Star Trek

Star Trek is indeed flourishing (especially Strange New Worlds, in my opinion), but I wouldn’t say Star Wars is stagnating. They just don’t happen to have anything new out right this minute. Many franchises would love to be “stagnating” with shows like The Mandalorian or Andor.

The challenge of storytelling in the Star Trek universe and the Star Wars universe are very different challenges. In Star Wars, the main story has already been told. From Episode I to Episode IX, you have the Skywalker Saga, and all other stories told on the side must be, in some way, in service of either that or to the broader events in the galaxy that bring it about. Every story in the SWEU service that main storyline, and even when they stray off to try to have their own story, they always come back to it again and again, eventually becoming part of it themselves.

Now, this isn’t a bad thing. One thing that has made this work for so long is how good the writers - especially Dave Filoni - seems to be at fleshing out the universe in which the SWEU exists. The man has a gift for worldbuilding. Not only does it take place in a civilization seemingly tens (or possibly hundreds) of thousands of years more advanced than ours, the whole civilization occupies most of the galaxy and regularly travels around it rather quickly, as opposed to how, in Star Trek, the galaxy is still a very big place, and traveling long distances like they often do in Star Wars could take years, if not decades. And it’s got a lot more characters than we see in Star Trek because there’s a lot more shows that have gone a lot more places and done a lot more things. An entire galactic rebellion didn’t just happen when some farm kid had his aunt and uncle murdered and picked up an old laser sword that some hermit gave him. and the entire Galactic Empire didn’t just go away when they lost power. There’s a lot to explore there, story-wise. And they have. That’s the problem.

It’s just too much all at once, and people get exhausted just trying to keep up. In Disney’s never-ending thirst for profits, they just kept pumping out content, and people kept gobbling it up. It’s not that it wasn’t pretty great stuff, it’s that they released so much and have told so many stories and have covered so much ground that people are kind of getting tired of it. It’s not necessarily that people are bored or that the content isn’t good, it’s that Star Wars, itself, is starting to wear thin. And there’s still plenty more story to tell, but people need a break. It’s been non-stop Star Wars content since 2001, and for the last few years, it’s been a deluge of it. It’s just too much for a lot of people, and it ruins how special Star Was is if it’s so common that’s impossible to avoid.

Star Trek can like that, too, though. If too many shows are coming out at once people will lose interest because it becomes less interesting and special, even if the quality is still high. Sometimes the quality suffers as a result, too. I think both franchises could benefit from turning down the firehose of content releases to more of a steady stream.