Star Trek: Discovery

[Labster]

With hindsight, TNG can fee very sterile at times. Part of it's the art direction and lighting style - but it's very placid and calming. It's an aesthetic that works for some episodes, especially when there's a lot of thinking involved which needs a calmer environment. It doesn't work for others. TNG was, a lot of times, the anomaly of the week, with a puzzle to solve. It didn't really feel about people.
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Unlike those smily, happy robots on their cruise liner. It's not a joke, that I think Data was the most human thing on that boat.

A certain Tiffany Susan Pompoms would like to have a word with you...

But OK, I get your argument.  But that interpersonal distance is, in some ways, a lot like real life workplaces.  I don't know hardly anything about my coworkers.  I know that one of them has a daughter (or maybe two?), and some people are married.  But mainly we just work together to solve problems.   And yeah, people make mistakes, but then we work together to fix it.  And it's not like there's moral ambiguity in what we do either.  So sure, you can argue TNG is boring, but I don't think you can argue it doesn't reflect reality.

At one point in the episode, Lorca loses his patience with Burnham's obsession with ethics and barks, "This is a ship of war!" At that moment, the series signaled its complete break with Star Trek series of the past. I couldn't help but hear an echo of Guinan's line from the TNG episode "Yesterday's Enterprise," when the ship has accidentally slipped into the wrong timeline and become a warship. Only Guinan can sense the change, and she tells Picard, "This isn't a ship of war; it's a ship of peace."
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Perhaps during troubled times in history, we need a character like Burnham to show us what it means to strive for moral progress, despite personal and political disaster.

Siiiiigh.  The Original Series came at a time that was far darker than now.  Far darker.  CIA and KGB throwing proxy wars across the southern hemisphere.  The Cuban Missile Crisis.  Rampant racism and discrimination across the civilized world.  Regular famines.  Basically everything in "We Didn't Start the Fire".  Smallpox was still around.  Largely, these problems were solved or defused with a liberal helping of modernism in the form of international law, equal rights movements, and science.

I reject the hypothesis that we live in dark times.  We live in stupid times.  We've lost the vision of progress that we used to have, and we need Trek and others to provide that vision.  Back to Dartz:

They're relatable to people who feel far more depressed and uncertain of themselves and live in a world that feels likes it's on the brink - even as it's subtly getting better.

You're right.  Or at least I hope you're right.