An interesting, deliberately thought provoking 🤔 question for a lazy long weekend Sunday morning…
Setting aside whether specific fans like specific ‘gimmicks’ (crossovers, musicals, bringing back Kirk or Khan) or tropes (transporter malfunctions), Space.com is posing the hypothesis that the proportion was too high in Strange New Worlds second season.
There’s no arguing that the season was successful in drawing in large audiences week after week. Taking a look back though, was there too much trippy-Trek(TM) dessert and not enough of a meaty main course? YMMV surely.
For my part, I can both agree that trippy Trek is something I’ve been wanting more of, and that I would have welcomed 2 or 3 more episodes were more grounded or gave the opportunity to see more of Una as a leader and dug into Ortegas backstory.
The 90s shows seemed to be bit embarrassed by trippyness, although Voyager found its pretext allowed even stern Janeway to pronounce ‘Weird is our business.’ One can argue that the high proportion in SNW is a feature, not a bug.
I’d still prefer a 12-15 episode season though.
Controlled technology and not easily built from scratch even by Starfleet engineers.
The Relaunch novelverse expanded the concept and importance of industrial replicators. When Voyager returned to the Delta Quadrant, she led an small ‘Full Circle’ fleet that included a large engineering ship that did have industrial replicators large enough to reconstruct ships when severely damaged.
Lowere Decks and Prodigy have brought industrial replicators into onscreen canon.
Prodigy gave the Protostar prototype ship an industrial replicator large enough to construct shuttles. Lower Decks has shown the Cerritos and other ships tasked with delivering and bringing online very large industrial replicators on planets seeking Federation support.