There seem to be three distinct post-Trek futures:

• genuine big shot actor
• reasonably successful voice actor
• B-movie “star”, featured prominently on the poster and appearing for 5 minutes in the actual movie.

At the same time, the gravity systems are designed by the best engineers in the Federation because they never, ever, give out, even when the rest of the ship is disintegrating.

Yeah, and the problem with the Picard and Data show is that those characters don’t really have a relationship, at least not an emotional connection like Kirk/Spock/McCoy. They basically just had a professional relationship, which was fine for the series where there’s a problem to be solved every episode, and it’s not necessary to have fleshed-out character arcs. But a movie narrative needs to make the audience care about the main characters and their interactions with each other, all within a very short period of time. Picard/Data simply could not provide that emotional core.

Another important factor is TNG’s reliance (sometimes over-reliance) on A/B plots. The B plots were often an outlet for the ensemble characters to come out and play.

I think you can even argue that in each case there are two main characters plus a third wheel (Riker/McCoy).

But McCoy never faded from view, whereas Riker almost became a background character during the second half of TNG. They should have written Riker out of the series after Best of Both Worlds; after the character stuck around, the writers seemed unable to figure out what to do with him.

This is the answer, unfortunately.

I recently had a pretty horrible experience with an AMT Enterprise-D. Bad plastic quality, giant sprue marks all over the place (including on panel lines), and terrible fit. It was like a blast to the past of what model building was during the 1990s, before modern injection molding technology.

Technically, all ships with a functioning command structure are dictatorships. It’s not analogous at all to systems of government for a whole society. In nautical tradition, the captain on his deck is more powerful than the king and pope combined. Things are watered down a bit more nowadays with military regulations, etc., but the point remains that it’s nothing like how civilian societies function.

If we go by historical analogies to the Age of Sail, some of the shenanigans captains got up to were pretty consistent with Star Trek (up to and including getting themselves killed by the natives, like Captain Cook). It’s only modern navies that care so much about the lives of senior staff ;-)

The Enterprise back to being a frigate, excellent.

The idea of the Enterprise-D being a flagship of Starfleet always sat uneasily, because flagships shouldn’t be the ones sent out to explore strange new worlds. You use a frigate for that.

Oof.

Meanwhile, Star Wars is rocking a line of high quality Bandai kits that cost about $30.