Spoilers Disco and Picard weren't the first Trek shows to hold a dystopian view.

Anyway, in TNG it was "Always morning in the Federation." To paraphrase Reagan. Well, morning has to turn into afternoon (DS9) and then evening (PIC) and then night (DSC S3) sometime.

 

Looking at it like that is just going to reinforce the Andromeda comparisons some are making in regards to Disco season 3. "The long night has come..."

 

In broad strokes, of course. There's no point in trying to duck that, so I'm not going to. The difference comes in the details and the execution. I like to think Discovery will handle the concept a lot better than Andromeda did or Genesis II. I'm hoping it's similar to how Ron Moore's Battlestar Galactica handled its concept a lot better than the '70s version.

Genesis II, by the way, has to be seen to be believed. Gene Roddenberry and all of his vices in an unrestrained production environment in 1973. That's all you need to know.

 

Andromeda was a terrific show in its first season and a half. The production values were never much, but the writing was terrific, thanks to a strong staff that included DS9's Robert Hewitt Wolfe and now-famous screenwriters Zack Stentz & Ashley Edward Miller. Unfortunately, the production company did its usual thing of firing the showrunners and replacing them with cheaper, worse writers, and the show went completely to hell.

The sequel/retooled pilot Planet Earth is better, probably in part because he had a female co-writer (future Rockford Files producer Juanita Bartlett) reining in his excesses.

 

I'll have to watch Planet Earth some time.

Genesis II is available on YouTube, for anyone who wants to watch it. It's terrible, it's probably one of the worst things I've ever seen, but it's a fun type of terrible. I like it for all the wrong reasons...

 

Were those not your points? I took them from your posts.

Masaka has to chase Korgano away.
I love that the sun was negative and the moon was positive in D'Arsay culture - I think usually the sun is positive across cultures.

 

Since there was the implication of fearing comfy chairs, no I think that misses the point.

 

What is more frightening about Wall-E compared to TNG?

 

Earth.

 

Ah, so the place of origin matters, and not where the story's society actually lives?
And an abandoned Earth is worse than rape, borgification, torture, occupation and war?

 

I thought those things didn't happen in the Federation? Just in Star Trek

 

What does the Federation have to do with it? The debate is whether the Trek shows are dystopic. Here's the question: Is a cute robot story with comfortable people and an abandoned Earth more or less dystopic than a show with these cruelties?

 

I'd say it started out so, yes.

 

They're not dystopian. They just take the trend DS9 started with 'Confront idealism with realpolitik' and expanded on it.

 

I have said it before and I'll say it again: A writer choosing to depict a world where characters only use formal prescriptivist language is doing so because of, at best, unconscious classist biases. There's no such thing as "elevated" or "debased" vocabulary; there are only words considered to be signifiers of class status. Words themselves by definition cannot be good or bad; golly was considered to be the most serious obscenity possible in the early 17th Century, because it's a contraction for "God's Body," a blasphemy; to use that word was to out yourself as a low-class, low-educated person willing to casually blaspheme (and therefore implicitly challenge the authority of the established religion). Today, golly is considered the most innocent possible interjection, the archetype of interjections used by characters defined by how wholesome and socially acceptable they are.

PIC finally depicting language in a manner that reflects organic human usage is a good thing, because it represents ST shaking off one manifestation of classist biases in its creators.

I can think of like maybe one line where a Romulan scientist said they had cyberneticists.

First off, the Rikers' house isn't a true log cabin; it's a fully functional house with a log cabin aesthetic. The house Kirk lived in with Antonia before returning to Starfleet, as seen in his Nexus vision in Star Trek: Generations, was also a house built with a log cabin aesthetic. Further, Chakotay said in VOY's "Resolutions" that he was taught how to build log cabins by his father.

So la Casa de Riker-Troi is nothing new canonically.

There's nothing mature about hostility to a sense of whimsy.

I have no clue what this is even supposed to mean.

I can't make heads or tails of this word salad of a paragraph.

It's my understanding that PIC is written in response to the Anglo-American political situation, as a response to Trumpism and Brexit.

For what it's worth, it's pretty clear that ENT's Xindi arc was a response to both 9/11 and the Afghan War, and that Vulcan Administrator V'Las's attempt to justify a pre-emptive invasion of Andor with falsified evidence of Xindi superweapon possession was itself a commentary on the Bush Administration using falsified evidence of weapons of mass destruction to justify a pre-emptive U.S. invasion of Iraq.

I mean, to be honest I think a reasonable case can be made that the United States has been dystopian at minimum since 9/11, and arguably since its founding. It's become impossible to ignore the fact, for instance, that every single black person in the United States lives in constant danger of being assaulted or murdered by police officers with effective legal impunity, and always has. And now it's clear that nonviolent protests demanding an end to police abuses will be met with profound violence from police forces, irrelevant of actual crimes.

