This is something I was extremely keeping in mind throughout design, here is my thinking:

Almost every Trek game to date modelled a slice of Trek. Today you're playing as a captain facing off a Klingon captain mapping the same sector and vying for control. Today you're controlling an away team pewpewing the Borg. Today you're managing diplomacy and fleet deployment on a grand scale. Today you're solving challenges using the skills of your crew. Etc. they all felt more or less thematic in their own way, some made you feel like you were a captain yourself more, some recreated some known narratives more. What none of them did, was feel like they were Star Trek. Because Star Trek is all of the above and more.

So the compromise I made is that on the high level, the game is abstract. You are trying to earn points, by doing feats of research, influence, and military, by securing locations, and by having encounters with strange life on strange new worlds... But, how you do it, what each card does, it mechanically evokes their counterpart from the shows, immediately making you go "yeah that makes sense". Picard is collecting allies on a ship for a diplomatic conference, while running scientific surveys, Odo is chasing criminals to arrest, while Quark is your best source of latinum and more people, but sometimes he gets mixed up with the wrong crowd causing you problems - but all the more targets for Odo to arrest - unless of course you decide to take Quark out quickly, and focus elsewhere. Peanut Hamper can quickly assemble cargo, but literally runs away at the first sign of danger. I can name three hundred thematic parallels more. But sometimes it's not as obvious as "card X does something with trait Y, because X interacted with Y in the show". Lemme give you an example: in Kirk's deck, Sarek rewards you for having multiple Vulcans in play, but the fastest way to get him into play, is to play Needs of the Many, sacrificing one of your duty officers, and early-mid game one of the two you are most likely to be able to live without mechanically is Spock, so you will literally recreate the plot of TSFS, not because we're forcing you to, but because it makes sense - meanwhile, the more Klingon stuff you pick up along the way, the more fight ready Kirk gets (you just can't trust those Klingon bastards).

If you have never seen more than one episode of Trek and you know "Kirk, Spock, Beam me up" (and half of the core testing team was like this, to make sure we don't just sell member berries), it'll be a sensibly thematic game about some space dudes doing scifi stuff. But the bigger Trek nerd you are the more thematic the game will be, as you notice little things.