Star Trek/YMMV

Series

• The Original Series
• The Animated Series
• The Next Generation
• Deep Space Nine
• Voyager
• Enterprise
• Discovery
• Picard
• Lower Decks

Movies

• The Motion Picture
• The Wrath of Khan
• The Search For Spock
• The Voyage Home
• The Final Frontier
• The Undiscovered Country
• Generations
• First Contact
• Insurrection
• Nemesis
• The 2009 film

Expanded Universe novels

• New Frontier
• Deep Space Nine Relaunch
  • A Stitch in Time
• The Lost Era
  • Terok Nor
• A Time To...
• Vulcan's Soul
• Titan
• Destiny

Comics

• Assimilation²
• Star Trek vs. Transformers

Video games

• Online

Franchise as a whole

• Acceptable Political Targets: Given that the Federation is a culture that celebrates diversity, it should come as no surprise that the writers generally have a left-wing bent, taking very harsh jabs at Conservative policies when the opportunity presents itself.
• Acceptable Religious Targets: Gene Roddenberry was a staunch atheist and blasted the "Religion Is Wrong" trumpet whenever he could. At best, religious planets are still in the Dark Ages, their development halted by the heavy religion in their society. At worst, they're pure evil. Though it seems that Hinduism is treated decently.
• Alternate Character Interpretation: After Hours had a blast pointing out the horrifying undertones to Federation Society.

Dan: So Star Trek and Next Gen are about a resource rich society that is in such a creative rut they will send the Enterprise, humanity's finest ship out to unexplored corners of space just to find new life and new civilisations. Novelty is the most precious commodity there is! This is a profoundly bored people, so jaded, that they will load up their children and women onto a heavily armed warship and send it just out... just go! Just go somewhere and find me something interesting and tell me about it?!

