Spoilers Let’s talk about the destruction of Trek utopia…

You'll get no argument from me. I often find deeper meaning and commentary in things that others might regard as more superficial. Certainly, the Abrams films are that for me.

But, many don't regard Trek that way. It's just an entertainment medium or family friendly show so shouldn't touch these topics.

Now, for me, that's ten levels of bs. But, certainly I see the reasons behind the reaction.

 

In the grim dark future of the 24th century, people in the Federation are still fighting for toilet paper.

 

Can’t they just transport the shit out of you?

 

Hey, sorry to keep everyone waiting for so long. First of all, there were multiple sources I had to look at but the main ones were an interview between Warm Radio host Scott Arthur and Gene Roddenberry in 1973, and then a lecture where Gene Roddenberry spoke to Wichita University on April 7th, 1974. I've now transcribed both. Completely. But I'll only quote the parts that are relevant.

I also have a quote from Gene Roddenberry from 1968's The Making of Star Trek by John Whitfield, and some excerpts from the Phase II Writer's/Directors' Guide. I don't have the Writer's Bibles for TOS or for the first season of TNG, unfortunately. If someone has those and can help fill in the gaps, it would be greatly appreciated.

PART I. GENE'S VISION, 1968

Let's take it from the top, and start from the beginning: This is what Gene Roddenberry had to say on Page 40 about the 23rd Century in The Making of Star Trek on Page 40:

“Intolerance in the twenty-third century? Improbable! If man survives that long, he will have learned to take a delight in the essential differences between men and between cultures. He will learn that differences in ideas and attitudes are a delight, part of life’s exciting variety, not something to fear. It’s a manifestation of the greatness that God, or whatever it is, gave us. This infinite variation and delight, this is part of the optimism we built into Star Trek.”

PART II. GENE'S VISION, 1977

And these are some of what he said in the Star Trek II Writer's/Director's Guide in 1977. Excuse the formatting. I decided to type them exactly as they were typed.

OUR STORIES ARE ABOUT PEOPLE (WHO ACT BELIEVABLY)
STAR TREK is not about science and gadgetry. All good stories are about people and science fiction is no exception. The more believable the people, the better the story. Science fiction story characters must be written as carefully as characters in any contemporary drama, reacting and interacting as real people behave. Whatever gadgetry we show must be believable too – it must be an extension of some present science fact or theory.

AN OPTIMISTIC PROJECTION OF THE FUTURE
If our society at the time of STAR TREK has advanced to a point of interstellar travel and co-existing with diverse planets and life-forms – then it must be assumed that we have also solved our petty squabbles and prejudices of the twentieth century. They would have also learned an affection for diversity; they do not judge other worlds and other lifeforms by Earth standards. However, on Earth or on the Enterprise, life is not dull – the challenge of self and self-improvement have replaced the old fears and aggressions.

Is the starship U.S.S. Enterprise a military vessel?
Yes, but only semi-military in practice – omitting features which are heavily authoritarian. For example, we are not aware of “officers” and “enlisted men” categories. And we avoid saluting and other annoying medieval leftovers. On the other hand, we do keep a flavor of Naval usage and terminology to help encourage believability and identification by the audience. After all, our own Navy today still has remnants of tradition known to Nelson and Drake.

I’m still confused about Earth in the STAR TREK century. You said to make logical projections into the future, then turned down my story.
Because the basis of it was an automated, regimented, inhuman Earth Federation of the future. We must have an optimistic projection of man and his society if we are to approve and identify with Captain Kirk, the crew of the Enterprise, and their mission. However, Earth colonies, parallel civilizations, and alien cultures, can present a range of problems leading to a story.

But projecting the advanced capabilities of your starship, wouldn’t man by that time have drastically altered such needs as food, physical love, sleep, etc.?
Probably, but if we did it, it would be at the cost of dehumanizing the STAR TREK characters that only a small fraction of the television audience would be interested; the great percentage of viewers might even be repulsed.

Then must the starship crew be perfect humans?
No, you can project too optimistically. We want characters with a reasonable mixture of strength, weaknesses, and foibles. Again, believability is the key here. What kind of men would logically and believably man a vessel of this type? Obviously, they’d be better selected and trained than the wild enlisted shore-leave group in “MR. ROBERTS.” On the other hand, they have not gotten too stuffy to enjoy themselves and their senses on liberty in an exotic alien city filled with unique pleasures.

