The failure to save Romulus and the likely refugee crisis from the Romulan Empire collapsing might have really stressed Federation resources and sensibilities?
Black lives matter.
Law and Order ≠ Justice
ACNH Island Isla Cero: DA-3082-2045-4142
Captain of the SES Comptroller of the State
The failure to save Romulus and the likely refugee crisis from the Romulan Empire collapsing might have really stressed Federation resources and sensibilities?
If you watch the new short, it also looks like the Federation had a major incident from within:
The Federation becoming isolationist kinda sucks to me given the state of the galaxy by the end of TNG/DS9/VOY.
The Federation has just won a war with the Klingons and Romulans as their allies
The Klingons are now run by Martok, brother of Worf and friend of the Federation. Worf is even Federation ambassador.
The Romulans just had their corrupt Senate executed and then lost their homeworld, putting them in a similar situation to the Klingons in Star Trek 6.
The Obsidian Order and Cardassian military have been destroyed, leading the way for a civilian government.
The Dominion have been defeated and Odo is introducing them to the possibility of living alongside solids peacefully.
The Borg have been neutered.
The Ferangi are embracing regulation and other progressive ideas.
Like, this is the perfect time for the Federation to doing the most outreach they have ever done in thier existence.
From my own experience, I saw the Berlin Wall fall, the USSR dissolve, and China become more open to the West. Seemed like everything was going to go great!
I'd rather watch stories about space exploration against a backdrop of maintaining a coalition of galactic powers, then watch stories about how something bad happened and made everything get worse, just like my own misrable reality.
I like my Star Trek being optimistic escapism.
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Inquisitor772 x Penny Arcade Fight Club ChampionA fixed point in space and timeRegistered Userregular
so has nobody talked about the Star Trek Picard Short Treks episode or what?!
It was interesting!
I've basically excised Discovery from my brain, so thanks for the heads up. Guess I'll look into it.
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SnicketysnickThe Greatest Hype Man inWesterosRegistered Userregular
I have no idea where I could watch this in the uk, I know the previous lot are buried under extra features or something on Netflix but I suspect that won't apply for this one.
The Federation becoming isolationist kinda sucks to me given the state of the galaxy by the end of TNG/DS9/VOY.
The Federation has just won a war with the Klingons and Romulans as their allies
The Klingons are now run by Martok, brother of Worf and friend of the Federation. Worf is even Federation ambassador.
The Romulans just had their corrupt Senate executed and then lost their homeworld, putting them in a similar situation to the Klingons in Star Trek 6.
The Obsidian Order and Cardassian military have been destroyed, leading the way for a civilian government.
The Dominion have been defeated and Odo is introducing them to the possibility of living alongside solids peacefully.
The Borg have been neutered.
The Ferangi are embracing regulation and other progressive ideas.
Like, this is the perfect time for the Federation to doing the most outreach they have ever done in thier existence.
From my own experience, I saw the Berlin Wall fall, the USSR dissolve, and China become more open to the West. Seemed like everything was going to go great!
I'd rather watch stories about space exploration against a backdrop of maintaining a coalition of galactic powers, then watch stories about how something bad happened and made everything get worse, just like my own misrable reality.
I like my Star Trek being optimistic escapism.
That's kinda what I think Trek is, personally. Even DS9 and it's Big Fucking War ends with peace and with a move towards mutual understanding.
The Federation becoming isolationist kinda sucks to me given the state of the galaxy by the end of TNG/DS9/VOY.
The Federation has just won a war with the Klingons and Romulans as their allies
The Klingons are now run by Martok, brother of Worf and friend of the Federation. Worf is even Federation ambassador.
The Romulans just had their corrupt Senate executed and then lost their homeworld, putting them in a similar situation to the Klingons in Star Trek 6.
The Obsidian Order and Cardassian military have been destroyed, leading the way for a civilian government.
The Dominion have been defeated and Odo is introducing them to the possibility of living alongside solids peacefully.
The Borg have been neutered.
The Ferangi are embracing regulation and other progressive ideas.
Like, this is the perfect time for the Federation to doing the most outreach they have ever done in thier existence.
Yeah well, when the soviet union collapsed, some people were calling it "the end of history", and look where that got us
The Federation becoming isolationist kinda sucks to me given the state of the galaxy by the end of TNG/DS9/VOY.
The Federation has just won a war with the Klingons and Romulans as their allies
The Klingons are now run by Martok, brother of Worf and friend of the Federation. Worf is even Federation ambassador.
The Romulans just had their corrupt Senate executed and then lost their homeworld, putting them in a similar situation to the Klingons in Star Trek 6.
The Obsidian Order and Cardassian military have been destroyed, leading the way for a civilian government.
