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.
there’s a saying that goes something like “democracy is a fresh challenge for each generation.” any trek show that shows what we can be without also exploring how we can (or can fail to) stay there is being overly optimistic at best and dishonest at worst. i agree that the execution often fails, especially in Picard and early Discovery, but later Discovery and Academy are shows not about a distopian future but about carving out a utopia within one. Discovery starts out in the SNW era and even in universe everyone can tell how messed up this crew is- note how Pike treats Disco with kid gloves versus how he treats the Enterprise like a ship of adults- but something very interesting happens when they make the jump to the post-Burn future, where suddenly the worst Starfleet has to offer are the best just because they remember how things could be. That offers them and the fallen federation (and the show) a mutual chance at redemption, and Academy is building off of that without Disco’s baggage. Academy sees the same problems you do with the post-Burn galaxy and are working to turn it back into the one you remember. you could argue about the execution still, but the heart is there