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

[Dukhat]

Why are you so unrelentingly negative?

He’s not. It’s just an act. I highly doubt he hates the show as much as he acts like he does.

 

[The Old Mixer]

Let's talk about the destruction of Trek utopia...not Pubert.

 

[nic3636]

Re Stewart's voice, my mother and I commented on it when we watched the show. In spite of the fact that Stewart has aged, in the show there seemed to be a definite emphasis on how Picard has aged and has given up on the Starfleet lifestyle, not to mention the medical condition he's revealed to be suffering from (and indeed, was not given a good prognosis!). I also noticed that he sounded younger towards the end and post body swap (and, indeed, has been pointed out, Stewart sounds different in interviews).

I got a definite Logan/Unforgiven vibe from Picard in that he becomes the full-on hero again right at the end and considering Stewart was in Logan, I wouldn't be surprised if that was when he started to think it would be fun if Picard got a similar outing. Thus, maybe it's just Stewart's voice changing with age but it seemed to serve the plot as well.

I'm not so sure, he did a doordash commercial with Mark Hamill and sounded pretty old there too.

 

[fireproof78]

He got his groove back? I thought he died and was replaced by a android with s copy of his memories. The real Picard is dead. He never got his groove back. He does looking at the lord of the rings reject when he died Lol.

Yes, he got his groove back. His consciousness was transferred. It's as Trek a plot as they come.

 

[SJGardner]

Didn't he get his groove back before he died anyway? He seemed so confident and triumphant after figuring everything out... calling Clancy and making her admit he was right all along, laying an official Federation claim to Coppelius just in case the Romulans arrived before Starfleet, holding the line until Riker's reinforcements arrived... not to mention how after all that, starting to feel himself overwhelmed by his disease, he asked for an injection of a stimulant he knew would swiftly kill him because he concluded that convincing Soji to stand down and not summon the ancient machines (and thereby showing the Romulans that synths weren't inherently evil and we could live together with them) was more important than his own life. To be honest, he seemed to act like his old self again already after meeting the Rikers back in Episode 7.

 

[KennyB]

Yes, he got his groove back. His consciousness was transferred. It's as Trek a plot as they come.

I hear Santa ain't real neither.......

 

[fireproof78]

I hear Santa ain't real neither.......

Since when?

 

[cooleddie74]

I call B.S. on that.

NASA even has authenticated footage.

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[Lord Garth]

I think you can look at where Starfleet and the Federation are at through Picard. He's the only character who's been a series lead underneath Gene Roddenberry, Rick Berman, and Alex Kurtzman.

 

[Dryson]

Trek's Utopia was destroyed by the Vulcans in my opinion. The Vulcans tried to convert humanity to think logically and always assume that every first encounter should be conducted logically using diplomacy.

Buy as we have seen, there have been more instances of first contacts being aggressive and violent with the other species trying to take from Earth to add to the other species own fight for dominance.

In space it's fire upon the unknown and fear a larger war or be fired upon and be destroyed in that moment.

 

[dupersuper]

Trek's Utopia was destroyed by the Vulcans in my opinion. The Vulcans tried to convert humanity to think logically and always assume that every first encounter should be conducted logically using diplomacy.

Buy as we have seen, there have been more instances of first contacts being aggressive and violent with the other species trying to take from Earth to add to the other species own fight for dominance.

In space it's fire upon the unknown and fear a larger war or be fired upon and be destroyed in that moment.

So...your utopia is humanity turning into interstellar tyrants?

 

[cooleddie74]

I'm lost.

On the other hand...I'll stay lost. I...I don't need to know.

 

[Sci]

Well I do believe you've managed to completely miss the point, which was explicitly that I don't expect human nature to change in the coming centuries. TNG is a particular offender in this regard. TOS not to much, I'll give you that, but there are more realistic portrayals in Trek lore.

Just because it isn't what you envisioned humanity to be in the future doesn't make it 'bad writing'.

Also your characterisation of what happened in Picard is misleading. The Federation abandoned the Romulan project under pressure from members who threatened to secede, and it banned synthetics for fear of a repeat of Mars. None of that is xenophobic.