The Dominion have been defeated and Odo is introducing them to the possibility of living alongside solids peacefully.
The Borg have been neutered.
The Ferangi are embracing regulation and other progressive ideas.
Like, this is the perfect time for the Federation to doing the most outreach they have ever done in thier existence.
Yeah well, when the soviet union collapsed, some people were calling it "the end of history", and look where that got us
But when the Picard producers first approached the actor, Stewart was uninterested in returning to the character who defended a utopian vision when he felt the real world had taken a dystopian turn.
Stewart says, in a post-President Trump and post-Brexit world, the United States and the United Kingdom, in particular, distanced themselves from what the United Federation of Planets — Star Trek's fictional interstellar union of planets that share democratic goals — represented.
"The European Union always made me feel, well, we are heading towards our own Federation of Planets somewhere down the line that will come about. And I am angry, disappointed and embarrassed by our decision to leave the Union," the English-born actor said in an interview with Weekend Edition Sunday.
Much like Picard, Stewart is uninterested in playing a part — fictional or not — if it doesn't mesh with his beliefs.
It wasn't until the producers described the transformed landscape they envisioned for Picard that Stewart got on board. "The Federation" has swung isolationist, and the new Picard is very different.
"My interest was intensely sparked," he said.
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Gabriel_Pitt(effective against Russian warships)Registered Userregular
edited January 2020
MtFHA* - "Make the Federation Humane Again."
*
I'm sure a Klingon could pronounce that.
Gabriel_Pitt on
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HardtargetThere Are Four LightsVancouverRegistered Userregular
edited January 2020
i mean my worry on picard is already happening based on this short treks which is that to save money they are just recycling discovery shit. like the CG for the ships being built at Utopia Planitia were all disco ships from 100 years earlier, etc
we'll see how the actual series is. continuing to keep my expectations low.
Yeah, when I was watching the short, the production design looked very DISC era. I knew we were getting a Picard-era related episode but didn't clue in this was it until the end.
Star Trek is the king of bootstrap effects; A lot of their models in TNG on are repurposed Macross kits they bulk imported from Japan. One of my favorite anecdotes is that Captain Garret was killed by a VF-1 Valkyrie.
The failure to save Romulus and the likely refugee crisis from the Romulan Empire collapsing might have really stressed Federation resources and sensibilities?
If you watch the new short, it also looks like the Federation had a major incident from within:
"Rogue Synths Attack Mars"
lol
I'm imagining the Federation being attacked by an army of Robert Picardos who watched Photons Be Free.
The Federation becoming isolationist kinda sucks to me given the state of the galaxy by the end of TNG/DS9/VOY.
The Federation has just won a war with the Klingons and Romulans as their allies
The Klingons are now run by Martok, brother of Worf and friend of the Federation. Worf is even Federation ambassador.
The Romulans just had their corrupt Senate executed and then lost their homeworld, putting them in a similar situation to the Klingons in Star Trek 6.
The Obsidian Order and Cardassian military have been destroyed, leading the way for a civilian government.
The Dominion have been defeated and Odo is introducing them to the possibility of living alongside solids peacefully.
The Borg have been neutered.
The Ferangi are embracing regulation and other progressive ideas.
Like, this is the perfect time for the Federation to doing the most outreach they have ever done in thier existence.
Yeah well, when the soviet union collapsed, some people were calling it "the end of history", and look where that got us
But when the Picard producers first approached the actor, Stewart was uninterested in returning to the character who defended a utopian vision when he felt the real world had taken a dystopian turn.
Stewart says, in a post-President Trump and post-Brexit world, the United States and the United Kingdom, in particular, distanced themselves from what the United Federation of Planets — Star Trek's fictional interstellar union of planets that share democratic goals — represented.
"The European Union always made me feel, well, we are heading towards our own Federation of Planets somewhere down the line that will come about. And I am angry, disappointed and embarrassed by our decision to leave the Union," the English-born actor said in an interview with Weekend Edition Sunday.
Much like Picard, Stewart is uninterested in playing a part — fictional or not — if it doesn't mesh with his beliefs.
It wasn't until the producers described the transformed landscape they envisioned for Picard that Stewart got on board. "The Federation" has swung isolationist, and the new Picard is very different.
"My interest was intensely sparked," he said.
The original Trek was released right smack dab in the middle of the cold war, during Vietnam even.
Hell, TNG was half over by the time the Berlin Wall came down.
The idea that because the world is dark and terrible, we need to double down on cynicism is incredibly unappealing to me . If anything, we need the optimism of classic Trek now more than ever.
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Inquisitor772 x Penny Arcade Fight Club ChampionA fixed point in space and timeRegistered Userregular
The Federation becoming isolationist kinda sucks to me given the state of the galaxy by the end of TNG/DS9/VOY.
