One of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s missions was to give coherence to a world originally developed as a frame for the one-off episodes – completely disconnected SF stories using the same stock cast and setting – of the original series.

There’s an abortive first season plot about corruption in Starfleet that’s dropped once it’s established Starfleet isn’t interesting enough to bear more weight than as a plot device telling the Enterprise where to go this week.

Something underappreciated as a success though is that the original series had scads of godlike but trickstery or inhuman beings because individual writers (the Trek franchises were famously full of episodes by published SF writers and continued to take freelance episode pitches well after this had been widely abandoned in TV) kept finding the notion of the Enterprise dealing with one a solid premise.

And in TNG we instead get Q, this type condensed into a single recurring character, introduced in the pilot, getting 6 episodes to himself and then blessing the finale, going on to appear in other Trek shows across multiple galactic quadrants (also, basically My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, as the John de Lancie-voiced season 2 big bad Discord)