I just don’t get it. What is the freaking problem of those directors, trying to rewrite federation into some kind of dystopian tech fascism?
I was annoyed by the first Star Trek movie by JJ Abrams, with those police cops. I was alienated by those anti-android resentments in Picard. I stopped watching Discovery after the first episode, because the main protagonist was sent to some kind of labor prison for disobedience, where prisoners regularly die. I didn’t think it could get any worse but just watching the first 10 minutes of Starfleet Academy makes me want to bury the whole franchise [edit: and stopped watching]. Some drumhead court-martial, lifelong prison sentence, violently separating a mother from her child and some goons beating up a prisoner. How in the hell is this the same federation of TNG, Voyager and DS9?
Star Trek is supposed to be the ONE fiction with a positive, utopian view on mankind and the future. I totally get the attraction of dystopian settings but for that I can read some Warhammer 40k novels. This really makes me furious.
Fortunately there is still Strange New Worlds.
Please spoiler me, when this bullshit in Starfleet Academy gets turned around in some twist, because otherwise I will just ignore the show.
It’s been happening for a while; they keep wanting to make it “darker and edgier” which started with some episodes of TNG (The pegasus) and just kept getting worse (deep space 9).
During TOS, things were not exactly properly utopian either, but I haven’t watched enough to comment properly.
Undiscovered Country was considered too militant by Roddenberry. IIRC Nimoy agreed, but only decades later.
The problem for Star Trek is that utopias are hard to write (they’re considered boring or to cerebral for TV) and are usually reliant on external forces for their conflict. TOS was full of episodes where ‘the other’ upset the utopian balance. While I love/prefer TOS, younger audiences tend to find the episodes unsatisfying, even twee.
Since TNG, conflict has come more and more from within Star Fleet/Federation rather than the monster/planet of the week. That inevitably leads down a darker/dystopian path.
My favorite episodes are the ones where there is some sci-fi problem, and they try to fix the issue. Or they have to mediate some problem with some aliens based on some pragmatic problem. They get presented with some moral dilemmas, and act in a moral way, and go somewhere else.
There’s no need to lie to romulans, bomb planets, etc.
Does that mean you’re a fan of Threshold? Cracking Warp 10 is a sci-fi perform, no? 🤣
haven’t seen the hot lizard on lizard action, maybe when my wife gets to that ep of voyager.
I’d honestly go much further back and put it at The Measure of a Man.
A supposedly eutopian Federation should never have been in a position where it would need to go to trial over whether someone could be compelled to undergo a lethal medical procedure (Maddox admitted he wouldn’t be able to reassemble Data after disassembly), nor be reclassified as property/salvage so they could not legally refuse.
They would never do it with any of the organic humanoids in their ranks, how is Data an exception?
It basically proves Chancellor Gorkon’s words true. The Federation is an organic human(oid)s only club. If you’re not one, then any rights you thought you had go away as soon as it’s no longer convenient.
If Starfleet had wished to take Voyager’s EMH and vivisect his matrix to figure out what made him sapient, nothing would have prevented them from legally doing so, and neither the Voyager nor the Doctor would have legal means of preventing it.
Rights being conditional hardly seems like the kind of thing that belongs in eutopia.
Fair observation, but from my perspective what differs between the Pegasus and Measure of a Man is that the problem in Pegasus was whole cloth institutional. I get what you are saying though, there were no existing legal frameworks for data to reside in that stopped him from even being considered in passing as property, which is bad. However, it seemed to be one guy that wanted to do that, and the trial was held to examine if that would be right or not, and to establish the legal precedent.
Wheras with the Pegasus, the investigation disappears into a hole and not touched since. Instead of punishing Pressman, he gets made Admiral.
https://youtu.be/9eEGmC9FeFU?t=178
At the same time, Starfleet also enabled it. The entire case would have never happened if it had just been Maddox asking for Data’s voluntary participation. Part of it was that Starfleet was trying to compel Data to submit to the procedure, and also prevent him from leaving Starfleet to avoid it (hence the property angle).
We also know that the ruling was constrained to that one case both from Voyager, where it was outright stated to not apply to the Doctor, and because Data also had to fight Starfleet to prevent them from taking away Lal. While the fight was ended early as Lal died (possibly as a result of the emotional stress), it would not be too surprising if another legal battle resulted. Maddox might have started the events of Measure of a Man, but he was not singularly responsible for that whole business.
We don’t actually know what happened from after the Pegasus’ cloaking device was revealed, other than that Pressman and the rest of his crew were likely to face court martial (and Pressman had “high-up friends” in Starfleet). He was promoted to Admiral before it was exposed, and it’s unclear what he was promoted for, since he was already Admiral when he tried to get it back.
Just a stickler here, he was made Admiral after the mutiny and whatnot during the first cloaking trials, which happened before the episode (and before he was made admiral), which caused the cover up discussed in the scene I linked.
We don’t know what happens to any of the plot points after Picard De-cloaks in front of the Romulans.