One of the big epiphanies I had from seeing those reviews was that in the movies’ attempts to make Picard and Data more interesting, it also pushed them way out of character. Picard becomes reckless and quick to anger, and I guess someone got tired of the “emotionless android” thing, so they used Data’s emotion chip to allow Brent Spiner to ham it up for the rest of the movie series… and thoroughly annoy anyone who wasn’t charmed by his performance.

Then the 2009 movie betrays Star Trek in a different way. To me that’s the one that really broke the “odd-numbered rule”, as the way it dumbed things down and emphasized action seemed more in line with the even-numbered movies. Part of its appeal is the broad, in-joke type references to things people remember from the original TV show, so it’s easy to enjoy on a surface level, and I appreciate the difficulty in how many things this single movie had to accomplish; but if you really love the Star Trek franchise as a whole, the 2009 film can leave a bad taste in your mouth, I feel.

any franchise will lose when viewed as some sort of -thon; also, I thought the nemesis and the 2009 crap-athon sucked.

oh, and data is completely different in the tv series, but since the writers wanted to kinda develop his character (which is, by virtue of being a robot, static) by implanting this weird emotion-chip – it kinda killed the “original” data, who was kinda similar to spock from TOS, as in logical, unconcerned with emotions, but really, secretly, envying others for their humanness.

For my part, I enjoyed your perspective on the Star Trek films, but I have to disagree with the questions about why old Trek fans liked the new film. I think the majority of Star Trek fans are fairly casual – they may have seen a great many episodes of the various series, but they’re not so precious with the material that they should mind it being used to take the franchise in a new direction.