What is Earth like in STAR TREK’s century?
For one thing, we’ll seldom take a story back there and, therefore, don’t expect us to get into subjects which would create great problems, technical and otherwise. The U.S.S. on our ship stands for “United Space Ship” – indicating without troublesome specifics that mankind has found some unity on Earth, perhaps at long last even peace. If you require a statement such as one that Earth cities of the future are splendidly planned with fifty-mile parkland strips around then, fine.

End quotes.

You'll notice that even as late as 1977, Gene Roddenberry imagined a better humanity but not a perfect humanity and he didn't say that Earth was a paradise. He also at no point mentions a money-less future. He does say that Earth resolved a lot of issues of the 20th Century, but doesn't go into any further detail. He probably didn't intend to because he didn't count on visiting or talking about Earth very often.

 

Now on to the good stuff. First we'll go into Scott Arthur's 1973 interview with Gene Roddenberry. Gene doesn't once talk about his Vision or a Perfect Humanity, but what he says about the characters he developed is interesting.

This is NOT the entire interview. Just excerpts from it.

PART I: THE CHARACTERS

SA: Are you satisfied with the way most of the characters were developed in “Star Trek”?

GR: What I was trying to do was to get a sort of a family group representing different types of humanity, so that our audience would feel at home on the ship. And it was really an effort for us to give 20th Century audiences some handles in this future world; recognizable people.

SA: Why was Spock a half-breed? Why was he that?

GR: I wanted to have an interesting personality but I wanted parts of him to be at war with one another, the human part fighting the alien part, and I thought half-breeds have traditionally in drama have always been highly interesting characters.

SA: How about Captain James T. Kirk? He was sort of an all-American boy but on a larger scale. He was handsome, he was intelligent, was it hard to keep from the basic nice guy in situation after situation?

GR: That is a problem, of course, but at the time we were putting “Star Trek” on, television was full of anti-heroes, and I had a feeling that the public likes heroes; people with goals in mind, people with honesty, dedication, and so on. And so I decided to go for straight heroic roles on the show and it paid off. My motto for Kirk, for those that are interested, was Horatio Hornblower, CS Forrester’s sea stories, which I’ve always enjoyed.

SA: Here’s a loaded question. Now, Kirk was almost always involved in quick superficial relationships and not much else romantically. Sometimes that was even more fictitious than the rest of the plot. Was Kirk married to the Enterprise? Is that what happened?

GR: That was what we wanted to develop, yes, married to his job and to the ship. That was his real love affair.

PART II: THE FRANCHISE
[Skipping ahead, Gene Roddenberry seemed to have an idea of where he wanted the Star Trek Franchise to go even at this point.]

SA: When you sat alone in your quiet room and you and you started on the “Star Trek” series, did you ever think it would go that far, to have a convention of Trekkies?

GR: No. I hoped the series would be successful but I was really astounded when it became a cult. The gratifying part of that is I made a real effort in “Star Trek” to write into it some of my own beliefs and philosophies on non-violence, on if someone else is different it does not mean they’re necessarily bad or wrong, and philosophies like that, and talk like that, and it was very gratifying that the Star Trek fans like that part of the show best of all. The fact the show said something.

SA: I guess you know that part of the reason for the Trekkies is not only to pay tribute to “Star Trek” but try to resurrect it. Now comes the bonus question: why can’t we resurrect, why can’t we have a new series with the same cast of “Star Trek”?

GR: Well, I wondered that myself. There have been several efforts. NBC started talking about it once, and then they asked for a new pilot, and that’s an enormous amount of work and risk and our attitude was, “We made 78 shows; we didn’t see why we had to try out for them all over again.” I think our best chance of getting it back on the air would probably be through the motion picture route. There’s some talk at Paramount of doing a “Star Trek” feature, a major feature, and I think that if we did a feature or if we were fortunate like “Planet of the Apes”, they did a series of features, I think that would probably lead to it getting back on the air.

SA: Is the cast willing to do that?

GR: On a feature basis, that wouldn’t be too much of a problem because they could do a feature and still take care of their other commitments. If we were going to go straight on the air, we would probably plan it a year, a year-and-a-half ahead so our current commitments by all the actors could be gotten rid of.

