So where is the room for ambition or advancement outside of Starfleet?
Who makes anything? Why would there be corporations? It’s the same flawed ideal of Communism - that everyone will freely do whatever they are needed to do and that somehow, miraculously, everyone will have all their needs provided for them and society will continue to advance.
Humans don’t work like that. We should know that by now.
But what is “the Federation”? Sure, on a third world planet like Bajor the Federation looks like a big deal. But people on Earth barely even know the Federation exists. They’re like the Salvation army…if you’re living in some slum in Africa and some nonprofit organization sets up a school and distributes books and clothes and eyeglasses they seem incredibly wealthy and generous. But from here in the US they just look like a bunch of guys who gathered up some leftover junk and shipped it to Africa.
Nobody makes anything and there is no need for corporations. Nobody does anything that needs doing because nothing needs doing. Everyone miraculously has all their needs provided for them by a little box called a replicator. And mostly, society doesn’t advance, except by the few people who are bored by having their every need provided by that box.
I totally agree with this. Like I said earlier in the thread, I think Trek needs to lie fallow for a while.
Plus, you can explore sociopolitical themes (which is what science fiction is ABOUT in the first place, once you get past the zapguns and rockets) a lot easier from a custom-fitted setting than from what is essentially, at this point, Gene Roddenberry fanfic (although Berman and Braga are the realtrek equivalents of Stephen Ratliff). A peripatetic peddlership moving from localspace government to localspace government, dealing with different forms of government every week…free-for-all trade in the Anarchosyndicalist League, paperwork out the wazoo in the People’s Bureaucratic Starcluster of Sector Zed, dodging government enforcers in the Repressive Empire of Insular Totalitarianism…the possibilities are pretty endless. Whereas we’ve seen, extensively or in part, all of the quadrants of the Milky Way in the Trekiverse. Obviously, there’s still a lot of stuff in that universe we haven’t seen, but it seems like using the setting again is just an attempt to cash in on the name.
However, Gene not having been invested with infallibility yet in the TOS age, he had to hold back with only an implied utopian “background”. The idea was to handwave away the homefront socioeconomic issues so that only the alien encounters would face the crew with troubling issues. By TNG he is being explicitly utopian and actually advocating how superior that utopian world would be to ours.
In TOS he showed something that went well with optimistic postwar futurism: criminals would be reformed through psychological treatment, food would be provided by supercrops like quatrotriticale, conflict would be resolved by aiming outwards (but, only **after **another major world war). Mighty aliens like the Metrons and Organians decide that humans are promising. TOS “utopia” was achievable by extrapolating from Jack Kennedy’s America: we can make it to the moon in 9 years, surely we’ll be doing manned interplanetary flight by 1990 and interstellar by 2100. Kirk is a social liberal but he’s ready go eyeball-to-eyeball and kick ass when necessary, a-la JFK, and dropout-hippie “space children” are misguided(!).
In the mid-80s, Gene can “become strident” when creating TNG because (a) now he’s the almighty Great Creator Bird and (b) he finds himself facing Reagan-era America. Now we have Q showing up in a Marine uniform talking right-wing trash as an example of the sins of humanity’s past. TNG “utopia” was about rejecting *Reagan’*s America: the ugly, foolish adversaries are the ultracapitalist Ferengi, Picard spends the entire first two seasons facing enemies by just standing there and talking about how morally superior we are even when clearly provoked, we have a ship’s “counselor” to get us in touch with our feelings and a young boy-genius to show up the grups, etc. Eventually, it got better by going back to the action-adventure genre, but it was iffy for a while.
So… you’re saying that Starfleet is run by Trekkies?
Wrong. The reason you so rarely see utopian futures in movies and TV is that convincingly portraying a society where the standard of living is a great deal higher than that of present day America is difficult, and most of all EXPENSIVE. About the only people doing it are … get this … Star Wars and Star Trek, the two most popular SF franchises there are.
On the one hand, you have Lucas out on Skywalker Ranch churning out movies with scenes involving hundreds of spacecraft flying through world-spanning cities, on the other hand you got Roger Corman churning out post-apocalyptic dystopias set in some Southern California ghost town whose special effects consist of a few junked cars, whose entire budget would be eaten up by a single 5 second shot from most any Lucas film.
Utopias are expensive and difficult to convincingly create and dystopias are cheap and easy to convincingly create, which is why so many SF films and TV series are dystopias, but if you CAN manage a convincing utopia, you have yourself a franchise.
