kieron115
Oh, right, the Orions. For sure Gene put quite a bit of his prejudices into the races, which then got amplified by early Trek writers’ tendency towards mono-cultures, and I think all of Star Trek has had trouble trying to figure out how to fix it. Enterprise decided to just lean into the stereotypes hard though for some reason. The Ferengi were an anti-semetic caricature in TNG until the DS9 writers worked to expand their culture on screen and move away from some of Gene’s more troubling stereotypes. Hell, they had an entire arc where Rom and Leela worked to literally dismantle the existing Ferengi culture into something more aligned with Starfleet ideals. It took until Lower Decks, a 30-some odd minute cartoon, for them to do something similar with the Orions. So I guess the point of this ramble is that, while nothing is gonna change these old episodes, if you wanna see some positive progress for the Orions I would highly recommend watching LD if you haven’t already!
I really enjoy season 4 (except These Are The Voyages… lets not talk about that.) but I think it’s definitely fair to say that the sheer adrenaline ride that was season 3 slows down a bit after the Xindi threat is resolved. You end up with a lot of these standalone arcs that, like you said, are focused on building connections with existing Trek (the augment trilogy leading into Affliction/Divergence is a good example) or arcs designed to set up the founding of the UFP. It’s clear that they were also leading into the Romulan war which was only ever mentioned in passing in TOS. In that context I think the slightly slower tempo season 4 would have made an excellent breather between the two.