SA: The cartoon version of Star Trek, is that a compromise, a pacifier?

GR: No, it wasn’t meant as that. NBC wanted a strong show in their morning cartoon time-slot and they were willing to go along with my demand that it not be written down to the kiddie’s level. I believe that children are much more intelligent than they’re given credit for. So we used regular “Star Trek” writers and the standard “Star Trek” type story. And it wasn’t a pacifier, it was just an effort to do something a little better on Saturday morning.

[It seems to me as if the wheels were already turning in Gene Roddenberry's head at this point: make Star Trek movies, then get Star Trek back on TV with new actors. He didn't say that out loud, but he was probably thinking it. When Star Wars beat Star Trek to the punch on the big screen, he probably had to modify his idea so that he'd be returning Star Trek to TV with the TOS cast after all, but once Paramount decided to turn Star Trek into a movie again after Close Encounters of the Third Kind, he probably decide to quietly go back to his original plan.

Here's a good one, for people who can't stand that DSC visually rebooted the TOS Era. ]

SA: Looking back, would you do anything differently?

GR: Nothing basic. Definitely there are errors we made. There are sets, I think, looking back, we could improve, but as far as any basic differences, no. I think we could keep the same configurations of the Enterprise and the bridge, although technology’s advanced a lot since ’64 and our instrumentation and everything could look a lot better and there are new plastics we can use. We would get better looking sets if we did it again.

PART III: GENE'S VISION, 1973
[Then they get into the philosophical... ]

SA: Do you have a philosophy for everything, let’s say futuristic, that you write?

GR: I should say that if I have any overall philosophy, it’s a reverence for living things of all types and a great optimism about mankind. I think for all the foolish things we do, we’re a pretty remarkable creature and I think we’re still in our childhood compared to where we will be going.

SA: Do you think mankind needs saving of some sort?

GR: My own philosophy is that mankind has within himself what he needs. I rather think that whatever God is, we are all a part of it.

SA: How about the UFO flurry, Gene? As a man who has created a UFO or two in his time on paper, do you believe in them to be flying saucers? Do you believe UFOs to be visitors from another world?

GR: I think it’s not impossible. I disbelieve most reports but I think it is not at all impossible that we have been visited or are being visited, and sometimes I hope so. We tend to make such a mess of it ourselves; we could use some outside help.

PART IV: OTHER PROJECTS
[Now we'll cap off this interview with some things that will be of interest relating to both Picard and the third season of Discovery.]

SA: Let’s talk about something you’ve done recently, a few things. First of all, “Genesis II”: about a man in our present who wakes up in a post-nuclear war future, trying to help out. A pilot for possibly a new series. This seemed to be more commercial than any of the other Roddenberry creations. Why was that?

GR: I wanted to do another show which had one thing that “Star Trek” had and that was a chance to visit different worlds every week. At the same time, I didn’t want to do planet hopping again. And so it occurred to me that if our Earth went into a new Dark Ages before another civilization is built, society tends to fragment and really does get like 100 different worlds all over the Earth. And I decided that although we did go two centuries ahead, I’d prefer to have the hero a 20th Century man and that’s when we came up with the idea of suspended animation to get him there. And perhaps that gave it a commercial look.

The status of the show is that we made the pilot for CBS, they decided not to go into a series. ABC became interested in the general idea and I revised and changed many things in the concept and then now in the middle of writing a new pilot motion picture for ABC, which the show will be recast with new concepts and I think this time we may get it into a series.

SA: Take care to talk about that? The name of it, the plot, anything?

GR: It’ll be on the air sometime this spring, but we don’t have an air date. As a matter of fact, we begin shooting it in about 10 days and I’m at home today working on the script. As a matter of fact, doing a polish on it.

SA: No hints as to what it is?

GR: I don’t even know what the name of the series will be. The working name we’re using right now is “Planet Earth”. Whether that will be the final name of the series or not, I don’t know.

SA: One more thing. Let’s talk about something that was on national TV last night, “The Questor Tapes”, which I thought was excellent. I think it’s one of the best Roddenberry things besides “Star Trek” that I have seen.

GR: Thank you.

