Trek is the only franchise that has enough backstory to make a jump between such diverse elements of the same series feasible. As to RD’s snide remarks, I will be very surprised if no homage is paid during the movie to what came before- or is it after?- whenever.

As for TOS vs. TNG, I just watched TOS straight through for the second time in a couple of years…while the characters are certainly iconic, pound for pound on a quality level, I have trouble ranking it much higher than Enterprise. Outside of its 20 or so outstanding, classic episodes, the writing is atrocious and the story’s (not just the effects and acting and sets) are campy and didactic. That’s not to say that TNG was never campy or didactic, but sheesh, TOS is just hard to watch at times. I can usually watch a full season of Trek in about a month, but it took me three months just to watch season 3. I can’t help but think much of the TOS-love is sheer nostalgia.

Regarding the Kirk/Picard debate–TOS Kirk was about as interesting as those stock-Klingon villains. Maybe he’s fun for some people, but I find TOS boring in how predictable Kirk’s behavior is. We could practically make madlibs using Kirk’s responses for most TOS episodes and plug them in — I bet Kirk is going to fly in the face of authority and do what’s right then sleep with an alien woman. Yippee… Picard is more interesting, but also somewhat predictable. My hands down favorite captain is Sisko. That’s right.

DS9: The main reason I felt I had to post here is that there was a lot of DS9 hate going on with no one sticking up for it–DS9 is, in my estimation, the richest, deepest, most interesting, most fully formed and least predictable Trek. It was the first Trek to make the bold move of working out a huge arc that ran through most of the series, and despite a few missteps within that arc, everything was pretty consistent and engaging. Most importantly, the characters were fallible and real, and rarely predictable. Sure, the show was occasionally didactic, but DS9 had a good deal of respect for its audience, and let us wrestle along with our own conclusions without trying to spell everything out for us. Who cares that the cast wasn’t zooming around the galaxy running into one all-powerful energy being after another and breaking the prime directive 15 times a season–DS9 was about the idea of home in the Star Trek universe. To this day, no Trek has offered as unique or challenging run as DS9. While I look forward to the new Star Trek movie, I know it’s going to be muscle-Trek. There’s a place for that, certainly. But saying that’s the only thing Trek can or should be does a disservice to what should really be remembered as this franchise’s golden age.

Oh yeah. That golden age? Were we to pick a five year span to call Trek’s golden age, I think anyone would be hard pressed to find a better five years than 1991-1996. This time saw STVI, Generations, First Contact, TNG seasons 4-7, DS9 seasons 1-3ish, and the beginning of Voyager.

There was no, nor will there probably ever be, another time when so much excellent Trek is being produced at the same time.