AI and deep fakes. So, it’s like we have a couple of the basic components that make a holodeck work, but without the holograms themselves.

But anyways, the point is that we have just a small fraction of the capability available in a holodeck, and with just this tiny amount, people have already created perversions far beyond anything that the writers of Star Trek ever imagined.

Maybe those cables are decorative and reminiscent of the Borg’s sense of aesthetics. I mean, look at their goddamn fashion sense.