SA: It was thoroughly believable, about a computerized human-like robot. And what I like best about it is that you did not moralize. There was probably a horrible temptation at the end to moralize and the flashing red light and say “This is what it is” and “This is what it should be” and “You people are doing this wrong” but you let us do that for ourselves. Do you think that day will come when machines will really overtake and control man? Not like it did there, but it could have happened?

GR: I think it’s certainly conceivable. The basic question in “Questor” was “What is life?” If you can create a thing out of a mechanical thing that thinks, is that necessarily any less alive than a thinking creation that’s made out of organic matter? And I think it is certainly conceivable that computers could become more intelligent than we are.

[I'll leave it there for now. Tomorrow, I'll go into the relevant parts of the Wichita University lecture that I didn't already quote before.]

 

Tomorrow, I said? No. Let's do this now and get it done. Gene Roddenberry's 1974 lecture at Wichita University.


There's a huge difference between a radio interview and talking to a radio host. Here are Gene's thoughts in the Academic setting. Not the entire lecture. Just the relevant parts pertaining to Gene's Vision and things relevant to later Star Trek. In particular TNG toward the end of his life, then Discovery and Picard today.

So let's kick this off!

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PART I. INTRODUCTION

Thank you very much. I should probably start with a confession. I use the blooper reels to gauge the level of the audience I’ll be facing. [laughter from the audience] I can see I'll be facing a group of intellectuals this morning. [more laughter] I'm being quite serious. Really. The greatest laughs we've gotten on the blooper reels have been enjoins for astronauts in space laboratories and in top colleges. The only place we showed them that we never got a laugh was in a showing for television executives. [laughter] Which seems to indicate there is a correlation between sense of humor and intelligence. [laughter, clapping, and applause]

I probably should admit I will be having some fun today at the expense of television executives, but my quarrel is not with the people, it’s with the nature of commercial television as it exists today and I will be coming back to that later. As far as individuals go, there’s many good people and television networks and studios as there are in any other large American corporation. They are skilled professionals who represent a broad range of backgrounds such as advertising, public relations, brokerage houses, the petroleum industry, law, and other quasi-criminal activities. [laughter]

PART II. UNTAPPED POTENTIAL

I think the question most often asked about “Star Trek” is: Why the incredible support of the fans? Why is this show, now in its 14th rerun across the nation, playing to more people than it played to on its original prime-time network run? And how does a television show result in conventions that perhaps you've heard about in New York, Los Angeles, and around, that will bring out as many as 10,000 fans caravanning, flying, driving from around the country? I think this is a much more important question than “Star Trek” itself. It suggests that television can be, or should be, much more than just an inconvenient blot on our culture. It suggests to me that historians may look back on television today and see much of it, or most of it, as almost a criminal waste of an opportunity to reach and expand the minds of humanity.

I do not see “Star Trek” as a great work of art. I do not consider it to be all things to all people. But out of the thousands of letters generated by the show, out of the hundreds of personal contacts that I've been fortunate to make, I'd like to describe two occurrences that can tell us a little bit of what television could do.

PART III. SOMEONE TO LOOK UP TO

Who would you pick as a model for your children today? As I grew up, it was quite simple. You picked the President of the United States. [laughter] Why hasn't the same phenomenon happened on other shows? Many of them have used equally skilled actors. I happen to think many of them at times have used better directors and writers, been skillfully produced. Again, I think the answer lies with the audience. The audience may enjoy the entertainment but it will refuse to admire television heroes whose goals in life is like cool million, to make a million dollars every week. Or with a half-mechanical man, another science-fiction show, who works for the CIA, protecting us from evil foreigners. Or with the greed shows who make it pornographically possible for a lady to climax on stage as she wins a new automobile. [laughter and clapping]

There very well may be truth in the theory that lacking human, real life images to admire and emulate, our television characters were adopted by many as surrogate images. Fictional images, temporary, weighed in the day that flesh and blood integrity again appears on the scene. Could the show be summed up as making any particular statement? Because I’m sure, as you know, our principle popularity in colleges has been the statements it made. I think they can be summed up in making two main statements. At least this is what we were trying to say.