Add to that things like the suppression of voting rights, the corporate capture of every level of government, the institution of a nationwide warrantless surveillance, the oppressive and racist "War on Drugs," the institution of privatized prisons creating a market incentive for state governments to find new reasons to imprison people, the crushing of unions, the near-extermination of Native Americans, slavery, genocide, the brutal oppression of LGBTQIA+ people until very recently, the fact that a third of all women are raped in the United States but most rapists are never held accountable, the brutal state prison system, centuries of cisheteropatriarchal misogyny, and, well, the fact that capitalism is an economic system built upon legalized thievery...

... Yeah, I would say you could make a much more credible case that the United States is a dystopia than the Federation as seen in PIC.

I think you could make an argument for The Fifth Element as dystopia, insofar as the world of the future appears to grant excessive rights of search and seizure to police and fewer rights to individuals accused of crimes, insofar as it doesn't look like the natural environment is in good condition, and insofar as women are routinely economically coerced into being sexually objectified in service-sector jobs (McDonald's associate, spaceline flight attendants, etc). On the other hand, Earth in The Fifth Element appears to be a democracy, white supremacy may well be gone (no one thinks anything about the President being a black man), freedom of religion is still a thing, incredibly advanced medical technology appears to be routine, and no one bats at eye at Ruby Rhod's gender presentation (which reads to modern eyes as much more stereotypically "effeminate" than is tradition in cisheterosexual men).

All in all, I'd say The Fifth Element is a mixed bag, neither utopian nor dystopian.

That's a pretty absurd list, I'd say. It's been a million years since I saw Forbidden Planet, but I can't remember anything dystopian about it. While I do agree Wall-E is a cautionary tale about one type of future to avoid, no reasonable person could call the society aboard the Axiom dystopian; deeply troubled, maybe, but hardly dystopian.

I mean, I think the particular situation Sisko is talking about there is the question of how colonial settlers on a frontier manage intercultural conflicts in the context of an environment where they do not have all the resources necessary to meet their needs, vs. how people in the metropolitan center who live in a state of material abundance manage intercultural conflicts. Historically, I would say that settler colonialism has more often than not driven people to resolve such conflicts through violence rather than through compromise. And while it is certainly true that crisis can bring out the best in people, it can also bring out the worst.

In any event, I think the key point there is what people are like when their needs are met, vs. what they are like when their needs are not met. As The Good Place points out, people become better versions of themselves when they are able to get all of their needs met.

I really don't think either show relies that much on nostalgia. Both use little hits of nostalgia to lure people in, but both shows build the core of their real stories around new scenarios. Hell, if PIC were as nostalgic as all that, people wouldn't complain about it so damn much.

 

Neither of them hold dystopian views of humanity's future.

The usage of the word makes me think you have no idea what you're talking about.

 

Indeed. It's in that wonderful place of It's not Star Trek enough/it's too much Star Trek nostalgia. Must not be all that bad.

 

I don't think the abanoned Earth in WALL-E is the dystopian part. The cruise ship is the dystopian part. Again, the term "dystopia" is not just a generic synonym for "any bad future." It refers specifically to societies and states that are oppressive, dehumanizing, or otherwise undesirable, including those that superficially appear like idyllic, cozy paradises but achieve that by taking away human freedom, choice, and dignity. The Earth of the film is not a society, but an abandoned world where WALL-E lives alone. The dystopia is the ship where the surviving humans have been stripped of their ability to exist independently and think and act for themselves. The fact that they imagine themselves to be "comfortable" does not make it less of a dystopia, because many unjust and oppressive societies have used the comfort of the people -- or at least of the privileged few that the enslaved masses toiled to satisfy -- as their excuse. (Or sometimes the privileged masses for whose comfort a few are persecuted. See "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.")

By the same token, just because Star Trek shows bad things happening does not make a dystopian show. Its universe includes some dystopias, like Landru's planet, the Cardassian Union, and the like, but that's not the single defining focus of the franchise, nor is the protagonists' home society a dystopia. It's a society that is sometimes allowed to make mistakes and have problems, but that's not a dystopia, it's just the nature of any plausibly depicted society.

 

Deep Space Nine showed that the Federation was saved by Sisko, Ross and the group Section 31 doing dirty work that they covered up or, when they couldn't sustain it, Starfleet and the Federation didn't officially sanction and also wasn't willing to not benefit from.

 

Wow, did you miss the point. Section 31 did NOT save the Federation. It was Odo and the DS9 crew taking a stand against Section 31, putting an end to their genocidal plan, that convinced the Founders to end the war. If, say, Captain Kirk made peace with an enemy leader by saving them from an assassin, that wouldn't mean the assassin was responsible for making peace. You don't give the problem credit for the actions of its solvers.

Besides, what does that have to do with the topic of dystopias? Again, "dystopia" does not mean "any and every bad thing whatsoever." It is a word with a specific meaning: An entire society that is systemically, intrinsically oppressive, cruel, or otherwise destructive to human freedom and well-being. It doesn't apply to a generally decent society that makes mistakes or has occasional strains of corruption within it.