The “Very Short Treks” series was created by Casper Kelly, the mastermind behind “Stroker and Hoop,” “Too Many Cooks,” and the Cheddar Goblin sequence from “Mandy.” Kelly clearly has a twisted sense of humor, and handing him “Star Trek” is like handing a handkerchief to a hay fever sufferer and then asking them not to get any mucous on it. Of course, Kelly created one of the silliest — and dumbest — “Star Trek” projects to date, mocking the franchise relentlessly, and doing so with the participation of many of the show’s various cast members. 

The idea behind “Short Treks” was to pay homage to “Star Trek: The Animated Series,” which turned 50 in 2023. Kelly animated all his shorts in the style of “Animated Series,” which was produced by Lou Scheimer’s famous Filmation studio back in the day. Kelly, however, was clearly not interested in traditional “Star Trek” stories about exploration and diplomacy, nor was he interested in making small character studies of well-known Starfleet characters. Instead, he created aliens with underwear heads. He made a species that considers it polite to wipe boogers on visiting Federation officers. He created a character named Ass Face. 

“Star Trek” can certainly stand some irreverence, as its main characters tend to be stuffy, ultra-formal, uniform-wearing diplomats. And goodness knows I love a good booger joke or Ass Face gag. But I don’t know what the heck this is. It knows enough about “Star Trek” to make inside jokes, but it also seems to hate the series. One might say that “Very Short Treks” is all in good fun, but that would only be true if it were fun. 

When “Short Treks” debuted in October 2018, it seemed to have a mercenary function. At the time, the first season of “Star Trek: Discovery” had just come to an end, and its planned second season wouldn’t debut until the following January. CBS All Access (not yet named Paramount+) clearly wanted to keep subscribers on the hook until then, so the network seemingly rushed “Short Treks” into production, releasing one short every few weeks, just far apart enough to keep the monthly subscription fees renewing. The shorts were clearly very low-concept, and most of them were filmed on mostly empty “Discovery” sets, usually with only a few actors on hand. 

Few of the shorts are standouts, and they didn’t get truly creative until later in the show’s run. In the second season, “Short Treks” ran its first animated episode, called “Ephraim and Dot,” directed by noted composer Michael Giacchino. The short followed the adventures of Ephraim, an outsize spatial tardigrade, as it infiltrated the tiny tunnels in the hull of the U.S.S. Enterprise. It was pursued by a repair drone, Dot, that aimed to eject it. Thanks to a few glimpses through portals, Ephraim was inside the Enterprise during the events of “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” and “Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.” 

The second animated episode of “Short Treks” was called “The Girl Who Made the Stars,” and was directed by Trek regular Olatunde Osunsanmi. This one was about a young Michael Burnham (the main character from “Discovery”) listening to an old African folk tale told by her father. It has very little to do with “Star Trek” and is only okay. 

Indeed, most of “Short Treks” is only okay. Despite its fitful moments of ambition, it always felt a little mercenary, done for financial reasons instead of creative ones. It never had the thrill of something like “Liquid Television,” and never added importantly to Trek canon. You can skip it.

The beleaguered “Star Trek: Prodigy” was infamously canceled while its second season was in production, and unceremoniously dropped from Paramount+ altogether. The show was eventually picked up by Netflix, which aired its second season, but many Trekkies wondered why “Prodigy” warranted such harsh treatment. Was it the CGI animation? Was it because it was aired by the kid-friendly Nickelodeon? Was it the elongated story arcs? It’s hard to say.

It could have been because “Prodigy” started out in a very non-“Star Trek” place. At the start of the series, the main characters — a group of runaway teenage slaves — had never heard of Starfleet before, and had never encountered a Starfleet vessel. In the first few episodes, though, they find an abandoned ship called the U.S.S. Protostar, board it, and are instructed on how to use it by a hologram of Captain Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) of the U.S.S. Voyager. Despite the “Star Trek” iconography, the villains and action made “Prodigy” feel more like “Star Wars.” 

Over the course of the series, however, the teen runaways — operating at the behest of the hologram Janeway — began to think of themselves as a crew that had to work together and employ their personal expertise in creative ways. By the end of the first season, they are all in Starfleet back on Earth, happy to have outgrown their dark past. “Star Trek,” the show argues, is better than “Star Wars.” 

The second season was an even more elaborate story about time travel, retrieving the Protostar from villains, and reuniting many old, familiar faces. The show seems shaky at first, but quickly becomes pretty great. It didn’t deserve its fate.

If one were particularly daring, one could rank “Star Trek: The Animated Series” even higher than the original “Star Trek” series. Gene Roddenberry oversaw its creation, and many of the original show’s writers returned, this time unbound by the limits of live-action special effects. The show’s animated medium suddenly allowed “Star Trek” to become truly alien, featuring impossibly crafted starships, aliens with multiple limbs, underwater episodes, and a visit to the planet where Satan lives (yes, really). Also, because the series was only 30 minutes (as opposed to the original show’s one-hour time slot), the writers had to be more efficient in their storytelling, allowing plots to unfold more naturally and engagingly. Some may find the following statement heretical, but there was less extraneous character stuff. 

The biggest problems with “Animated Series” are that it cut corners as often as possible, leaving a lot of the animation static and dull to look at. There are many extreme close-ups of characters’ faces where only their mouths are moving. Backgrounds are reused to a noticeable degree, and the exact same three music cues can be heard again and again and again. “Animated Series” could get creative with its aliens and visuals, but they didn’t really move around a lot. 

Still, the writing was sharp, and many of the episodes dealt with heady themes and weird sci-fi ideas just like the original “Star Trek.” Its two seasons can likely count as the final two years in the U.S.S. Enterprise’s five-year mission — which only took eight years to complete. 

Prior to its release in 2020, “Star Trek: Lower Decks” started out on the wrong foot. It sold itself as a comedy version of “Star Trek,” which wasn’t what Trekkies wanted at that time. You can’t undercut your own franchise’s seriousness from within, Paramount. That was the job of satirists. And indeed, the first episode of “Lower Decks” wasn’t very good, stressing a flippant, “Family Guy”-style sense of humor inside the “Star Trek” universe. Things didn’t bode well. 

But then “Lower Decks” got to its feet and took off at a sprint. Its premise was novel, in that it was a series about the undervalued, lower-ranked officers on a starship, the ones who have all the crap jobs. Additionally, it took place on an unimportant Starfleet vessel, the U.S.S. Cerritos, that never took care of terribly important missions. “Star Trek” is a vast universe undergirded by a complex bureaucracy and a fleet of grunt workers, all of them required to make sure that a utopia can be achieved. For ensigns, though, it doesn’t always feel like a utopia. Sometimes it feels like you just have a s***ty job. 

The brilliance of “Lower Decks” came, though, as its main characters began to grow. Ensign Beckett Mariner (Tawny Newsome) liked people to think of her as a rule-breaking firebrand, but she is eventually interrogated about her behavior, and she reveals some serious insecurities at work. The series develops naturally, all while remembering that these people have terrible jobs and screw up more often than “Next Generation” characters. It’s one of the best Treks of them all.