I think the modern writers have forgotten that some of those gimmick episodes of TOS happened because they had a shoestring budget and had to reuse whatever cowboy or city set was available.
I think the modern writers have forgotten that some of those gimmick episodes of TOS happened because they had a shoestring budget and had to reuse whatever cowboy or city set was available.
I think it would have been great if they had actually committed to what is intriguing about a pre-Federation humanity; especially after the criticisms of liberal utopianism that were fleshed out in DS9. They didn’t though, it mostly manifested as vague, “racism bad,” stories where political tensions are a consequence of misunderstandings or external bad actors, and not the struggle to reconcile fundamentally oppositional material and political interests.
The Xindi arc was at its most interesting when the tensions within the Xindi were focused on, but that was itself shortlived and reductive. It’s all just a bit flat unfortunately, even though there are a lot of really interesting ideas and a decent production behind them.