PART IV. HUMAN MATURITY

First, we were trying to say that humanity will reach maturity on the day that it begins to positively value diversity in life and ideas. As I heard repeated from the southern policeman, “To be different is not necessarily to be ugly. To have a different idea is not necessarily to be wrong.” The worst possible thing that could happen to all us is for everyone to begin to look, impact, and talk, and think alike. If we cannot handle and learn to enjoy the differences between our own kind here on Earth, God help us when we get into space and meet the variety that is almost certainly out there.

PART V. OPTIMISM: THE POSITIVE SIDE OF HUMANITY

Finally, I think “Star Trek” was a statement of affection and optimism about living things in general and I think this again reflects credit on the audience. I’ve often been asked, “You have fan on your show that are 10 years old and you have college residents and scientists and astronauts, firemen, policemen, is there any one thing that they seem to have in common?” Yes. Well, there’s one thing we have noticed. Invariably, our fans have youthful minds, and so when we were saying it’s not all over, it’s not all been invented, it’s really all just beginning. I think this is a terribly, terribly important statement to young-minded people, whatever their age.

PART VI. THE OTHER SIDE OF THE COIN (And Why It's Not the End)

All of which usually brings up an interesting question. It goes something like, “Hey, wait Roddenberry, how can say that it’s all just beginning for us when you’ve gone ahead and wrote shows like “Genesis II” and others, which have said that our technological civilization that we enjoy now is probably going to crumble?” And an answer while writing the original Star Trek format, I never considered for a moment that the USS Enterprise, and the Federation, and the thing represented by that were necessarily a direct and [un]interrupted outgrowth and our present civilization with its heavy emphasis on material things.

And you might ask, “Doesn’t the collapse of all our much of what we have now mean the end to all of us?” Of course not. Humanity is an incredible creature. Knock us down, destroy our civilization, and we will probably get up and build a better one on top of it as we have done time and time again. And those of you that are frightened at some of the things happening on our day, and I thought that our civilization could crumble too, let us consider what happened the last time. The collapse of Rome, or perhaps since these things take generations to happen, the disintegration of Rome prepared the way for much more than was lost.

What happens in a case of civilization crumbling is something like those deep ocean currents that bring nutrients to the top and out of this spawn an incredible variety of new life. I think this is something talked about in History, but fall of the Roman Empire, and the rebuilding which followed, spawned treasures far beyond the capacity of Rome, Greece, or the Byzantine Empire. Consider these: the art of the Renaissance, the humanitarian philosophies, the medical revolution, that phenomenon named Shakespeare, the great poets, Beethoven’s symphonies, in fact the whole explosion of music that has persisted into our day. Our present technology then, in slightly over 50 years, has gone from the first spruce and fabric airplane to putting a man on the moon.

Should this civilization fall, it happens. There are a lot of factors right now that make some shake up sound quite desirable. For example, as I’ve been saying for years and as you’ve read in the newspaper recently, the nuclear bomb is no longer the exclusive property of reasonable and mature nations like the United States, Russia, China [mild laughter] We are about at the time of nuclear capacity potentially in the hands of any country willing to pay the price and even extremely large industrial corporations, or even extremely wealthy individuals. And as I’ve said on a news conference, yesterday, the idea of AT&T having an atomic bomb just scares the Hell out of me.

Pessimism? Absolutely not. What I’m being is an optimist. What I’m saying is that there are heartening indications all around us: in the power crunch, the population explosion, the food problem, and all of these things, that some of our society will become unglued before we are able to blast ourselves and our planet out of existence. In other words: I’m saying that these things we’re facing may be natural checks and balances protecting us as we slowly evolve into a more mature species. These crises may be happening as they were planned. I agree with Arthur C. Clarke and a number of other writers who have stated that call it what you will: God, El, Allah, Von Daniken Space Travelers if you want to go that way. Any wisdom capable of putting intelligence on this planet is no doubt capable of a plan that will protect it through its present childhood until we have reached the point where we’re able to take care of ourselves. We are going to have another chance and another and still another, if we need it, until we have built an adult reasoning civilization. And I define an adult reasoning civilization quite simply as one in which our capacity to love has become as great as our capability to destroy.

 

PART VII. "THE QUESTOR TAPES" & THE ORIGIN OF DATA

Well, I’ve been speaking of racial childhood and that, of course, helps bring me back to television. And it’s hard to talk about television and remain serious. There are few places where so many truly funny things can happen. One of the funniest incidents happened while we were making a movie of the week, a science-fiction pilot called “The Questor Tapes”.

