I also love Star Trek: Voyager, and I would warn Jelena to keep her hopes down when watching DS9. It mostly stinks. It's a much more character-driven show than the other Star Treks, and each of those characters starts out mildly interesting and then gets less and less compelling as the show goes on. For example there was one character who was interesting because he was so not human, and the writers gave him a clichéd human love story and then magically turned him human. That's just one example; almost every character has similar progression. And their idea of character development is usually just having a character babble on and on and on about childhood stories whose psychological impact on the character is never seen in the present. There are 36 episodes of the show worth seeing (out of 176 total); I'll send you a PM with the list.
I saw the new movie twice. That ought to tell you what I think of it. There was no chance I wouldn't like it, since the guys behind it are the guys behind some of my favorite shows like Fringe and Lost. (I think the "Red Matter" was a reference to their show Alias, which prominently and repeatedly featured floating red spheres made of weird liquid.) I agree that I could have done without what they did with Uhura, but I can see why they did it: she's kind of a worthless character, as she was. Now that having black people on the bridge isn't a big deal anymore, she needs to have more of a reason to be there.
I think that's something which they did exceptionally well: at the end of the movie you want all the original characters to be in the next movie, and not just because they used to be there. They found a way to get each and every one of those characters to work and seem like an important element of the series, and since that wasn't the case in the original show that's impressive.
The only major problem I have with the movie is that it feels like a pilot episode, but it's not a TV show. In TV shows, having a story which only exists to set up the status quo is fine, because the next week (or a few months later) you're getting the next one. But when we're not going to see the next movie for years, it's kind of annoying. Both times I walked out of the theater, I felt like I'd like to see the second one right now. Which is good for their business, I guess, but it also means there's something missing from this one. There was no plot. The characterization was great enough that that didn't bother me while watching, but then you get to the end of the movie and nothing's happened.
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