Comment by mschild
10 hours ago
I agree, but when rewatching older Trek shows it is also a bit infuriating how nothing really has an impact. Last season of TNG they introduced the fact that warp was damaging subspace. That fact was forgotten just a few episodes later.
I think Strange New Worlds walks that balancing act particularly well though. A lot of episodes are their own adventure but you do have character development and an overarching story happening.
> when rewatching older Trek shows it is also a bit infuriating how nothing really has an impact
TNG: You get e.g. changes in political relationships between major powers in the Alpha/Beta quadrant, several recurring themes (e.g. Ferengi, Q, Borg), and continuous character development. However, this show does much better job at exploring the Star Trek universe breadth-first, rather than over time.
DS9: Had one of the most epic story arcs in all sci-fi television, that spanned multiple seasons. In a way, this is IMO a golden standard for how to do this: most episodes were still relatively independent of each other, but the long story arcs were also visible and pushed forward.
VOY: Different to DS9, with one overarching plot (coming home) that got pushed forward most episodes, despite individual episodes being mostly watchable in random order. They've figured out a way to have things have accumulating impact without strong serialization.
> Last season of TNG they introduced the fact that warp was damaging subspace. That fact was forgotten just a few episodes later.
True, plenty of dropped arcs in TNG in particular. But often for the better, like in the "damaging subspace" aspect - that one was easy to explain away (fixing warp engines) and was a bad metaphor for ecological anyway; conceptually interesting, but would hinder subsequent stories more than help.
The wildest dropped Arc were the absolutely horrifying mind control parasites. But like that the warp core speed limit I see why, you'd have to change the whole tone of the show if you wanted to keep them as a consistent threat.