And for those of you that did not catch the show on television, it was the story of an Android robot who was outwardly indistinguishable from a human male; other than perhaps the programming of his computer mind made him incapable of hate, jealousy, greed, violence, and other television star qualities. [laughter from the audience] In the original draft of the show, Questor was searching for the man who built him, the man who had created him. Which some of the executives thought immediately irresponsible on my part because who ever heard of a character in a drama who was interested in a reason for his existence. [mild chuckles]

At any rate, the only way Questor could locate his creator was through a very, very lovely lady who refused to talk. Fortunately the Android had been programmed in literature which included the work of de Maupassant, to which he had learned that sometimes the human female will to open her mind to a man to whom she has opened other channels of communication. [laughter] In my original script, the Android then made love to her, he was programmed for excellence in many areas. [laughter] And he secured the necessary information.

I was called to a meeting of the Executives. [laughter] A robot doing it to a woman was clearly unacceptable. [more laughter] Yeah, you think that’s funny. Can you imagine the problem I would’ve had if I’d written a gay robot? [more laughter] I carefully explained to these executives she didn’t know he was a robot, that I would use the usual good taste, these things wouldn’t be seen on the screen, but they still refused and a great argument ensued.

At first I thought my opponents were showing human jealousy; perhaps a masculine resentment against a mechanical man who could presumably do whatever he wanted whenever he wanted for as long as he wanted. [laughter] But it turned out no that wasn’t it at all. Our agreement turned out to be much more basic. I realized by the time we were done, what they were really trying to say to me is, “After all Gene, would you want your sister to sleep with a robot?” [laughter from the audience] As some of you know, I lost the argument. Questor did not get the girl, but I went home rather happy that night because how often is it in a writer’s career that he has opportunity to build a whole new area of intolerance? [laughter, then clapping]

End of excerpts.

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Okay. Those are all the relevant parts I wanted to quote. Now tomorrow (this time I mean it), I'll go into my take on all of that.

But, while this is still hot on my mind, I will say I think this is where Gene Roddenberry got the bubblings of the idea that would eventually become Picard. He wrote Kirk as a swash-buckler through which he could live out his fantasies. I think he wrote Picard more specifically with what he said above in mind. He wanted someone that children would look up to. And since Picard was an arguably avatar for Older Gene, he probably wanted Picard to be written as an idealized version of himself that children would look up to...

... which is probably why he was so against the idea of a bald, British guy playing the part. He wanted a horny French guy (even though Gene wasn't French, he was still horny ) in the part. Patrick Stewart just wasn't the guy he pictured playing the kind of character he was imagining off-and-on, consciously or not, since the some time in the '70s.

 

It's been two months. I'm updating. I have some insights I didn't have a few months ago.

Social Unrest is the worst it's been since 1968. I've had thoughts recently about how I think "The world is stupid". I imagined people in the year 3000 looking back on today, talking about how backwards things were. Then that's when I finally saw where Gene Roddenberry was coming from.

During the '60s and '70s, even during the upheaval, he saw Humanity becoming better eventually. In the '80s, with the version of Star Trek he wanted to make beginning with TMP rejected by the subsequent films, he probably saw TNG as the last chance to produce something where he'd ever be able to say what he wanted to say.

In "Assignment: Earth" he had Gary Seven say they were waiting for Earth to evolve into a mature society. In "Encounter at Farpoint", Gene probably decided that Humanity would finally actually reach this point. Which is why he'd have Q, standing in for a God, challenging it.

And once Humanity reached where he wanted it to be, he would use his ideal society to look down on the Humanity of the Reagan '80s. Hippies who sold out. Materialism all the rage. A return to conservatism. Greed. Wall Street. His view of humanity Today shifted from positive to negative in the '80s. That's why he looked down on it. That's why it become more important to him to say "Look at how much more evolved the 24th Century is."

Then there's money. During the lean years of the '70s, when he had several failed projects or projects that didn't get off the ground, he was dependent on the convention circuit. He probably thought, "Wouldn't it be nice if I didn't have to worry about money?" So, in TNG, his last chance to be able to say anything, he makes sure they drive home the idea of they don't have money in the 24th Century. There's no real opening to bring this up in TMP, so the next spot would be TNG.

