Honestly, I didn't think it worked for me as much as I wanted it to because it implies the Federation has ghettos and hate crimes.
Is Season Two Episode Two one of the best episodes of any Star Trek Series?
- Thread starter Vulcana
- Start date
Of course it does. It's an alliance of hundreds of worlds.
The comfortable trekkie notion of a Federation Utopia can't coexist with their exaggerated image of Trek as commentary on the real world except in the most self-flattering sense. I'd rather have a little of the commentary, when it's not too heavy-handed, since it's more important to the original core values of the property. There's a big difference between a "better, hopeful future" and a perfect world.
The comfortable trekkie notion of a Federation Utopia can't coexist with their exaggerated image of Trek as commentary on the real world except in the most self-flattering sense. I'd rather have a little of the commentary, when it's not too heavy-handed, since it's more important to the original core values of the property. There's a big difference between a "better, hopeful future" and a perfect world.
Last edited:
The Federation is required to be aspirational while other worlds outside it are the place that aren't. Basically, it's all too eays to say, "We'll never be rid of racial hatred, poverty, and strife" while Star Trek goes, "What if we could be?"
But that's my view.
Basically, only other people have shortcomings. We're above all of that. We can uplift them, lecture them, or ignore them. Increasingly, Trek has favored the third option.
Yes, the Federation is us. We're meant and encouraged to identify with them. Don't pretend otherwise.
This is exacerbated by the fact that the franchise has nothing to offer but familiar moral platitudes as "help."
"War is bad, mkay?"
Feels real good, don't it? Facile, smug and sooo reassuring.
Last edited:
Yes, we actually get better as a species. If you believe that's impossible and that we should have hate crimes in the future, I don't know what to tell you.
Season 2, Episode 2 says that even if we abolish war, poverty, and intolerance on old matters, we'll still terrorize children and drive them to death based on entirely new arbitrary distinctions.
It's depressing as hell.
Trek is not a documentary about "the future." It's fiction about human beings. It's not at all depressing when characters we care for stand up to help one another in the face of injustice and unfairness, whether the story is set in the 18th century or the 23rd.
In Utopian Trek, all our stalwarts can do is lecture the primitives on how they have to overcome their baser selves before being allowed in live in Federation Suburbia. It's encouraging to see the franchise grow out of that and return to what it once was. Stories like "Errand of Mercy" or even "A Taste of Armageddon" were not about Kirk and Spock living in a Utopian future. In fact they could not be told as they were if based on such a premise.
Shimmerman once said that he had the best part on DS9 because Quark was the only one who was allowed to act fully human. He was right.
Don't you think there's a limit, though? Una describing something out of Kristallnacht is very different from the federation being "flawed." It's the same with the idea that Section 31 was doing Nazi-like experiments during the Dominion War on the Changeling prisoners. There's "we aren't perfect yet" and "The Federation in engaged in crimes against humanity."
At what point did "the Federation," an interstellar alliance, do those things? Or did you mean some Federation citizens and organizations that are part of the alliance did them?
"Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach" was one of the most gripping episodes of Trek I've seen in decades.
If the producers had granted Pike the easy out of a triumphal (and laughable) Picardian denial, the story would have been ruined.
"Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach" was one of the most gripping episodes of Trek I've seen in decades.
If the producers had granted Pike the easy out of a triumphal (and laughable) Picardian denial, the story would have been ruined.
Last edited:
We've seen throughout Trek history that bad actors persist.
Similar threads
- Locked
