In the first episode of 'Star Trek: Picard' itself, when questioned about his decision to save Romulans after the supernova and why he left Starfleet, Picard angrily says, "Well, Starfleet wasn't Starfleet!" The gravity of this dialogue is unmistakable, and we see that throughout the show. Starfleet has become isolationist and the Romulan refugees are abandoned.
And these are terrible, terrible things. But they're not truly
dystopian. A dystopia would require the Federation itself to embrace authoritarianism as a political ethos internally; there's no evidence of this whatsoever.
The Federation itself is depicted as little more than a military bureaucracy modelled on the present-day United States.
This is absolutely false. We see people going about their lives, free people with full bellies, in Boston, in Paris, in LaBerre. There is no indication, for instance, that police engage in systemic, racially-motivated violence. There is no indication that peaceful protesters will be teargassed and shot at for arguing that agents of the state should be held accountable if they commit violent crimes against people. There's no indication whatsoever that they live under the thumb of Starfleet. We see
Starfleet behaving like a military bureaucracy, because it
is a military bureaucracy. And it's not one based on the present-day U.S.; the United States Armed Forces does not have a single flag officer with operational command over the entire organization the way Fleet Admiral Clancy serves as commanding officer of all of Starfleet.
Federation citizens are shown working for money,
Which is not dystopian. Even in many models of socialist utopias, workers still get paid. And there's nothing in PIC that precludes the possibility that most firms are worker-owned co-ops where the means of production are communally owned.
and some have far more privileged lives than others.
I am not convinced that this is true. Raffi insinuates it, but Raffi is, like Jean-Luc, living in a cycle of self-destructive behavior that involves alienating people who love them. Dahj seems to be a recent university graduate who doesn't have a job yet, but she's certainly living in the kind of apartment I would have
killed to have as an unemployed 22-year-old.
There's drinking, vaping, swearing, grit and grime.
So, first off, drinking and vaping are not inherently dystopian. The characters that do that, are all characters who have chosen to live outside of the Federation and/or outside of the Federation's mainstream cultural mores. (Remember, Freecloud is
not a Federation Member State.)
And swearing is absolutely not dystopian. In fact, the
idea that swearing is bad, is itself a product of an oppressive, classist culture. It's also absurd -- one arbitrarily-culturally-defined vocalization cannot be "worse" than others. Hell, in the 15th Century, "golly" was considered the most obscene possible word, because it was a contraction for "God's Body," a blasphemous interjection. Now it's considered the archetype of interjections spoken by people who are morally innocent.
Swearing is not bad, and it's both dishonest and unrealistic of TNG not to have included it in its characters' general vocabularies.
Certainly, I would rather live in the World of TNG than the more frightening and undesirable World depicted in Picard.
I mean, it's a dystopia that required about three weeks' worth of direct action from Jean-Luc and his friends to get the Federation to realize they'd made a terrible mistake in banning Synths and abandoning the Romulans. We should be so lucky to live in a world with so little wrong with it.
Some even feel we're in a dystopia now! Charlie Brooker, the incredible writer of Dark Mirror is finding it hard to write new episodes as he watches what's happening in some countries.
We may well live in a dystopia today. I mean, hell, here in the U.S. you can't peacefully protest police brutality without risking being teargassed. But there is no indication whatsoever that the Federation of PIC subjects its citizens to the kinds of brutality and oppression the present-day United States visits upon its people.
Where is everyone getting the idea from that the Federation has become isolationist? In 2386, the Federation was all too happy to help out the Romulans with their plight to evacuate their planet. After the evacuation fleet was destroyed, a new fleet wasn't constructed because a few Federation member planets changed their minds about helping the Romulans. How does this make the Federation isolationist? "Isolationism" means that they would be cutting themselves off from the rest of the galaxy, but there's no evidence that this is the case.
I think the fact that the Federation not only refused to help the Romulans still in their system after the Mars Attack but that it also abandoned already-established Romulan refugee colonies like Vashti, is a strong indication that the UFP has become somewhat more isolationist. A Federation that's out there engaging with the galaxy to bring stability and peace would not have done that. But, again, isolationism is a far cry from dystopia per se.