I think Star Trek didn't start off as the series where Gene Roddenberry wanted to use all of his ideas, but once he realized Star Trek was the only thing that was taking off, that's when he put everything into it with TNG.

World War III being as horrible and devastating as it was is probably him incorporating Genesis II in Star Trek's backstory. Earth fell apart, then came back together again and became stronger than before. Likewise in PIC, and probably even in DSC S3, the Federation has fallen on hard times, but will come back better than before.

So people who only met Gene Roddenberry at the end of his life probably bought into the idea that "Gene had a vision" because he had two decades to think about it and this was "now or never", so it was all upfront. And he had to keep the mythology around him alive so when people people said "Gene had a vision", he kept feeding right into it. After he died, people representing him kept feeding it. They were trying to make what was there during Gene Roddenberry's time at the end of Star Trek look as if it was always there at the beginning of Star Trek and that's where it should be forever. So Star Trek was "always" like it was in 1987 and should be "forever" like it was in 1987. Wanting to stick to "Gene's Vision" is wanting to keep Star Trek frozen at one particular point in time forever.

 

I don't see anything wrong with the Federation in Picard. The show really softballed the failures of the organization and it turned out benevolent in the end anyway.

 

It’s really just Trek commentin on itself/repeating itself. Androids are just Genetic Engineering again, the Khan problem.

The problem I think, was the wider need to have ‘failed’ and abandoned starfleet vets to add some spice that ultimately weren’t needed. The character strokes for Raffi in particular really didn’t add much. On the other hand, they didn’t stretch much further than Trek has done since at least TNG with disillusioned Starfleet bods. Nothing broke, but nothing added.

 

To be fair, Starfleet has absolutely shit history with artificial life. Data is the exception not the rule.

I admit, I liked the fact Raffi is not necessarily shown as being right about her circumstance, "the world is against me" business. Her son seems very clear that a lot of it is her own doing and persecution complex.

 

I am looking forward to Star Trek: Keiko, where a Soong descendant tries to avoid controversy by taking up botany, fucks something up, and the study of plants is banned throughout the federation. Only a pissed off former Enterprise crew member and Niner can save the day. Inexplicably, they won’t get Colm Meaney back, but Tuvok makes a cameo in episode six, and Garak is a series regular.

 

I'd watch it.

The Daystrom Institute is not an organization which has covered itself in glory even before the events of Mars. I remind you that our first introduction to their founder was having him program the Enterprise to murder thousands of people by accident.

But honestly, I feel like there's a good argument for the Synth ban that never gets brought up. "If all people are going to do with synths is make slaves then we should ban it because we're against slavery."

 

I was surprised that was never addressed. It’s literally the cinch point of Measure of a Man, and it’s a Stewart/Whoopi scene, so it’s well known. Picard himself should have stood against their use. But then, they never addressed who hacked them anyway. Presumably the even more secretive Romulan Group, in order to get the ban, but that sort of doesn’t really work. Not least as it doesn’t answer ‘how’.

 

No, they came right out and said it was done by the Zhat-Vash. Destroying the shipyards and synths was more important than the lives of a billion Romulans.

I think the Synths were supposed to be non-sentient, though, or at least as much as your typical non-R2D2 droid.

 

Yeah. But they didn’t fully address it. Because *if* they are not sentient, the Ash Tray need to take out every ship, every holodeck, every holosuite in the federation. Possibly other civilisations too. If they are more sentient (and F8 kind of seems close in intelligence to B4) then the Federation council/Picard should never allow it. Also, if they aren’t sentient, and clearly weren’t exactly working on hard jobs, then they serve no useful purpose *except* as a story point, because we *know* there is better tech in the federation doing those jobs. The enterprise cleaned itself for a start. It’s janky basically. Needs more sorting out in season 2 ( Especially as Picard just put a price on his own head, or had it put there for him, and now him and the EMH are presumably on the Bat Flash kill list. But the Fat Cash aren’t exactly skilful operators....multiple Romulans has the opportunity to take out Data in the past, and not one turned out to be Flat Mash in disguise.)

Still, I mostly like Picard, so this isn’t a massive criticism.

