Is it Cake? season 3, obviously lol

home soil, which was just like the platonic ideal of what i feel like a solid star trek episode should be

I think we would get along quite well. You're obviously a person clear of thought with good taste.

I really believe that the advent of good-quality CGI on a TV show budget combined with writers' lack of self discipline was Star Trek's decline. Starting with the latter half of DS9. All those Dominion War battles where hundreds of ship were blowing up every few minutes after getting hit just once certainly attracted the Star Wars crowd, but they had none of the emotional intensity of something like TOS's "The Conscience of the King" (which is the third best Star Trek episode ever), or TNG's "The Survivors" (#2), or DS9's "Duet" (#1). Starship battles should be slow, ponderous affairs akin to WW2 naval battles, and certainly not an every-episode thing. I feel like the finale starship battle in "The Undiscovered Country" is the platonic ideal of what a starship battle should be. The Enterprise and Excelsior in that movie felt heavy in a good way. Their rugged and powerful design declared "Don't mistake peaceful for weak" to any foreign power looking to start shit with the Federation.

I wasn't concerned about the hundreds-per-second crew kill count during DS9's "Sacrifice of Angels" when so many ships were blowing up so often. I was looking at my watch. I just wanted the battle to end so we could get back to the unfolding drama happening on occupied DS9. I was far more emotionally affected by TOS's "Balance of Terror" during the final scene in the ship's chapel. One death that hit harder than countless anonymous starship crews.

One of the things I really like about "Lower Decks" is that the writers do have the self-discipline not to write huge battles scenes for all the episodes, which they could easily do with animation. They save the big dramatic battles for a handful of episodes, and their rarity adds to their emotional impact. I don't think the USS Cerritos even fires on another ship in the whole first season. I would eagerly watch anything that this series' writers are involved in in the future, because it is the best-written Star Trek anything in literally decades.

And I'll say this here because "Lower Decks" is on my mind: the design of its comm badges and the design of the California-class itself parallel each other beautifully. Both are relatively simple and practical designs, no ornamentation or even complex geometry here. The comm badge is just a black-rimmed Starfleet-delta. And the California-class is just a round saucer, two nacelles, and a simple engineering hull. But the practicality and simplicity of both designs is a kind of elegance of its own. This is working hardware, not flashy hardware. This is hardware for the ones who roll up their sleeves. Which I literally just realized that Mariner does too. It's all making more sense now.