On the End of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

I've just finished Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and I have mixed feelings.  Sure, after watching these characters for seven seasons, you can't help but get a little choked up watching them all go their separate ways in the final few minutes of the finale.  Even if in some cases (like Odo and Capt. Sisko) it's for silly reasons and played off as a permanent, heartfelt goodbye when it could just as easily be a temporary absence for both.  Still, that final shot with the camera zooming away from the station while Jake and Kira watch the wormhole from the promenade was a fitting end.

Honestly, the whole thing was a bit of a slog, and not anywhere near as good as it's usually hyped up to be.  Sisko was a badass captain—and, man oh man, Avery Brooks sure can give Patrick Stewart a run for his money in the Acting™! department.  And, sure, the Defiant is a cool ship (even if it's no Enterprise).  But I just didn't enjoy watching this series as much as Next Generation.  Sure, it had more ongoing continuity, but not enough to stack it up against modern offerings like Farscape or even Stargate.  And it's left me more than a little reluctant to take the plunge into is primary contemporary competitor, Babylon 5 (not that I've ever managed to make it past the first episode of that show).

I'm not quite ready to head into Voyager yet either.  I did vow to finally watch through all of Trek, but DS9 has me a little burned out on it.  Frankly, I don't even feel like I have the stamina to finish The Orville.

Heck, maybe I'm just burned out on TV shows in general.  I swore off procedurals once Castle and Bones started to suck (although I do catch an episode of Elementary every once in a while—but it's not as if that show was ever particularly good to begin with).  I reached a point some time ago where I couldn't even sit through an episode of The Big Bang Theory, and in all that time, the only other sit-com I've taken to watching is Brooklyn Nine-Nine, which is excellent—easily my favorite show on TV right now, and probably (now that I think about it) the only program I'd say that I "watch" with any regularity (which, I suppose, is a level of devotion that sits somewhere between "like" and "fan").  But B99 was on the bubble for cancellation this past season, NBC picked it up from FOX for one final upcoming season, and after that, it'll be gone.  And then I won't be watching any TV at all, and certainly not anything that's airing now.

Well, not unless you count Star Trek: Discovery, but its first season was kind of awful, in the same way that the first season of Stargate: Universe badly mishandled its franchise and misunderstood why its fans love it.  (This must be a common problem in a post Battlestar Galactica reboot world; two out of three Trek reboot movies and every Batman movie since 2005 have suffered from the same flaw.  All this edge for the sake of edge.  Ugh.)  Maybe the next season of Discovery will be better—Stargate: Universe eventually improved as well—but we won't see it for a while.  Discovery has done so well overseas that more seasons will definitely happen, no matter how poor the domestic ratings, but I'm not holding out any real hope that they'll feel like Trek, never mind good Trek.

All in all, it's just mildly disappointing.  Kind of like DS9 itself.