The Federation has just won a war with the Klingons and Romulans as their allies
The Klingons are now run by Martok, brother of Worf and friend of the Federation. Worf is even Federation ambassador.
The Romulans just had their corrupt Senate executed and then lost their homeworld, putting them in a similar situation to the Klingons in Star Trek 6.
The Obsidian Order and Cardassian military have been destroyed, leading the way for a civilian government.
The Dominion have been defeated and Odo is introducing them to the possibility of living alongside solids peacefully.
The Borg have been neutered.
The Ferangi are embracing regulation and other progressive ideas.
Like, this is the perfect time for the Federation to doing the most outreach they have ever done in thier existence.
Yeah well, when the soviet union collapsed, some people were calling it "the end of history", and look where that got us
But when the Picard producers first approached the actor, Stewart was uninterested in returning to the character who defended a utopian vision when he felt the real world had taken a dystopian turn.
Stewart says, in a post-President Trump and post-Brexit world, the United States and the United Kingdom, in particular, distanced themselves from what the United Federation of Planets — Star Trek's fictional interstellar union of planets that share democratic goals — represented.
"The European Union always made me feel, well, we are heading towards our own Federation of Planets somewhere down the line that will come about. And I am angry, disappointed and embarrassed by our decision to leave the Union," the English-born actor said in an interview with Weekend Edition Sunday.
Much like Picard, Stewart is uninterested in playing a part — fictional or not — if it doesn't mesh with his beliefs.
It wasn't until the producers described the transformed landscape they envisioned for Picard that Stewart got on board. "The Federation" has swung isolationist, and the new Picard is very different.
"My interest was intensely sparked," he said.
The original Trek was released right smack dab in the middle of the cold war, during Vietnam even.
Hell, TNG was half over by the time the Berlin Wall came down.
The idea that because the world is dark and terrible, we need to double down on cynicism is incredibly unappealing to me . If anything, we need the optimism of classic Trek now more than ever.
I think this erases the darkness present in the original show while ignoring the difference between making a show that addresses how to be heroic and idealistic in current realities and immature and nihilistic “grimdark” SF.
like isn't the best trek just learning to stand up in and against the darkness anyway?
my problem is a lot of the (wider internet fandom) critiques aren't asking if this setting acts as a foil to Picard or if those themes will be explored and worked through. they're just like surface level federation should never be dark, while not really considering all the other times the federation already was dark.
I don't know where or how the destruction of romulus fits into this timeline but at least this is past shinzon wrecking up the place, a rogue starfleet admiral or two, and multiple existential threats to the federation. I'd expect there were lots of differing political fights on how to react to each of those between idealism and isolationism and i'd assume any longstanding governing force alternates between periods where one outweighs the other.
like maybe it is just surface level and doesn't play into the story at all, but that's not the sense i've gotten from the trailers so far. and I want to explore a story that has a wounded federation looking at it's own identity and learning where we heal and go from here, all with the help of a retired standard bearer who once was our moral paragon to the galaxy before something we did made him turn his back on us.
To all the people in my mentions: The Federation is "colonialist" because every second episode involves a literal Federation "colony."
The Federation is largely a network of "colonies" and "outposts" held together by a "fleet." I mean, pay at least minimal attention here.
Some people have countered that the Federation is supposed to be a *contrast* to the 1990s United States, and that's true in terms of conscious intent, which is why I'm pointing out it totally fails on that basis in hindsight.
It's a utopian and critical self-portrait, but it's still a self-portrait—down to the ways it promotes the denial of the obvious (e.g., the Federation empire's ludicrous denials that its heavily armed fleet is a military force, or that humans enjoy supremacy in the Federation).
The other thing that's come up in replies is the Prime Directive. It doesn't change the *structure* of the Federation, but does it disprove charges of colonial *aggression*? Maybe, but only in the way the principle of national sovereignty is today—imperfectly, to say the least.
At best, the Prime Directive protects only a narrow kind of people: humanoid civilizations that aren't *too* humanoid and civilized. At worst, it's treated as pure fiction in practice.
But the Prime Directive is mostly irrelevant to my thesis anyway, since Federation colonialism is based on the same cultural myth of abundant "empty" land that European colonialism was. "In the beginning," as John Locke says, "all the galaxy was America."
So TNG has a really interesting blend of Euro-Americans' most romantic notions of historical European colonialism (or what they think it should have been) with idealization of their own society and its power systems in the age of the End of History and of Democratic Enlargement.
It's very seductive for Americans of my generation (or thereabouts), raised on a set of powerful old cultural myths and contemporary expectations of real-life greatness, to game out that mix of historical phenomena as they "should" have been.
