Star Trek is about people being sexy and overly dramatic in space. After solving all their problems, humans of the future flew out into the stars to find more problems and have ethical conundrums about them while tricking the audience into thinking about real-world issues.
Earth doesn’t have war, famine or Jeff Bezos anymore so humans formed a club with their alien friends where everybody can just chill and be cool (humans are best friends with a bunch of space elves who have bowl cuts and pretend they don’t feel emotions). Sometimes the club gets into fights with space orcs or cyborg zombies trying to strip everyone of their individuality but it’s usually resolved pretty quickly so they can go back to chilling and exploring space.
Every time they Boldly Go into space they find Weird Shit™ and People Who Are Very Different but this is resolved by doing technology stuff or making dramatic speeches. The elves also have imperialist cousins (dark elves) who sneak around in invisible ships and pop up every once in awhile to try and trick us into getting in a fight with them, but this never works and they end up taking their football and going home.
Star Trek comes in six flavours:
Star Trek TOS (Original Flavour): made in the Sixties. A feminist captain with a weird speech pattern, a charming redneck doctor and a space elf go to space and run into all sorts of crazy things like sentient rocks, Cold War allegories, pouty gods and evil doppelgangers. The captain is gay for the elf, who is half human but very much in denial about it. A Scottish guy fixes the ship. There are lots of fistfights and miniskirts. It also got adapted into a very trippy cartoon in the Seventies! And six movies.
The Next Generation (Sequel Flavour): made in the Eighties/Nineties. Same concept as TOS but there’s more of it. The captain is a bald guy who talks like he’s in a Shakespeare play all the time. There’s also a bearded guy who’s always DTF, a robot who loves to cosplay Sherlock Holmes, and a psychologist (but they mostly just use her as a lie detector). The orcs are our friends now and one of them works on the ship. They spend a lot of time getting stuck in their cosplay machine, dealing with Time Fuckery and the dark elves being sneaky again, and getting kidnapped by a trickster god who has a crush on the captain. Also has four movies that are mostly about the captain and the robot.
(Bald captain has his own show now where he is friends with Space Legolas and they try to figure out if robots are evil. It is a very Different Flavour.)
Deep Space Nine (Story Arc Flavour): made in the Nineties. Instead of flying a ship around they’re on a space station guarding a wormhole to the other end of space (but sometimes they still fly around). This one has plotlines! The captain is a single dad who meets gods in the wormhole and accidentally becomes Jesus to a race of aliens that survived space lizard fascism. His 2nd in command is a terrorist who fought the lizards, his best friend is a trans lady with an immortal worm in her stomach that carries memories of her past lives, and their mechanic is a grumpy Irishman who accidentally becomes best friends with a very annoying doctor. Head of security is a grumpy blob of Jello who can turn into anything he wants. He’s always trying to arrest the bartender, a space goblin who worships capitalism. They end up in a big fight with Nazis from the wormhole. One of the lizards who thinks he is Very Handsome won’t leave them alone. There is also a bi lizard assassin who is so gay for the doctor he turns into a good guy, plus a mean lady Pope and literal demons.
Voyager (Action Adventure Flavour): also Nineties. A lady captain is chasing some dissidents and her whole ship gets thrown to the opposite end of space (not the one with the wormhole). She tries to get them home while dealing with cabin fever, the time police, aliens who try to kill them for trespassing, and a tragic lack of coffee. Her best friend is an elf but is not so Dramatic about it. Later she adopts one of the cyberzombies, and they spend a lot of time flipping the double bird at the cyborg zombie queen. Their Doctor is a hologram who wants to be an opera singer.
Enterprise (Prequel Flavour): early 2000s. Humans are flying around in space for the first time, trying to make new friends (like the blue antenna people) so they can form their club, which doesn’t exist yet. The elves are kind of dicks about it, but they start to come around. The captain is a big lovable dork who gets beat up a lot. His best friend is a redneck and their doctor is a polyamorous puffer fish with a zillion weird pets. After being constantly pestered by the time police for awhile, they then have to stop some zoo people who want to make Earth kasplode. Sadly gets cancelled just as they get down to business.
Kelvin Timeline (Reboot Flavour): there are also three movies with new actors playing younger versions of the TOS characters. An angry miner kills the space elf planet and makes a new timeline where the feminist captain is a horny frat boy and his elf boyfriend is Straight™ and has temper tantrums all the time. Everyone is Cool and there are lots of big spaceships and explosions. Also Benedict Cumberbatch.
Discovery (Modern Flavour): now with Canon Gays™! A grumpy fungus expert figures out how to make the ship fly around the universe with mushrooms. The main character was adopted by elves (the elf guy from TOS is her brother). She’s friends with an adorable girl who never shuts up and a space gazelle man with Anxiety. She gets arrested for awhile but then falls in love with a walking spoiler and they try to stop the space orcs from being such huge assholes. Later they chase an angel around the galaxy and get a new captain whose cheekbones are so sexy they have to save themselves with time travel. This one is still going!
There are lots of people on the internet who will try to tell you which of these flavours is the Good Star Trek and which ones are Bad. Some of them will even say this or that flavour is Not Star Trek. Those people are wrong and you should enjoy whatever flavour you think is the most fun! Some of the flavours start out kind of bland at first but they grow on you, others are too spicy for some people and that’s ok. You might enjoy all the flavours or just one (or even none at all) but the important thing is you get to decide! There are even flavours that don’t exist in the shows or movies! Because the best thing about Star Trek is there’s a lot of it.
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