[Ghoulish Delight]

To me, yeah, they are now different characters...and that's kinda why I like it. As I sat and struggled with the surprising fact that I liked it in spite of my dislike (which does mirror mp's reasons) of the alternate timeline device, I tried to think of another way to accomplish the same effect of dropping the 40 years of baggage that I liked about it.

I came up with two alternates. One was in the model of Next Generation. Set it in the future, start over with new characters. But that's an obvious non starter at this point. It worked for Picard and crew, but the amount of "canon" is now so great that there's just no way to go far enough in the future to be entirely divorced of it. And while I would have been more impressed by them creating new, interesting, likeable characters than by cultivating impressions of the old characters, fans (myself included) at this point have massively high standards for what any cast of characters should be like that it's a tall order to meet those expectations with something new and original that doesn't feel derivative.

The 2nd thought was along mp's comic book reasoning. But unlike comic books, there has been a (sort of) unbroken timeline/body of canon for the last 40 years. I can't even count the number of versions of the Batman origin story I've seen, they reboot that series every 5 years in one media or another. For them to just create a parallel version out of thin air, entirely unrelated to the timeline that's been obsessively picked over, I don't think it would have been embraced.

So I understand how they came to the device they chose. It semi-plausibly DID put things in "the same universe" while explaining how things can be completely different and not just a rerun of what we already know. I just don't think Trekkers would have been accepting of the comic-book model of redoing origin stories. If there's no in-universe explanation for the differences, they'll just reject it.

That's why, for me, I'm okay with this, but not okay with Midichlorians. It claimed to be the same universe with no explanation for the massively stupid inconsistencies. Sure, in this they pulled it off a little clumsily, and yeah, I did think things like, "He's supposed to be just as good a captain having grown up without a father as he was having grown up with a father? Really?" But the relief I felt of not having to fit everything I was watching into what I knew and whether it made sense with later events outweighed all of that for me.