Nope. The reason I have the story set in the fringes of Federation space on board the equivalent of a tramp steamer is the OTHER problem with utopias, which is that good stories need strong conflicts, and utopias are almost by definition places where most conflicts, strong and otherwise, have been satisfactorily resolved for all concerned. Well, that’s one of the three reasons I’d set things up this way.
From Roger Ebert’s review of Star Trek: Nemesis
I encourage anyone who’s interested in the state of the franchise to read the full review.
I would love it if the next Star Trek series (or movie) sloughed off all its cliches and gave us a vision of humanity in the 34th century. And I don’t mean just replacing one set of technobabble with another. There was, I imagine, a time when warp speed and photon torpedoes and teleportation must have seemed fantastical and futuristic, but now it’s basically par for the course. If Star Trek wants to break new ground and distinguish itself from works like Firefly and Battlestar Galactica, it needs to show me some real mind-blowing sci-fi.
Imagine all that hyper-advanced technology the Enterprise was always encountering: time travel, sentient animals, god-like artificial intelligence, etc., etc… Now it’s all commonplace or obsolete. How do you govern a society like that? What do the people in it desire? Where do you explore when every pebble on every planet in every galaxy has been scanned? What can you show me that pushes the boundaries of my imagination?
I’m not sure about that, not everyone would have access to a starship. Maybe boredom would be the cause of any disaffection.
Plus I’m sure it’s been stated that the Federation is the government.
I agree with an earlier remark that the best Trek (to date) was DS9, sure it was a little limited by virtue of being in one place, but the characters and story were much better than TNG or TOS.
One of the reasons to stick with the Trek frnachise is that people like the established alien races, the trick is to use them in an interesting way without all the godlike beings and time travel to mess things up.
Maybe one possibility would be to set the series in the mirror universe and show how a new Federation rises from the ashes of the empire and its successors.
I think DS9 was the best of the Trek series because it was limited to one primary locale. That was part of what encouraged the writer to break away from some of the, ah, excesses of TNG.
You want a starship? You just program your replicator to build it, one piece at a time just like that Johnny Cash song.
Your replicator can’t make new land and it can’t make privacy. But if you need wide open spaces there’s plenty of wild open spaces out there in, you know, space.
As for the Federation being the government, I’ll grant that the Federation could be the only organization that looks anything like the old-fashioned governments of the 21st century. That’s because there’s no need for any sort of government in our utopia. So the Federation is run by the weirdos and oddballs who think running a pretend hobby government is fun–we have people like that here on the Dope. And occasionally the volunteer government hobbyists do something useful, like when the Shriners get together and send used eyeglasses to Guatemala.
Eh. I think they’d all get bored and just dribble off in attending the meetings, like 99% of the people who start Nation States countries eventually end up letting them go into suspended animation because within a month they forget all about them or they get tired of fixing the same issues every other day.
(Countdown to massive rush to that link by people who read it and suddenly realize “HEY! I remember that! Wonder what my country’s doing now?!”)
It’s because we’ve forgotten the mini-skirt, dammit.
Sure, but my point is that, regardless of how it’s approached, utopianism is not popular, on TV or film. Even TOS ’ writers acknowledged as much; Kirk always talked up the importance of the Prime Directive, right up to the point where he broke it.
There is no reason for a Star Trek series to be utopian. It may have been a distinctive characteristic of the early series; but it was not a necessary one, and writers have been trying to escape that legacy ever since. Finally, DS9 explicitly disavowed Roddenberry’s idealism. It is now canon that the Federation was never utopian to begin with; its citizens just think it is. DS9 established that when Kirk and Picard talked up the open, benevolent Federation, they were really dupes, because the Federation has always had covert agents to do its dirty work regardless of its stated values. So it turns out that it really didn’t matter what Kirk and crew did for other societies; because if it ever went sour for the Federation, Section 31 would swoop in and fix things without anyone being the wiser. It’s worth noting that DS9 was more popular than anything Roddenberry ever did, simply by doing everything the exact opposite.
If it ever becomes popular to believe that humans can create a society better than the one we have now, then by all means write a SF series about it. But it can’t be Star Trek, because that franchise has since established that it never actually happened.
