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.
A goal to work toward. A hope that if we keep fighting, there will eventually be a future where people don’t have to fight. That there is a path toward humanity reaching it’s peak, rather than an endless sisyphian struggle until our extinction.
It’s not “things could be fine without struggle or setbacks”, Star Trek makes it VERY clear that it was not a smooth and easy path toward fully automated gay space communism. It’s history of humanity is riddled with wars and uprisings and cultural slides backwards. But there is the idea that there could be a better future someday. Where greed and inequality are almost foreign concepts in society. Where science and reason finally win out against superstition and ignorance.
It may be a fantasy, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to hold onto a belief that things will not always just continue to be shitty forever. Never forget the words that can make a happy man’s joy turn to ash, or a sad man’s misery into hope:
This too shall pass.
Neither does Star Trek. But neither the franchise nor I are so naive that we think that there’s a “mission accomplished” state in which bad things don’t happen any more.