• Broken Base:
  • How dark should Star Trek be? Given that Gene Roddenberry envisioned TOS as a utopian future, some fans insist that Star Trek should always be Lighter and Softer than other sci-fi while others argue that as long as the morals of Starfleet and the message of hope are intact by the end, the franchise can easily tell Darker and Edgier stories without issue. In fact, those fans argue that making Trek darker makes the happy ending and message of hope more impactful.
  • And related to that, how action-y should Star Trek be? When the Kelvin timeline brought more traditional Hollywood action to the franchise, some found it a Star Wars ripoff while others welcomed it, noting that there had always been fistfights in Trek, but they were now shinier.
• Contested Sequel: Star Trek XI (referred to by some fans simply as 'the Abrams film' or similar) has caused a Broken Base within Star Trek fans between people who only like the old Trek, people who only like XI, and people who like both.
• Creator Worship: The Great Bird of the Galaxy himself. Rick Berman, Ronald Moore and J. J. Abrams are a bit lower on the hierarchy. Brannon Braga is, unfortunately, often villainized for what happened with Voyager and Enterprise.
• Crowning Music of Awesome: Various theme songs.
• Fan Dumb: Quite possibly Ye Originale Fan Dumb, at least in the sense we think of it today. Mercilessly skewered in the documentary Trekkies, which featured the juror who wore her Star Fleet uniform to court and one fan who seriously thought about getting his ears surgically altered to look Vulcan.)
• Fandom Heresy: In the right circles, saying Star Trek has become "too preachy" will, at the very least, get you looked down upon and mocked given that Trek has always been preachy about left-wing policies.
• Fandom Rivalry: Star Wars vs Star Trek is the Fandom Rivalry. The internet in The Nineties was flooded with Trekkies and Star Wars nerds debating who would win in a fight. In The New Twenties however, it's died down as the two franchises have moved away from one another, tonally, and both have faced internal schisms regarding their new media.
• Fountain of Memes: A Long Runner like Trek has spawned more than a few. "To boldly X where no one has Y'ed before", Resistance Is Futile, green chicks, and KHAAAAAAN! are some of the more memorable.
• Franchise Original Sin:
  • Most of the things Trekkies hate about Star Trek: Voyager and Enterprise were already very present in the much-lauded middle seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and even in Star Trek: The Original Series; things like the anomaly of the week, the malfunctioning holodeck, the evil versions of regular characters, the shuttle crash plots, and the B-plots that feel like a soap opera. But it wasn't until later in the franchise that they really started to grate on viewers, since it finally started to seem like the same thing over and over again.
  • Most complaints about Darker and Edgier takes on Trek; the violence, the swearing, a Humans Are Flawed take on Starfleet; can easily be found in the much lauded Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. But since this was the first show to do it, and was marketed as the oddball of the Trek shows of the 1980s and 1990s, these aspects could easily be overlooked as one-offs. And, before and after the Myth Arc started, DS9 had many of the usual apolitical Monster of the Week episodes, something that also gave the characters more time to process and address everything that had happened, rather than the overt serialization that defined Trek from Star Trek: Discovery onwards.
  • Most complaints about Trek "going woke" following its return to television in 2017. These viewpoints and morals were always there in Star Trek but the older shows generally presented the issues by looking at alien societies and using metaphors that could obfuscate the issues and messages to those not paying too much attention. From 2017 onwards, a lot of the morals are presented when looking at the flaws in human society, making Trek‍‍'‍s political biases unmissable.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • Gets along well with Doctor Who. The Doctor and Guinan have a popular, though platonic, Crossover Ship.
  • After John deLancie was cast as Discord (largely an expy of Q) in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, Trek became very friendly with My Little Pony.
  • Though there are some Fandom Rivalry feelings, it's largely in this state with Seth MacFarlane's Spiritual Successor, The Orville.
• Ho Yay: Every series has at least one hugely popular slash pairing, and sometimes more than one. Slash fans will insist these characters want nothing more than to do each other, no matter how heavily contradicted by canon.
  • Kirk/Spock (or Spirk) is the original Slash pairing.
  • Spock/McCoy from TOS.
  • Picard/Q from TNG.
  • Garak/Bashir and Bashir/O'Brien from DS9.
  • Janeway/Seven from VOY.
  • Archer/Reed, Tucker/Reed and Reed/Hayes from ENT.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: In the 30th anniversary special, there is a skit featuring the cast of Frasier serving on the USS Voyager under Janeway. At one point, a Klingon beams aboard with the dog, which had been digging up azalea bushes on the Klingon homeworld. Janeway remarks, "Now you see why we shouldn't have pets on starships".
• Mary Suetopia: Roddenberry's vision for Trek, but especially the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
• Memetic Loser: The Redshirts.
• Misaimed Fandom: Marina Sirtis, Councellor Troi, once opined that anyone on the political right who enjoys Star Trek is this, noting that the franchise promotes the opposite message. Given that Trek shows push themes, often heavily, of progressivism and acceptance of differences, it's not hard to see how she arrived at this conclusion.
• Only the Creator Does It Right: Some viewers refuse to watch anything from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine onwards given that Gene Roddenberry didn't create them.
• The Problem with Licensed Games: Star Trek has been notoriously variable with the quality of its forays into interactive entertainment - partially because distilling the essence of the best episodes of the series into a truly interactive format is goddamn hard. The "best" Trek games to date have been somewhat more combat-focused than many of the shows really were. Of course, the fact that the license keeps bouncing between hands and developers (unlike Lucas Arts, who've been refining their Star Wars offerings for the better part of two decades now) has not helped matters in the slightest.
  • The two genres which are widely considered to have been most adaptable are strategy games (Star Trek Bridge Commander, Star Trek Armada, et al) for the combat elements, and point and click adventures (Star Trek: 25th Anniversary (video game), Judgment Rites, A Final Unity) for their episodic nature and ability to explore some of Trek‍'‍s more ponderous aspects. 25th Anniversary and A Final Unity in particular are often held up as being the closest you can get to actually playing interactive episodes of their respective television series, complete with the complete original casts providing the in-game voices of their characters (which helps a lot with the atmosphere).
• Sequelitis: It began with the very first episode of Voyager, but by the time Insurrection rolled around, even major critics were noting that the franchise was taking a fairly serious and noticeable dip in quality. Enterprise and Nemesis are "credited" with coming within a whisper of killing the franchise (Nemesis being the only Trek film in history to not turn a profit). Thankfully the reboot saved it.
• Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped: Constantly. The longest running one in the franchise is that a better future is possible, but good people have to be willing to stand up and fight for it.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The media that discusses the Andromeda galaxy constantly hints that some great cataclysm has shattered the hyper-advanced civilizations and they've been trying to come to the Milky Way but this is never expanded upon. Though this is somewhat justified by the sheer distance between the galaxies.
• Values Dissonance: While every Star Trek show and movie is progressive for their time, they're also of their time. Looking back, especially at TOS and early TNG, can often leave fans cringing at attitudes that were perfectly acceptable at the time those shows were made.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Watching a later Star Trek episode is almost like watching a movie in television show form. The best examples would likely be "The Best of Both Worlds" (TNG), "The Way of the Warrior" (DS9), "Scorpion" (VOY) and "Twilight" (ENT). Of the movies the favorites are Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek: First Contact and Star Trek.

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