The more I think about it, the more it seems that TOS was indeed mostly about the hot-button issues of the '60s. The majority of original episodes seem to shoehorn into a few basic catagories of what was topical at the time:[ul][]Lest We Become Them: Although liberally peace-loving, the Federation accepts that there are Bad People out there, and that they must be fought. However this necessitates being constantly on guard against the impulse to use violence as the answer to everything.[]Beware the False Utopia: It will always be tempting to accept what looks like The Answer, but more often as not it’s a trap.[]Don’t Let Technology Dehumanize: Whether it’s mind control, drugs, or reducing people to or replacing them with robots, technology has the potential to dehumanize, especially if combined with the False Uptopia.[]Embracing the Other: Others may be different from us, but that shouldn’t be grounds for hatred or fear of them.Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely: Title says it all.[/ul]I think you could plausibly fit 90% of all TOS episodes into those five catagories.
If you add in: Don’t scoop out someone’s brain and replace it with Folger’s Crystals, then you’re at 100%
I think then that the dirty little secret of the Federation would be the suicide rate. With nothing to do and no ambitions to fulfill, people are either going to spend their days drugged into oblivion, running off to the colonies (which explains all the Human colonies) or just ending it all.
Well, define “nothing to do”. I’m unemployed right now, and even though I’m not working for a living I find I’m incredibly busy…gotta post to the Dope, watch TV, take the kids swimming, study for a class I’m taking, exercise, clean the house, cuddle the baby, play computer games, and on and on. People who don’t have to work for a living sometimes end up drugged into oblivion but most people don’t. They do everything everyone else does, except the working at a paying job part.
So given a replicator that produces any consumer good I can imagine and a computer network that connects me to any entertainment I can imagine, there’s no need for me to work for a living. But that doesn’t mean my life is pointless, it just means I’ve got 8 extra hours in the day to do all the other stuff I do when I’m not at work. Have you noticed a high suicide rate or drugged oblivion rate among wealthy retired people?
In other words, Harlan has won in the end.
TOS was on when I was in high school. The general feeling back then was pessimism, give Vietnam, the beginning of concern about pollution, riots, and all sorts of race problems. SF was hardly immune from this - the standard future was post-pollution nightmare, with an overpopulated earth dying. See Make Room, Make Room. The consensus view was that by 2009 we’d have suffered a population crash, and were busy suffering from lack of food and polluted water. The Roddenberry view would be that we would have a black president.
I say Harlan won because if you’ve read his original version of City on the Edge of Forever you know that the motivation for them being on the planet was drug runners on the Enterprise. Why not - the army was full of drug users. Ellison actually had the consensus view here.
The interesting thing about Star Fleet is that it seems made up of moral people not happy in the utopia. Even Spock, who rejected a prestigious gig for his position.
I think a show set in TOS times, or slightly before, when life on the frontier was dangerous, and populated by people desiring to be away from the utopia but less willing to be in a military organization would be interesting. They would visit a lot of these colonies to trade and bring supplies, and would run into all sorts of interesting problems without the benefit of a heavily armed starship to back them up. It should enforce the eschewment of techobabble while preserving a lot of the best aspects of TOS. These guys would stay away from primitive worlds, partly because of the prime directive but partly because there was no profit in it. But if there was …
I thought someone proposed to Paramount that the next Star Trek series be set at the Academy, or maybe that was just a rumor 
I definitely want to see something with the Mirror Universe. It would solve the problem of a utopia, for one. After Sisko traveled there and mucked up Terak Nor, there could be a huge rebellion and a Maquis type alliance forming between all of the subjugated races. This would allow us to have fairly familiar technology, yet without the baggage of the normal Trek timeline to limit the writing. This universe would be rife with conflicts that they couldnt do in the regular Trek universe and we’d get to see familiar characters guest star as their Mirror versions.
Mostly, this would allow people to enjoy a new Trek without the fans’ objections to plotholes and timeline mistakes, as even though I liked seeing the Borg or Ferengis in Enterprise, the damage to the Trek continuum was just too great for me to ignore. It went from being fanservice to outright ignorance, and many stupid and desperate attempts at explaining the inconsistencies ruined what little leeway I gave that show during its waning days.
The Mirror Universe could give a whole new set of timelines for Trek that would both be refreshing and familiar, and can probably satisfy fans of the series who dont want continuity problems and new views who would enjoy Trek with more blasting and fighting from the bygone Kirk days. The only thing I’d mandate would be that the Prime Directive be nowhere near this. That was nice for the regular Trek universe but this is a place where it was customary to assasinate in order to move up rank, and the human race has been enslaved for who knows how long. Leave the moral preaching to regular Trek and just let us see humans fight back to retake their empire.