It could also be a spin on “It’s a Wonderful Life”, where Q shows Picard a universe in which he was never born... which I suppose is the gist of Tapestry.
Please tell me they're adapting DC Comics "The Gift" and that this is the bizarro timeline where Jean-Luc saves his brother Claude, who then grows up to be Space Hitler.
Perhaps Q shows him that Rene would've become a dictator... that would be quite a twist! And then Picard himself sets the fire in the past...
But it was also kinda proved that they were alive, or no matter how basic your synth is, there's a road to scentience, that an all powerful space God synth might feel like getting involved with their progress, or you know, hippies, who want to march for equal rights and chain themselves to shit. Anyone in the Federation, can build synths now, but anyone in the Federation thinking they can press a slave race into endless toil, is heading towards a rude awakening, because Synth rights means that you either have to whip them to keep your construction project up to speed or pay them like you would anyone else... No on in the Federation exchanges Labour for cash. It doesn't exactly make sense does it? Foreign Labour? Apprenticeships? One dude plus a lot of automation. One dude with an industrial replicator, an antigravity fork lift, a phaser and a week, can build the pyramids.
When there's a new and interesting Trek thing that no one has posted about yet and that seems to be quite a big deal, I have to work on it immediately XD
I’m thinking this is another Tapestry situation. Where Q is showing Picard alternative histories if he did or didn’t take certain actions. Though what could lead to a fascist looking Federation.
Someone suggested upthread that, had he not perished, Rene might have grown up to become a dictator. I mean, c'mon: what do you think he was dreaming about while lying on the grass and staring up at the night sky? Starships, of course -- starships raining down the wrath of Federation quantum torpedoes on all inferior beings who dare oppose him! ... that being said, there was also the more realistic possibility that a living Jack Crusher does something very, very bad in an alternate future.
Honestly, I don't buy the idea that someone raised in the Federation could grow up to be a dictator. People like that don't emerge out of nowhere; they're shaped by their upbringing and environment, and they gain power by appealing to a large number of people who share their views and pathologies. I think people raised in the Federation, particularly on Earth, would be unlikely to grow up so damaged, and by the same token, it's unlikely that anyone who did would find enough like-minded Federation citizens to back their rise to power. There was the miniseries The Fall in the novels, which is rather prophetic in retrospect because it involved a president who pushed the UFP toward fascism and turned out to be a fraud, but he was a Bajoran, raised in the Occupation, and he came to power as president pro tempore after a, err, sudden vacancy in the office, rather than winning a following and getting elected.
There's two maybe 3 people in the image at the bottom of the stairs wearing the same outfit as Picard in the previous image.
That's what they all say ... until it happens. Germany was a modern, democratic society in the 1920's. Adolf Hitler then tapped into an unseen underbelly. Who knows what's churning underneath the surface of the UFP that people would just as soon prefer to ignore? At any rate, it's an alternative history -- little more than a speculative, intellectual exercise.
Not that unseen. There was a widespread strain of anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe, combined with resentment at the punitive measures imposed on Germany after WWI. Also, the culture at the time normalized beating and emotionally depriving children as "necessary" discipline, so a lot of people grew up psychologically damaged. I don't think there's an analogy for any of those things in the Federation. That requires a level of revisionism I don't care for. It's one thing for a show like DS9 to challenge the utopian values of the Federation by putting them under stress. It's another thing altogether to reveal that they were never any more than a veneer over an innately broken society. That would be a grossly cynical rejection of everything Trek stands for. Yes, and part of a speculative intellectual exercise is assessing the credibility of a hypothetical scenario -- using what is known about the parameters of the situation to assess whether the scenario is probable or improbable.
Rene probably grew up hating his grumpy dad for keeping tech out of the house, and then he wasn't admitted into the academy or wasn't promoted... and wanted to be a captain so badly... so he grabbed power a different way Look at the Enterprise with its military log, dark interiors, militaristic uniforms just because the C didn't show up to defend Narendra...
And it looks like an evolution of the eeeeeeevil Space Force may be the military branch of this Brave New World Disorder, judging by the other flag design present on the steps.
Yeah, but that's after 20 years of fighting ruthless attack by the Klingons. And a wartime military looking and acting like a wartime military is hardly evidence that the nation it defends is under fascist rule. The military and civilian worlds are very different things, something a lot of Trek viewers forget, since we've hardly ever seen civilian life in the Federation (until Picard, at any rate).