Spoilers Let’s talk about the destruction of Trek utopia…
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I mean, we know from Star Trek: First Contact and Star Trek (2009) that the average Federation Member State's capital planet seems to have populations in the billions, whereas we rarely hear about colony worlds with more than a few hundred thousand people at most. So it does seem as though the majority of people prefer to live on a built-up Federation homeworld where poverty is gone and all your basic material needs are provided.
Yet we also know from Sisko's Creole Kitchen, the Picard winery, the Atlantis Project, and the existence of Starfleet itself, that it's not as though Earth and other Federation Member worlds have ceased production. Their inhabitants don't spend all day in bed between walks over to the replicator to stuff their gullets. People can and do find, and create, meaningful work.
For some people, that means forging a new community off on the frontier. For others, it might mean serving their community on Earth. For others, maybe it means finding forms of artistic expression. (Given that in real life the supply of actors always exceeds the commercial industry's demand, I suspect that a post-capitalist Federation has large and thriving artistic industries.) For others, maybe it means building a better computer system. For others it might mean medicine. Etc.
That, and 24th Century medicine probably does a lot more to repair the damage caused by alcohol and drug use than we can do today.
I finally found the time to finish Picard today. It is amazing how being trapped at home and not having a commute actually has led to less free time.
As someone who regularly lambasts the Kelvin universe films and Discovery for abandoning the Roddenberry Trek Utopia, Picard has it. Sure there is cussing and in general the series is a bit courser and would have a more adult rating, but that is just surface details. I won't discuss the particulars, but the events of the final episode are classic TNG resolutions. Picard's goals, who helps him, who he convinces to act, all of it. This series rings true to the best of TNG. And some nice ties back to some TOS episodes in this series as well. Picard is the best Trek since TNG.
As someone who regularly lambasts the Kelvin universe films and Discovery for abandoning the Roddenberry Trek Utopia, Picard has it. Sure there is cussing and in general the series is a bit courser and would have a more adult rating, but that is just surface details. I won't discuss the particulars, but the events of the final episode are classic TNG resolutions. Picard's goals, who helps him, who he convinces to act, all of it. This series rings true to the best of TNG. And some nice ties back to some TOS episodes in this series as well. Picard is the best Trek since TNG.
Can you check and see if you have a fever?
I mean Discovery did no such thing but ok.
No it didn't. But, one also has to look at how utopia was presented in TOS vs. how utopia became in later works. Humanity in TOS was still very much understandable in contemporary terms, but focused on mutual cooperation not human evolution. Society was one of willingness to work together vs. being divided because of appearance. It was simple but essential. It didn't preclude the possibility of conflict.
Spoiler: there was no utopia in TOS. 
I agree, but I've already seen the viewpoint of reverse engineering the TNG/TMP utopic attitude back in to TOS. So, here comes the arguments.Spoiler: there was no utopia in TOS.
Earth is on the way to the TNG/DS9/VOY "utopia" or whatever one chooses to call it but it's much closer to our modern world and what we see in ENT.
Haven't watched it in a while, have you. It is definitely there and not much different from TNG. Definitely no different from the original cast films. That was one of the things that made Star Trek so popular originally. Optimism of the future in a pessimistic time.Spoiler: there was no utopia in TOS.
Nope, no fever. 1000 times better than Discovery. And 10,000 times better than the Kelvin timeline films.
I watch it frequently. And I stand by my opinion.
"Really progressive and trying to reach a utopia" is not a utopia, especially with the way so many humans in TOS behave.
TOS was 'us, but better,' while TNG is nuHumans Utopianism for the first couple of seasons until it tones down a bit with being so full of themselves. ENT kind of splits the difference as a direct extension of VOY until season 3. DIS' first half reads like Mirror Universe lite, until we see the actual Mirror Universe firmly establishing what we've been watching is definitely supposed to be prime Trek. DIS S2 is a bit of an improvement but does the whole S31 in the open with a shadow fleet. S3 is a big nudge in the right direction with the admiral earnestly wanting to help but lacking resources.
Trek's idea of utopia is messier than a Klingon wedding.
Optimism is not utopian.
Oh, I'm sure that there are those who think that. But Picard is like TNG? That's less common.
That is only because TNG was sterile for 80's/90's prime time audiences while Picard is freer to play in the world and get a little more down and dirty. At its core, Picard carries the same positive message of the future as TNG did. It promised and delivered exactly what was promised.
The so called "Trek Utopia" is not a classic Utopia by any means. It never was. That is just a catchy phrase for what Roddenberry saw for the future of humanity in Star Trek. I call it Roddenberry's Vision to avoid that confusion. All it means is that we get better over time. Enterprise was a bit messier in this respect than TOS (at least what I saw and remember of it). It was supposed to be because it was before the Federation.
But here are some key aspects of what I see it including. Avoiding war. Racism is virtually extinguished. Money is not really used anymore. Poverty is mostly abolished. The greed the tends to drive us today is replaced by the drive to learn. This is all in TOS, fully fleshed out. The 1701 crew truly do not understand some of the things they encounter that we are doing today. And there is always some internal conflict. Bureaucrats who do not understand the realities of dealing with alien civilizations. Starfleet officers who have seen too much and crack. And while TNG may have upped the level of the "Utopia" that we see, they also upped other things. We get a couple of conspiracies, very biased people trying to derail things, corruption at the highest levels, or at least the question of it. And DS9 carries that to an extreme and is probably the biggest violator in the Justman/Berman years of Trek. Whereas Voyager has the merger of the Starfleet and Marquis crews. But all this is there in TOS. All of it. It is what made TOS what it was and what has carried fandom through and why many of us are so pissed at the Kelvin movies and Discovery.
But here are some key aspects of what I see it including. Avoiding war. Racism is virtually extinguished. Money is not really used anymore. Poverty is mostly abolished. The greed the tends to drive us today is replaced by the drive to learn. This is all in TOS, fully fleshed out. The 1701 crew truly do not understand some of the things they encounter that we are doing today. And there is always some internal conflict. Bureaucrats who do not understand the realities of dealing with alien civilizations. Starfleet officers who have seen too much and crack. And while TNG may have upped the level of the "Utopia" that we see, they also upped other things. We get a couple of conspiracies, very biased people trying to derail things, corruption at the highest levels, or at least the question of it. And DS9 carries that to an extreme and is probably the biggest violator in the Justman/Berman years of Trek. Whereas Voyager has the merger of the Starfleet and Marquis crews. But all this is there in TOS. All of it. It is what made TOS what it was and what has carried fandom through and why many of us are so pissed at the Kelvin movies and Discovery.
I still see those same things Discovery and in Kelvin. They just have to be fought for in a stronger way rather than just being taken for granted. TOS never takes for granted that the battle has been won. Rather it is an ongoing struggle never to be idle. Racism is virtually extinguished, but still present in TOS. There are divisions and strifes and internal conflict.
In short, there is not a single aspect of Star Trek's optimism (not utopia. I'll not use such an inaccurate term) not present in Discovery or Kelvin universe. It simply isn't the automatic assumption of all beings.
In short, there is not a single aspect of Star Trek's optimism (not utopia. I'll not use such an inaccurate term) not present in Discovery or Kelvin universe. It simply isn't the automatic assumption of all beings.
And at it's core so is Discovery and Kelvin Universe.
War is repeatedly considered normal in the TOS era. They featured racism repeatedly and never at all implied it had died out. The Enterprise visited planets that were obviously poor (and Captain Kirk grew up on a planet that had so many problems their governor executed people to have enough food left over for the others). And money is used *all* the time in that era.
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