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.
Waste and trash also aren’t an issue because of the aforementioned replicators. Waste and trash become the food. Energy is cheap, next to free, and about as clean as can be.
Why would you live in squalor when you can just as easily push a button and teleport the trash and grime into the nothing?
Education is cheap and easy because we have both plenty of educated people, and sentient AI. Same for medicine.
It’s one of the few pieces of media that has traditionally outright agreed with the spirit of what you’re saying. There’s no need to shit on its message that if we find the cause to work together, we have it within us to develop fully automated luxury gay space communism because we’re more alike than we are different, and an exploration of those differences will bring us together.
The difference between a post scarcity society and the good place is that it’s not that there’s no problems, it’s that there’s no significant material problems. And it’s not like the entire galaxy was like that.
Cynicism becoming conflated with realism is boring.
At it’s heart, the expanse was explicitly not post scarcity, so comparing it’s treatment of inequality with one where those problems have been solved is silly. It’s like saying the expanse is unrealistic because their spaceships are too fast, and Apollo 13 is a more realistic portrayal.