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.
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.