I'm not being ironic: Psychologically speaking, it's attractive. I genuinely *like* TNG.
(A lot of replies now are leaning hard on "but those planets *were* empty!" as a defense against the charge of colonialism, which means they're missing my point that the whole thing is wish-fulfillment—a chance to have one's cake and eat it too.)
It's a fantasy of being the anticolonial colonizer, the liberating empire—the same fantasy I grew up with for America's place in the world.
It's like America's hegemonic viewpoint is so delusional that its propaganda turns into science-fiction that is completely unrecognizable to its advocates and critics, and enjoyed for its fantastical elements.
this seems like a good time to post a star trek cultural analysis by a professor of US history!
The other thing that's come up in replies is the Prime Directive. It doesn't change the *structure* of the Federation, but does it disprove charges of colonial *aggression*? Maybe, but only in the way the principle of national sovereignty is today—imperfectly, to say the least.
At best, the Prime Directive protects only a narrow kind of people: humanoid civilizations that aren't *too* humanoid and civilized. At worst, it's treated as pure fiction in practice.
except that they had a whole fucking show exploring how the Federation interacts with a society on these very fringes. The only correct thing in this entire post is that Star Trek isn't real.
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Gabriel_Pitt(effective against Russian warships)Registered Userregular
To all the people in my mentions: The Federation is "colonialist" because every second episode involves a literal Federation "colony."
The Federation is largely a network of "colonies" and "outposts" held together by a "fleet." I mean, pay at least minimal attention here.
Some people have countered that the Federation is supposed to be a *contrast* to the 1990s United States, and that's true in terms of conscious intent, which is why I'm pointing out it totally fails on that basis in hindsight.
It's a utopian and critical self-portrait, but it's still a self-portrait—down to the ways it promotes the denial of the obvious (e.g., the Federation empire's ludicrous denials that its heavily armed fleet is a military force, or that humans enjoy supremacy in the Federation).
The other thing that's come up in replies is the Prime Directive. It doesn't change the *structure* of the Federation, but does it disprove charges of colonial *aggression*? Maybe, but only in the way the principle of national sovereignty is today—imperfectly, to say the least.
At best, the Prime Directive protects only a narrow kind of people: humanoid civilizations that aren't *too* humanoid and civilized. At worst, it's treated as pure fiction in practice.
But the Prime Directive is mostly irrelevant to my thesis anyway, since Federation colonialism is based on the same cultural myth of abundant "empty" land that European colonialism was. "In the beginning," as John Locke says, "all the galaxy was America."
So TNG has a really interesting blend of Euro-Americans' most romantic notions of historical European colonialism (or what they think it should have been) with idealization of their own society and its power systems in the age of the End of History and of Democratic Enlargement.
It's very seductive for Americans of my generation (or thereabouts), raised on a set of powerful old cultural myths and contemporary expectations of real-life greatness, to game out that mix of historical phenomena as they "should" have been.
I'm not being ironic: Psychologically speaking, it's attractive. I genuinely *like* TNG.
(A lot of replies now are leaning hard on "but those planets *were* empty!" as a defense against the charge of colonialism, which means they're missing my point that the whole thing is wish-fulfillment—a chance to have one's cake and eat it too.)
It's a fantasy of being the anticolonial colonizer, the liberating empire—the same fantasy I grew up with for America's place in the world.
Seems mostly just a bunch of silly and cynical bullcrap.
Some ancillary silliness first:
"Starfleet is a heavily armed military force!"
Except they literally say it's not and it doesn't act like one. The US military of the 80s and 90s did not wander the planet doing scientific expeditions and diplomatic missions. But this is a pretty standard silly argument from some corners of the internet.
"Humans enjoy supremacy in the Federation"
It's called an effects budget.
"the Prime Directive protects only a narrow kind of people: humanoid civilizations that aren't *too* humanoid and civilized"
Just ... did you watch the show? One of the most famous episodes of TOS is them learning about non-human organisms and TNG itself has several episode I can think of with a similar theme. I'm not sure what the point of any of this really is honestly, it's such a bizarre read on even the scattershot and ever-changing nature of the prime directive.
The meat:
"The Federation is colonialism because it's composed 'colonies' and 'outposts'"
Or it's because that's the kind of stories it's telling. We know there's a bunch of not-colonies and not-outposts. They talk about them frequently and visit them occasionally.
"Federation colonialism is based on the same cultural myth of abundant "empty" land that European colonialism was"
What the heck show are you even watching dude? TNG spends most of it's run not going around colonizing much of anything. I'm not sure where the colonial politics he's imagining here is.