I agree with your broader points about PIC not "destorying" ST's optimistic vision of the future overall, but I think the idea that abandoning helping the Romulans and banning synths weren't forms of xenophobia is just not accurate. Those Federation Members who threatened to secede because the Federation was trying to save billions of innocent Romulan lives were being xenophobic against Romulans, and the UFP giving into them was a xenophobic act. Banning all synthetic lifeforms from the UFP because of the actions of a few synths (the security of whose operations was unclear) is xenophobic against synthetic sentients.

No. I am so sick of people mistaking the darker tone of DS9 with the cynicism of Picard. DS9 was a show on the frontier...beyond the frontier, actually. Outside of Federation space.

Most of PIC takes place outside of Federation space, too.

So much of the crux of that show was specifically the contrast between that setting and the paradise of Earth and the rest of the Federation. Picard has the Federation itself being sad and scared and xenophobic and isolationist and reactionary.

DS9 made it clear that xenophobia, isolationism, and reactionary politics were major forces within the Federation that had to be fought against. DS9 Season Four literally featured a faction of Starfleet so freaked out by the possibility of Founder infiltration that they tried to overthrow the democratically-elected government and install a military dictatorship. DS9 S5 featured reactionary assholes who condemned the culture of a Federation Member State (Risa) for daring to incorporate the idea that sex is good, before they violently seized control of a vital part of Risa's public safety infrastructure and destroyed it (the weather control system). And DS9 S7 features the Federation Council deciding to passively allow the Founder species to go extinct rather than help them avoid a potential extinction-level event -- just like the Federation in PIC decided to passively allow billions of Romulans to die instead of helping them avoid a potential extinction-level event.

The people were against saving Romulans.

Some people. PIC makes it clear that this was a divisive issue and that no real consensus was ever reached.

They have 21st style shoddy "journalists".

I mean, that journalist was clearly an asshole, but there's no indication that she wasn't a journalist. There will always be people with unreasonable points of view in a democracy -- which is something DS9 made pretty clear, too.

I get that this is the Federation after several Borg attacks, the Dominion War, the destruction of Utopia Planetia, et al. I get why they've regressed. It's just not what I want to watch. Much like I get they were trying to give Superman no choice but to snap Zods neck in Man of Steel, and clearly it's what Zod wanted after his purpose of defending Krypton was no more. But that and the washed out reckless disaster porn that preceded it isn't what I watch Superman for.

I get what you're saying about comparing PIC's depiction of the Federation to Man of Steel's depiction of Superman, but I don't think this is actually a good comparison. PIC is about how the Federation did something wrong and then is led to redeem itself through Jean-Luc Picard's leadership. Man of Steel, insofar as it is about anything, is about Superman being forced to do something terrible (because Zack Snyder thinks he has to "explain" why Superman refuses to kill -- as though refusing to kill is some weird thing that needs an explanation!). The former is about the idea that we can be redeemed and become good again; the latter is about the idea that we can never help but sin and trying to be good is futile.

Where are people seeing the Xenophobia? The Federation is made up of dozens of species.

Isolationist yes, but not xenophobic.

Xenophobia can be targeted against a particular group.

In star trek the voyage home they had two or three whole scenes on swearing and how 23rd century humans speech excluded that type of language.

They never claimed swearing was excluded from 23rd Century Human speech. TOS is full of hells and damns, and TSFS literally has a scene with Kirk yelling, "You Klingon bastards." It's just that 23rd Century Humans weren't familiar with the particular swears of 20th Century Americans.

Language and speech does change through the centuries. If you traveled back 300 years you would probably have some trouble with some words that were popular back on the lexicon back them. Language when we are talking about slang does change over the decades and centuries. Gene had it right when he made language on star trek very clean and straight forward. No one say "hey dude sup" because things has changed by then .

They are using it just it just to use it now. The lexicon is 20th and 21st century. It's out of place in star trek and violates canon.

Except even prescriptivist grammar changes over time. It's just as unrealistic for 23rd or 24th Century Humans to be speaking in standard prescriptivist English as it would be for them to use slang contemporary to the production date. Either approach would be an unrealistic act of "poetic license." You're just used to one and not the other.

Also, let's be very clear: Swearing is a morally neutral act. There is nothing bad or wrong about it per se. Characters using swear words is not an indication of any loss of an optimistic vision of the future.

