Discovery definitely feels like it, especially since you have people still arguing quite animatedly about how it’s not Star Trek, and might have Ruined Star Trek Forever, though I would rather imagine much of it to be recency and accessibility more so than much else.
The other shows are a bit less accessible, even if they are newer, since CBS moved it onto their streaming service, and off of Netflix, whereas Discovery aired on Netflix around a time when Netflix was one of the bigger streaming platforms out there, and more people who aren’t as into Star Trek or other CBS properties might encounter it incidentally.
But for the most part, every single successor to Star Trek has always been controversial, and deemed to have ruined it forever, though most of it abates when the next show comes around, and is then deemed to have ruined Star Trek forever.
Though TNG was by far the least deserving of it.
I actually wonder about that. Most of the complaints, like the ones about Stewart being a shakespearean actor who wouldn’t be able to handle the rigours of serious television, or being bald were nonsense, but there was a lot of good reasons to complain about early TNG. A fair chunk of the early episodes weren’t very consistently good.
We know it to be better in hindsight, but if The Next Generation had started today, and not only is the second episode a rehash of a Star Trek (1966) episode, but the fourth was Code of Honour? I would also be inclined to criticise it for being quite bad. There’s a good reason why a lot of the advice for people watching TNG is to stick around until Season 3, or start from Season 3, since that’s when it gets better.
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 18 hours ago
I think the series with the worst long lasting impact is Voyager. VOY Borg are really bad compared to TNG Borg. PRO uses TNG Borg, which is great, but LDS suffers for its VOY Borg and I heard PIC stinks because it makes VOY Borg the main villains.
T156@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
I don’t know, TNG could be up there, but it was also generally influential as a whole, so both its good and bad ended up getting carried over.
The entire exploding bridge trope came from it, as did evil admirals. It also set up the Enterprise as the flagship, with the best and brightest of Starfleet. Which also meant that people generally assumed it to be the norm, and that the hero ship was some special ship, when it was a normal ship of the line in TOS.
They are, but more due to issues with overuse more so than anything. In TNG, we saw the Borg for all of 4 times. In Voyager, they were shown much more frequently.
But as far as the timeline goes, it also wouldn’t make sense to show an earlier iteration of the Borg, not when they were severely affected by the actions of the Borg.
I’d honestly argue that which version of the Borg to be a minor issue in Picard. Picard’s bigger problem was that it didn’t seem to know what it wanted to be, and kept leaping between multiple different plots and story lines, which confuses it a bit.
It arguably have been better if it has taken one of those plots, and run with it for the entire show. Like the matter with Synths and former Borg drones being treated as subhuman, vindicating the concerns Guinan and Picard had in the Measure of a Man, or visiting the TNG crew and seeing where they are now. As it actually was, it seems like the writers/producers felt that now they had Patrick Stewart, they wanted to do everything before it was too late, and the result was a bit of a mishmash.
The issue with the Borg tends to be more that they really aren’t very much of a threat by the end of Voyager, and were dealt such a blow that it would be almost impossible to ignore.
Their greatest threat, assimilation, is trivially curable, and it’s now known that their assimilation abilities are one of their greater weaknesses. The Federation might have issues with infecting someone with a pathogen to make the Borg assimilate them and self-destruct, but others have no such qualms, and we know of at least one species that did use such methods (Icheb’s parents).
Their adaptation is a greater issue, but even older Federation ships, like the galaxy-class saw good effect just cycling their weapons frequencies. The Voyager’s ablative armour would be well-studied after they returned to Starfleet, and dedicated anti-Borg weapons would have both been in active development, and also use.
As of the events of First Contact, it’s also known that not only are there Borg ruins on Earth that may still be intact and active, but that Borg ships are not as truly uniform as they seem, with Picard pointing out a weakness in a Borg cube that dealt catastrophic damage to it. Local signals, what he felt, scans of what remains of the area, and everything would have been thoroughly studied to determine how to both find and exploit those weaknesses on other Borg cubes, without a former privileged Borg unit at the helm.
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 3 hours ago
The bigger issue is the Borg queen. TNG Borg were the ultimate egalitarians. The ultimate communists. The federation’s ideals brought to an extreme.
VOY Borg are… a monarchy?
The best thing they could do in future lore is reveal that the Borg queen is a fake, invented purely to manipulate the psychology of individuals.