Basically it seems like he's trying to read "TNG is a colonial fantasy because it's a universe full of empty planets" into the fact that Star Trek is explicitly an episodic show about wandering around solving sci-fi problems. The only point of any of this stuff is that it's a setting reset every week. It's a twitter hottake. I'm not sure where he's getting the actual colonialism parts of colonialism from here either.
shryke on
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CambiataCommander ShepardThe likes of which even GAWD has never seenRegistered Userregular
It's not that Gene's vision of peace didn't matter, but it's you have to admit it's at least partially contradicted by the actual text and no amount of "nuh-uhs" will ever change that.
It's the reason Star Trek remains incredibly popular among my MAGA family members. (While Interstellar, of all things, is considered "too woke")
Cambiata on
"If you divide the whole world into just enemies and friends, you'll end up destroying everything" --Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind
Listen I've loved this franchise as long as I can remember, but I think the repeated cries of Starfleet not being military are kind of nonsense.
No matter how much you fuse your diplomatic and scientific corps to it, your military is still your military. When there is a martial threat to the Federation, there is not some other organization they call upon to go into battle. The flagship of the Federation is an ostensibly diplomatic vessel that still carries enough firepower on board to obliterate nations if the crew was so inclined. They are still a military organization. When O'Brien served in the Cardassian War, that was as a member of Starfleet, not some other Federation institution.
It's an idealized Utopian military, but it's still a goddamn military.
Also: a military that is occassionally asked to dislodge indigenous American tribes from their new homeland because again part of the point of the Federation as a thematic aesthetic is to be Space America.
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MonwynApathy's a tragedy, and boredom is a crime.A little bit of everything, all of the time.Registered Userregular
Yeah like the Federation has colonies but they're explicitly not European-style colonialism. That's literally the point of the Prime Directive. (NB: I initially put First Amendment here, which I find amusing.)
If Star Fleet acted like real-world historical colonial powers they'd be selling pre-warp civilizations hand phasers in return for the right to settle Space Manhattan Island, and while I'm sure someone can dig up an episode where a jackass admiral did exactly that I'm also 100% certain that the episode ends with Kirk/Picard/Sisko reading that admiral the riot act and imprisoning them
Like there's this thing where whenever this critique is brought up that everyone freaks out like we're about to try and cancel star trek.
Like, no, Star Trek is still fine. It's a good series and has done a lot to advance progressive causes and inspire hope to become better people and a better society.
But that doesn't mean there aren't real issues in the show thanks to the culture that birthed it that we can critique, learn from and use to grow the franchise and tell meaningful stories for the present and its struggles
Listen I've loved this franchise as long as I can remember, but I think the repeated cries of Starfleet not being military are kind of nonsense.
No matter how much you fuse your diplomatic and scientific corps to it, your military is still your military. When there is a martial threat to the Federation, there is not some other organization they call upon to go into battle. The flagship of the Federation is an ostensibly diplomatic vessel that still carries enough firepower on board to obliterate nations if the crew was so inclined. They are still a military organization. When O'Brien served in the Cardassian War, that was as a member of Starfleet, not some other Federation institution.
It's an idealized Utopian military, but it's still a goddamn military.
Also: a military that is occassionally asked to dislodge indigenous American tribes from their new homeland because again part of the point of the Federation as a thematic aesthetic is to be Space America.
Except it's not a military and the idea that it must be one because it also serves as a military is nonsense. The Enterprise is heavily armed because it's wandering the galaxy running into things that occasionally require some weapons and shields to deal with. But it's also a ship wandering around mostly doing diplomacy and charting nebulas and delivering supplies and it's full of fucking children and shit. You only need to look at the differences between what Starfleet is doing on a regular basis compared to (since this is the comparison in question) the US military to find the idea that Starfleet is a military operation laughable.
The entire argument rests on the idea that they've got guns, so they must be a military.
The original Trek was released right smack dab in the middle of the cold war, during Vietnam even.
Hell, TNG was half over by the time the Berlin Wall came down.
The idea that because the world is dark and terrible, we need to double down on cynicism is incredibly unappealing to me . If anything, we need the optimism of classic Trek now more than ever.
I think this erases the darkness present in the original show while ignoring the difference between making a show that addresses how to be heroic and idealistic in current realities and immature and nihilistic “grimdark” SF.
It's not the darkness that's bad, it's the cynicism. Star Trek has darkness, but it's about overcoming that darkness when confronted by it; starting out a show with the cynical idea that the darkness wins, just like today isn't what I'm looking for out of Star Trek (Regardless of if Picard is going to singlehandedly pull the Federation back from the brink or whatever.) I have a million other shows, comics and movies I can watch for that shit, if I was even interested in experiencing more of it when I can see the exact same things when I pick up a newspaper. (Keep in mind I also disliked how militarized and super duper black oppy that Starfleet became in Into Darkness as I found that cynical as well.)
