It seems when I watch TOS that Starfleet, and even the Federation, were more hawkish in some regards. And yet, by the time we get to TNG, it seems as if the Federation's politics have become less 'involved' and Starfleet seems more like an administration arm when there are not wars going on.
Is there some conflict between TUC and TNG that starts this liberalism shift in Federation politics? Or, do we see the begining in TUC with how the Khitomer accords showed a more galactic 'congress' at work.
Rob
Scorpio
I think there's a retro-conservative aspect starting with TWOK, not TUC. By SFS, you've got political paranoia in an X-FILES vein permeating the FED and SF with the Genesis business, and you start getting these bureaucratic incompetent or martinet commanders that make Ron Tracey seem great by comparison (hey at least Tracey could fight!)
I've believed that Bennett got the idea to develop this from an unused Sowards idea for TWOK (discussed in Asherman's MAKING OF ST 2), that Starfleet has abandoned 'to explore strange new/to boldly go' in favor of just protecting what it already has, and that THIS is what brought Kirk to his midlife crisis, since he is questioning what he has dedicated his life to.
I thought this was a great notion, but without them explaining it a bit, it just comes off as an arbitrary change (esp in SFS), practically a retcon of the trek universe.
That's in keeping with what some of the screenwriters of TUC and/or TVH have said about Bennett coughing up 'new' ideas a year or so after they've been presented by other writers and rejected.
A lot of it may just be Bennett trying to do as much of the conventional movie thinking thing for Trek (as explained in an Alan Alda flick: defy authority, blow shit up, show tits) as he could do with a pg rating, but it is basically just presenting straw men as obstacles for Kirk & co. It's a bummer, because with an actor as good as Robert Hooks, the scene with Morrow and Shatner could have been dynamite if there was a real character for Kirk to play off of (sort of like the Picard/Dougherty scene in INS should have been, come to think of it.)
It is worth noting, though, that a lot of the GR utopia shit went away (or became unspoken) well before he croaked. I mean, they stopped being vegan/vegetarian (which was a major story point first season TNG) by season four with Picard talking about fish eggs and such (Jeri Taylor seemed to work eating meat in more than all the other writers put together.) And the TNG movies were, with the partial exception of INS, practically a repudiation of the TNG universe, where everything is gunboat diplomacy. Not saying that repudiating the TNG universe is a bad thing, just that if you're going to do it, do it WELL (make stuff at least as exciting as GALAXY QUEST ... the part where the shuttle almost crashed in GQ, and when the ship is revealed in GQ, is better than anything in the TNG flicks.)