Watch star trek the voyage home. It does violate canon. They swear every other sentence now.

No, they do not.

Also Stewart is getting old and his voice sounds like a old British womans.

Wow -- ageist and misogynist!

It does sound feeble though, definitely weaker than it was before. I was surprised how much his voice changed when the series premiered. It makes some of his action scenes less believable, like at the beginning of the show when he was on the rooftop with Soji's sister and he got thrown back by that explosion I was thinking "yeah right, he would have broken every bone in his body".

I mean, characters being so near major explosions without damage is always unrealistic no matter whose body has miraculously escaped having every bone shattered. Picard's voice having changed in his 90s has absolutely nothing to do with that.

I get your main point, but in your example it's not clear exactly what the writers are getting at. It's possible that Raffi's living conditions are self imposed but she made some comments that implied she was jealous of Picard's chateau (could have also been sarcasm).

Yeah, I mean -- I think this is Michael Chabon basically objecting to Star Trek's old assumptions that economic inequality has been eliminated, but I don't think he really thought that one through, considering replicators would make the cost of living so low as to be practically zero, and that would rationally eliminate the foundation for a large amount of inequality. So I personally reject the idea that Raffi was speaking accurately there -- I think she's engaging in some very self-destructive behaviors and is really reaching for ways to rationalize her choices.

And even PIC itself implicitly backs up the idea that most forms of economic inequality have been abolished in the Federation by the 24th Century -- Dahj is an unemployed college graduate about to become a grad student, yet she lives in an apartment in a major metropolitan area that would be prohibitively expensive for unemployed recent college grads in real life. Looks to me like strong evidence that United Earth and/or the UFP ensure a baseline of material needs are met for all people if they so want it.

(Hell, even Raffi's trailer doesn't look particularly awful as living conditions go.)

Also, Rios says Picard is compensating handsomely for his services. For all we know he's referring to a couple of bottles of the Picard vineyard's finest year, but I think it's easy to see those scenes and conclude there's money and it's associated inequality in the Federation, even though that may not be the case. The ambiguity was probably just an oversight by the writing team as it was just a couple of throw away lines that had no impact on any of the plots, but they weren't doing themselves any favors there.

I mean, the presence or absence of money per se doesn't establish anything about inequality. You could have an egalitarian society that still uses money to facilitate trade. Prior Trek often used the idea of "no money" as shorthand for "economic oppression has been abolished," but prior Trek was often inconsistent about money's absence as well. I'm fine with the idea that money exists but class does not.

 

[Tuskin38]

Trek's Utopia was destroyed by the Vulcans in my opinion. The Vulcans tried to convert humanity to think logically and always assume that every first encounter should be conducted logically using diplomacy.

Buy as we have seen, there have been more instances of first contacts being aggressive and violent with the other species trying to take from Earth to add to the other species own fight for dominance.

In space it's fire upon the unknown and fear a larger war or be fired upon and be destroyed in that moment.

What the hell is wrong with you?

 

[The Old Mixer]

No need to get personal about it.

 

[nic3636]

I mean, characters being so near major explosions without damage is always unrealistic no matter whose body has miraculously escaped having every bone shattered. Picard's voice having changed in his 90s has absolutely nothing to do with that.

That's true, it just makes you think about it more I suppose. I just hear his older sounding voice and think his body has also deteriorated which may or may not be true. Maybe it's less of an issue now that he has a synth body.

 

[TRON JA307020]

That's true, it just makes you think about it more I suppose. I just hear his older sounding voice and think his body has also deteriorated which may or may not be true. Maybe it's less of an issue now that he has a synth body.

No he'll still sound old and move slow in season 2. He really didnt get a new body. Hes just an actor on a tv show and hes 80 years old. Lol

 

[Dukhat]

No he'll still sound old and move slow in season 2. He really didnt get a new body. Hes just an actor on a tv show and hes 80 years old. Lol

So if you know how old he is, stop making stupid complaints about how old he is and just don’t watch the show if you hate it so much.

 

[fireproof78]

Ageism-that's a new trait.

 

[USS Firefly]

I find It refreshing to follow a old person who is past his (physical) prime on his adventures. Instead of young handsome people