Also, colony has become a bad word lately because it's easy shorthand for the theft of land from rightful owners. Plopping down a new settlement on an uninhabited planet and likening that to the atrocities that US and other colonial powers get up to is not an argument that's going to sway me. There's literally episodes where they discover "Oh no, this planet is indeed inhabited after all, by life we could not recognize" and make amends for their actions.
Yeah like the Federation has colonies but they're explicitly not European-style colonialism. That's literally the point of the Prime Directive. (NB: I initially put First Amendment here, which I find amusing.)
If Star Fleet acted like real-world historical colonial powers they'd be selling pre-warp civilizations hand phasers in return for the right to settle Space Manhattan Island, and while I'm sure someone can dig up an episode where a jackass admiral did exactly that I'm also 100% certain that the episode ends with Kirk/Picard/Sisko reading that admiral the riot act and imprisoning them
and the point, I believe, that the tweeter is making is that it's the fantasy/propaganda version - where the Final Frontier, pristine and unclaimed, is just waiting for us to come along and Manifest Destiny all over it, and this time, there are no inconvenient natives already sitting on our land that we have to displace or eradicate and then pretend to later generations that they didn't exist, or voluntarily moved off it to live on reservations. We get the American legend of the Westward Expansion without all that icky genocide spoiling it.
EDIT: and as the Scottsman notes, in the fantasy, when we do discover someone or something living there, of course we apologize and treat them respectfully and would never try to steal their planet. That's something only Bad People do. >_>
No my argument Shryke is they literally are the government institution that fights wars and performs covert operations behind enemy lines, that's what makes them a military.
Yeah like the Federation has colonies but they're explicitly not European-style colonialism. That's literally the point of the Prime Directive. (NB: I initially put First Amendment here, which I find amusing.)
If Star Fleet acted like real-world historical colonial powers they'd be selling pre-warp civilizations hand phasers in return for the right to settle Space Manhattan Island, and while I'm sure someone can dig up an episode where a jackass admiral did exactly that I'm also 100% certain that the episode ends with Kirk/Picard/Sisko reading that admiral the riot act and imprisoning them
and the point, I believe, that the tweeter is making is that it's the fantasy/propaganda version - where the Final Frontier, pristine and unclaimed, is just waiting for us to come along and Manifest Destiny all over it, and this time, there are no inconvenient natives already sitting on our land that we have to displace or eradicate and then pretend to later generations that they didn't exist, or voluntarily moved off it to live on reservations. We get the American legend of the Westward Expansion without all that icky genocide spoiling it.
there's also something to be said about how the paternalistic view of pre-warp societies is itself a descendent of a colonialist viewpoint that is not as distant from it's forebears as it would like to think
Yeah like the Federation has colonies but they're explicitly not European-style colonialism. That's literally the point of the Prime Directive. (NB: I initially put First Amendment here, which I find amusing.)
If Star Fleet acted like real-world historical colonial powers they'd be selling pre-warp civilizations hand phasers in return for the right to settle Space Manhattan Island, and while I'm sure someone can dig up an episode where a jackass admiral did exactly that I'm also 100% certain that the episode ends with Kirk/Picard/Sisko reading that admiral the riot act and imprisoning them
and the point, I believe, that the tweeter is making is that it's the fantasy/propaganda version - where the Final Frontier, pristine and unclaimed, is just waiting for us to come along and Manifest Destiny all over it, and this time, there are no inconvenient natives already sitting on our land that we have to displace or eradicate and then pretend to later generations that they didn't exist, or voluntarily moved off it to live on reservations.
Except space is literally a giant void full of empty rocks. It's not fucking fantasy, it's astronomy. And the Enterprise doesn't spend it's time wandering around colonizing shit. And when the rocks aren't empty, they aren't doing any colonialism. What's the colonial fantasy here exactly? It's trying to jam this fucking hottake onto the show by trying to set up some sort of ridiculous no-win situation.
"It's colonialism!"
But they aren't doing any colonialism.
"That's cause all the planets are conveniently empty!"
But in real life, they are actually empty.
"They can be anything they want them to be. It's all just wish-fullfillment!"
That literally applies to any work of fiction though and the whole point of them being empty is not to re-enect a colonialist agenda (that they aren't even re-enacting) but simply a matter of narrative convenience for an episodic show.
It's an argument designed to try and say everything about producing an episodic show is somehow just a convenient excuse for the agenda the commentator is trying to read into the show.
We can of course just glance over at DS9, a show that ran in part contemporaneously with TNG with staff cross-over and similar management and everything, and see how the franchise treats things when you aren't just leaving the planet every episode so you can produce a different script.