 

1. Taking out the androids kills research in its infancy. The Mars-Bots aren't sentient but they're a step in the direction of mass production of intelligent lifeforms like Data by the hundreds of thousands. It works too because the Daystrom Institute gets shut down from doing anything but theoretical research for a decade and a half.

2. I get the impression they're not self-willed but they're fully capable of doing the job of humans in the 24th century. Automation has always been curiously absent in the setting.

3. Well the Zhat Vash for all their scariness aren't 100% effective at their jobs. I fully believe that comics and side canon will make it so they sabotaged Val, drove Noonian Soong into hiding, anf other stuff because that's what they're for.

For the show, I'm content with the fact that they didn't infiltrate the Federation until post-Dominon War.

 

I think a fair chunk of automation was implied or simply not shown. The old tech manual was full of stuff like fire suppression systems, and people working with their hands was always seen as a quaint anachronism in so many places. I guess the real spanner in the works was the holo miners in Voy. Aleegorywise and storywise, it’s a cute moment, but overall world building wise it didn’t make a lot of sense. Bit like the scarred up messes of ex-Borg we had. 24th Century medicine should mean the only scars are mental, like Picard himself...he had a soft, short term assimilation, but Seven had the full works and the EMH did a better job than Hugh got. Same with the ‘horror’ scenes in Picard...even on the fringe it’s gonna be less serial killers workshop and more clinical, but they were going for effect over verisimilitude. Even the Holocharacters raise issues...why weren’t they don’t F8s job?

I think a more interesting way to go with the F8s would have been to have them be crews for the fleet...that’s an area that makes sense, pretty much does away with the slave labour aspect, performs the same story function, and if anything carries much more weight.
But then, we don’t get the Alien tribute scene with some mean humans thrown in. Don’t get me wrong, I love me some Blade Runner (which gave us Soji) and Alien (from whose recent Isolation game we get the F8s) but that kind of story is a world away from working in Treks milieu. Needed a little more time in the oven, ironically. I think they had the right ingredients mind you.

 

1. The Romulans are said to never be releasing the XBs from their cube and they are essentially prisoners for the rest of their lives. I don't think that necessarily makes a big mistake that the Romulans don't devote much in the way of resources to curing their scarring or facial reconstruction surgery.

2. The holocharacters not doing the jobs of synthetic androids don't bother me because as we know, the holocharacters seem to be sentient beings and the Doctor raises all sorts of issue about that. However, with them you have to do all manner of build ups and projectors even if the mobile holo-emitters exist. The "Dummy Datas" seem like they're very good automation even if in "real life" you'd probably want to set up non-humanoid assembly lines.

3. Freecloud is in the Neutral Zone and not a Federation colony so clearly there's not the kind of rehabilitative prisons that we have even in TOS. Some races have some genuinely evil people left and "Nazi scientist" is a thing that we know the Cardassians employed plenty of.

4. One thing I did like is the fact both the Romulans and non-Romulans are fascinated by Borg tech and want to harness it to their own ends as a weapon. This was a thing that showed up in the STAR TREK reboot comic book as well as the online game. It also shows remarkable forward thinking by the Romulans. Its just that evil scientist lady clearly took sadistic glee in removing Icheb's parts.

5. Essentially, this entire season is one long extended homage to "The Measure of a Man" episode and I don't fault them for it. It was made by genuine fans of TNG and they wanted to explore the future where the Federation was edging on, "disposable people." It didn't cross that line because Bruce Maddox and Jurati clearly want to make PEOPLE not slaves but it shows that they had to sell the idea for tools first.

6. As much as people criticize this for not being Trekky, the foundations for this season are all throughout the series:

* The Federation's disdain for transhumanism
* The plan to make more Datas with Bruce and Lal showing Starfleet doesn't consider them real people. Voyager also hinted at that.
* The disdain for materialism is almost entirely a human thing and DS9 repeateldy showed capitalism is alive and well everywhere else.

Bruce and Jurati wanted to probably do what you're proposing but they had their dream destroyed.

 

Totally.
I just spent my dozing off time last not mentally writing the ‘androids as crew opening’. I think it could have really shored up some the holes for criticism. To be honest, the only thing in Picard that I wasn’t happy with was pretty much the last episode, but as with the TNG movies, some of this is due to the constraints asked for by actors.