Welp, The Rise of Skywalker might have been a bitter disappointment, but at least Star Trek: Picard seems good.
I am… not a real huge fan about how now the Federation is enacting immensely racist species bans, going “no, fuck YOU” to refugee populations in need, and has its own Fox News. And this is all happening out in the open with apparently enthusiastic support from the populace.
Discovery was already very eager to turn the Federation into some grim, depressing future space government and I don’t need another series deciding that that’s precisely what we need to make it ~interesting~ because post-scarcity utopias are boring somehow.
Giving the Federation a bit of a dark side is fine; it’s run by people and people are flawed. But ultimately the Federation, from TNG onwards, is in fact supposed to be a space utopia. It’s sins, when they happen, are meant to be ones of ignorance, of omission and individual bad actors, rather than of commission, of deliberate and vicious malice.
I know people are already rearing up to go “But what about Section 31!” And Section 31 is precisely my point. Section 31 is a rogue, illegal conspiracy of baddies with no sanction that, when 99% of Federation citizens find out they exist, are appalled by and immediately spring into action to try and get rid of.
Or look at Admiral Leyton. (The coup guy from Season 4 of DS9.) Leyton is trying to turn the Federation into a police state… and he understands that Federation society is so utterly and completely repelled by this notion that he is going to have to lie to EVERYONE, even his co-conspirators, to make it happen, and his entire thing collapses when a simple, basic appeal to Federation values is made to his literal right-hand woman and even SHE rejects him. Which was the point.
Only now in Picard we’ve got Space Fox News going “no migrant caravans!” and the Federation council going “gosh, some members of this race did a crime, better ban that race.” And I’m just. I’m so tired. Can they please let us have Star Trek? Can we have ONE setting where things aren’t shitty? Can we have one thing that says “hey, if we all pull together, we CAN overcome our worse natures and build this great utopian project?”
Is this so much to ask for?
I see what you’re saying, but there’s a part of me that thinks Picard is the perfect viewpoint character for a story about the Federation losing its way. When you talk about Star Trek’s optimism, you have to acknowledge that the original series, and The Next Generation even more so, were Cold War stories, and rooted in the perception of the West, and particularly the US, as bastions of democracy, equality, and civil rights, as opposed to the totalitarian, repressive Klingons and then Romulans. Even if you ignore how slanted that perception is, and just take Star Trek as its own vision of a utopian future, it feels obvious that there’s less value in telling this kind of story in 2020. That a story about the Federation losing its way and becoming insular and suspicious of outsiders after the loss of its ideological enemy, a terrorist attack, and the carnage of the Dominion war is more appropriate to this present moment than the type of story TOS and TNG were telling in the 60s and 80s.
My real question is what the purpose of this all is. If it’s just a way of making Picard look like a hero (as in Insurrection, or what the Abrams movies do with Kirk), or an awkward 9/11 allegory (as in Star Trek Into Darkness), or just, as you say, the belief that there’s nothing interesting to be said about a utopian society (as in Discovery), then yeah, I agree that it’s hardly worth doing. But if it’s actually a story about living in a society that has lost its way and not knowing what to do about that - or if you can even do anything - then that feels like a story we could use in this moment. And as I said, Picard feels like the perfect character to give that story to. One of the things I wrote about when I rewatched The Next Generation in 2011 was how, coming to the show as an adult, it was hard to escape the impression that Picard believed in the Federation more than it believed in itself. Insurrection may have been an over the top exploration of that concept, but it carried forward ideas already established in the show itself, in which Picard frequently clashed with admirals or the Starfleet brass over whether to uphold the Federation’s core values, and the proteges he tried to mold into Starfleet officers took one look at what Starfleet was outside the limits of Picard’s control and ran for the hills. An old Picard who has been forgotten and dismissed by society trying to make one last stand for the values he believes in strikes me as entirely appropriate to the character.
(I’m more bothered by the use of the Romulans, who really shouldn’t be refugees - the Romulan Empire would have had colonies outside its home system on which to resettle the millions displaced by the supernova, and Starfleet’s only contribution to that effort should have been in evacuating and transporting these people. Also, if you’re going to treat Nemesis as canon for the purposes of establishing Data’s death, you should probably also acknowledge that Romulus had a sister planet whose inhabitants were enslaved by the Romulans. Did Picard’s Dunkirk plan also include relocating the Remans, and if so, were they going to remain slaves?)
I’m also pretty sure it’s inaccurate to call “synths” an alien race rather than a technology, though obviously the fact that this is a new term that everyone is acting like we should recognize is a bit problematic. I’m a bit concerned about this throughline, because Star Trek has always struggled with the concept of artificial life. The Next Generation had Data and treated him as completely unique, even as holodeck characters routinely achieved consciousness. Voyager went a little further with the concept of holographic people, even suggesting that they were being used to perform menial or difficult labor (without dialing back their intelligence or self-awareness, for some reason), but treated the Doctor’s outcries against this situation with disdain, often chiding him for making his human crewmates feel bad with his [check notes] agitation against slavery. Even Picard assumes that holographic beings who are at least semi-intelligent can be used to perform certain types of labor without the ability to stop or refuse, as in the Index who greets visitors to Starfleet Archives. I’m not sure the show is equipped to handle an SFnal concept as thorny and complicated as this one.
(I’m also annoyed that Dahj and Soji were created by Bruce Maddox after Data’s death. Data had the right to create children out of his own body. Maddox, who wanted to create an entire race of Datas for reasons he never articulated but which were widely understood by everyone around him as sinister, absolutely did not have the right to take Data’s positrons and make new people out of them.)