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If you watch the new short, it also looks like the Federation had a major incident from within:
I'd rather watch stories about space exploration against a backdrop of maintaining a coalition of galactic powers, then watch stories about how something bad happened and made everything get worse, just like my own misrable reality.
I like my Star Trek being optimistic escapism.
I've basically excised Discovery from my brain, so thanks for the heads up. Guess I'll look into it.
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That's kinda what I think Trek is, personally. Even DS9 and it's Big Fucking War ends with peace and with a move towards mutual understanding.
Yeah well, when the soviet union collapsed, some people were calling it "the end of history", and look where that got us
Edit: Beaten like the US
I'm in agreement with Patrick Stewart:
https://www.npr.org/2020/01/12/795631574/patrick-stewart-didnt-want-to-reprise-captain-picard-in-a-post-brexit-world
*
we'll see how the actual series is. continuing to keep my expectations low.
[WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW MORE?]
Scrolling through, I came across this gem which is just so 100% TOS and I can't get over it.
Star Trek is the king of bootstrap effects; A lot of their models in TNG on are repurposed Macross kits they bulk imported from Japan. One of my favorite anecdotes is that Captain Garret was killed by a VF-1 Valkyrie.
lol
That armor wound up everywhere in cheap sci-fi of the 90s. Hell, it wound up in Power Rangers, of all places.
The original Trek was released right smack dab in the middle of the cold war, during Vietnam even.
Hell, TNG was half over by the time the Berlin Wall came down.
The idea that because the world is dark and terrible, we need to double down on cynicism is incredibly unappealing to me . If anything, we need the optimism of classic Trek now more than ever.
This reminds me of the episode with the exocomps, which is still one of my favorites.
I think this erases the darkness present in the original show while ignoring the difference between making a show that addresses how to be heroic and idealistic in current realities and immature and nihilistic “grimdark” SF.
my problem is a lot of the (wider internet fandom) critiques aren't asking if this setting acts as a foil to Picard or if those themes will be explored and worked through. they're just like surface level federation should never be dark, while not really considering all the other times the federation already was dark.
I don't know where or how the destruction of romulus fits into this timeline but at least this is past shinzon wrecking up the place, a rogue starfleet admiral or two, and multiple existential threats to the federation. I'd expect there were lots of differing political fights on how to react to each of those between idealism and isolationism and i'd assume any longstanding governing force alternates between periods where one outweighs the other.
like maybe it is just surface level and doesn't play into the story at all, but that's not the sense i've gotten from the trailers so far. and I want to explore a story that has a wounded federation looking at it's own identity and learning where we heal and go from here, all with the help of a retired standard bearer who once was our moral paragon to the galaxy before something we did made him turn his back on us.
And the series has often not been particularly subtle about "The Federation as America"
Star Trek is awesome.
except that they had a whole fucking show exploring how the Federation interacts with a society on these very fringes. The only correct thing in this entire post is that Star Trek isn't real.
No! No! Not the COMFY CHAIR!!!!!
Seems mostly just a bunch of silly and cynical bullcrap.
Some ancillary silliness first:
"Starfleet is a heavily armed military force!"
Except they literally say it's not and it doesn't act like one. The US military of the 80s and 90s did not wander the planet doing scientific expeditions and diplomatic missions. But this is a pretty standard silly argument from some corners of the internet.
"Humans enjoy supremacy in the Federation"
It's called an effects budget.
"the Prime Directive protects only a narrow kind of people: humanoid civilizations that aren't *too* humanoid and civilized"
Just ... did you watch the show? One of the most famous episodes of TOS is them learning about non-human organisms and TNG itself has several episode I can think of with a similar theme. I'm not sure what the point of any of this really is honestly, it's such a bizarre read on even the scattershot and ever-changing nature of the prime directive.
The meat:
"The Federation is colonialism because it's composed 'colonies' and 'outposts'"
Or it's because that's the kind of stories it's telling. We know there's a bunch of not-colonies and not-outposts. They talk about them frequently and visit them occasionally.
"Federation colonialism is based on the same cultural myth of abundant "empty" land that European colonialism was"
What the heck show are you even watching dude? TNG spends most of it's run not going around colonizing much of anything. I'm not sure where the colonial politics he's imagining here is.
Basically it seems like he's trying to read "TNG is a colonial fantasy because it's a universe full of empty planets" into the fact that Star Trek is explicitly an episodic show about wandering around solving sci-fi problems. The only point of any of this stuff is that it's a setting reset every week. It's a twitter hottake. I'm not sure where he's getting the actual colonialism parts of colonialism from here either.
Yes, THANK YOU.
It's not that Gene's vision of peace didn't matter, but it's you have to admit it's at least partially contradicted by the actual text and no amount of "nuh-uhs" will ever change that.
It's the reason Star Trek remains incredibly popular among my MAGA family members. (While Interstellar, of all things, is considered "too woke")
No matter how much you fuse your diplomatic and scientific corps to it, your military is still your military. When there is a martial threat to the Federation, there is not some other organization they call upon to go into battle. The flagship of the Federation is an ostensibly diplomatic vessel that still carries enough firepower on board to obliterate nations if the crew was so inclined. They are still a military organization. When O'Brien served in the Cardassian War, that was as a member of Starfleet, not some other Federation institution.
It's an idealized Utopian military, but it's still a goddamn military.
Also: a military that is occassionally asked to dislodge indigenous American tribes from their new homeland because again part of the point of the Federation as a thematic aesthetic is to be Space America.
If Star Fleet acted like real-world historical colonial powers they'd be selling pre-warp civilizations hand phasers in return for the right to settle Space Manhattan Island, and while I'm sure someone can dig up an episode where a jackass admiral did exactly that I'm also 100% certain that the episode ends with Kirk/Picard/Sisko reading that admiral the riot act and imprisoning them
Like, no, Star Trek is still fine. It's a good series and has done a lot to advance progressive causes and inspire hope to become better people and a better society.
But that doesn't mean there aren't real issues in the show thanks to the culture that birthed it that we can critique, learn from and use to grow the franchise and tell meaningful stories for the present and its struggles
Except it's not a military and the idea that it must be one because it also serves as a military is nonsense. The Enterprise is heavily armed because it's wandering the galaxy running into things that occasionally require some weapons and shields to deal with. But it's also a ship wandering around mostly doing diplomacy and charting nebulas and delivering supplies and it's full of fucking children and shit. You only need to look at the differences between what Starfleet is doing on a regular basis compared to (since this is the comparison in question) the US military to find the idea that Starfleet is a military operation laughable.
The entire argument rests on the idea that they've got guns, so they must be a military.
It's not the darkness that's bad, it's the cynicism. Star Trek has darkness, but it's about overcoming that darkness when confronted by it; starting out a show with the cynical idea that the darkness wins, just like today isn't what I'm looking for out of Star Trek (Regardless of if Picard is going to singlehandedly pull the Federation back from the brink or whatever.) I have a million other shows, comics and movies I can watch for that shit, if I was even interested in experiencing more of it when I can see the exact same things when I pick up a newspaper. (Keep in mind I also disliked how militarized and super duper black oppy that Starfleet became in Into Darkness as I found that cynical as well.)
Also, colony has become a bad word lately because it's easy shorthand for the theft of land from rightful owners. Plopping down a new settlement on an uninhabited planet and likening that to the atrocities that US and other colonial powers get up to is not an argument that's going to sway me. There's literally episodes where they discover "Oh no, this planet is indeed inhabited after all, by life we could not recognize" and make amends for their actions.
and the point, I believe, that the tweeter is making is that it's the fantasy/propaganda version - where the Final Frontier, pristine and unclaimed, is just waiting for us to come along and Manifest Destiny all over it, and this time, there are no inconvenient natives already sitting on our land that we have to displace or eradicate and then pretend to later generations that they didn't exist, or voluntarily moved off it to live on reservations. We get the American legend of the Westward Expansion without all that icky genocide spoiling it.
EDIT: and as the Scottsman notes, in the fantasy, when we do discover someone or something living there, of course we apologize and treat them respectfully and would never try to steal their planet. That's something only Bad People do. >_>
there's also something to be said about how the paternalistic view of pre-warp societies is itself a descendent of a colonialist viewpoint that is not as distant from it's forebears as it would like to think
Except space is literally a giant void full of empty rocks. It's not fucking fantasy, it's astronomy. And the Enterprise doesn't spend it's time wandering around colonizing shit. And when the rocks aren't empty, they aren't doing any colonialism. What's the colonial fantasy here exactly? It's trying to jam this fucking hottake onto the show by trying to set up some sort of ridiculous no-win situation.
"It's colonialism!"
But they aren't doing any colonialism.
"That's cause all the planets are conveniently empty!"
But in real life, they are actually empty.
"They can be anything they want them to be. It's all just wish-fullfillment!"
That literally applies to any work of fiction though and the whole point of them being empty is not to re-enect a colonialist agenda (that they aren't even re-enacting) but simply a matter of narrative convenience for an episodic show.
It's an argument designed to try and say everything about producing an episodic show is somehow just a convenient excuse for the agenda the commentator is trying to read into the show.
We can of course just glance over at DS9, a show that ran in part contemporaneously with TNG with staff cross-over and similar management and everything, and see how the franchise treats things when you aren't just leaving the planet every episode so you can produce a different script.