Why Do We Demand Internal Consistency & Continuity in Star Trek?

The writer's should be able to explain how their world works and why people do things for no compensation. That is one heck of a psychological nut someone had to crack at some point.

 

So did we really know to why in SW that a persons ability to use the force is down to the number of midichlorians they have?

 

The idea didn't bother me, the poor execution did. But, that is quite a bit different than everyone on a planet of billions decided to start working for free. Because no matter how automated things become, there will always be human intervention somewhere in the chain.

 

A constant thing we've seen in Trek is that before they became money free utopia they hit absolute bottom first. Things got much much worse before rhey got better, inuding another devastating world war

 

I just have a hard time ever seeing this happen. It is something I can't wrap my mind around. Who gets prime plots of real estate? The penthouse of certain buildings? Houses on the beach? Who gets real estate to open restaurants and other businesses?

Unlimited energy is great. But there's still a whole lot of experts you need to keep things going. The people who control the power grid, the people who are obtaining matter for replication, people who are in charge of construction.

Picard was offered a job as an underwater manager of some sort. Where would he have lived?

I think the Trek economy may not have "money", but I don't think it is very far removed from where we are at. Probably a world where status replaces cash. The more well known and useful you are, the more you get. With certain exceptions, like Robert keeping the family farm when there we're likely dozens of people who were more capable winemakers around.

 

This actually gets to, IMHO, the reason many people love the Federation setting. Questions of whether it is truly utopian aside, it appears to be a post-capitalist, secular humanist wonderland where many within-humanity divisions - from racism, to sexism, to classism - have been totally eliminated. People feel a strong attachment to the setting because they would like to live in such a setting, or at least imagine that their descendants will do so in the future. Thus people get pretty squirrly with attempts to "deconstruct" this into some sort of typical crapsack setting.

For example, one of the biggest issues I had early on with DIS was that Micheal Burnham wasn't just supposedly imprisoned for life, but she was being sent to a penal colony to do hard labor. One random threat to Scott by an admiral in TOS aside, Trek has been pretty consistent that penal colonies don't exist in the Federation. Even if you accept that permanent jails still exist in the Federation (something canon is iffy about) forced labor goes against everything the Federation is shown to stand for.

 

Um... they do. Tantalus, Elba II, New Zealand and I'm sure they've mentioned a couple of others. Ensign Ro was retrieved from a penal colony for the episode.

 

Cory Doctorow's latest book, Walkaway, goes into great detail about how a post-capitalist, post-scarcity, and post-cash world could operate. Tons of infodumping (and whole chapters dominated by philosophical debate) yet it still manages to tell an interesting story.

 

I might give it a try at some point. My reading pile is pretty steep right now.

 

Yeah, I forgot about the New Zealand prison. It didn't look to harsh from what we saw however. And of course TOS intimated that prisons had been all but abolished due to the work of Tristan Adams, but of course he turned out to be a bad egg and it's unclear if the Federation continued to use any of his methods.

Perhaps I should not have said penal colony in particular, but labor camp. There is no evidence that Ro did hard labor when she was in the stockade on Jaros II

 

Tom Paris looked to be involved in some pretty heavy labor when Janeway snagged him from New Zealand.

 

It probably becomes easier with the moon and Mars being terraformed. More prime real estate

 

There is still going to be nine or ten billion of us by that point. So certain types of property are likely to be available to a sliver of one percent of the population.

 

I completely agree questions of how such an economy might work and how desirable it is are far from trivial, but that isn't what I'm talking about.

On the contrary I'm talking about the endless merry go round of "does it?/doesn't it?" which characterises most discussion on the subject of money existing in the federation, where the focus is on proving a "factual" statement one way or the other about a fictional setting, not the actual meat and veg of implications and questions it raises about the real world.

Much as with the "disability representation vs accuracy of medical tech" argument it is an example of so called "in universe" details taking priority over the real world commentary which actually makes Trek such a beautiful, rare and valuable thing in pop culture.

Again, I'm not totally against the limited world building that exists in Trek per se, but am sometimes at a loss to how people seem so determined to focus on it to the detriment of the show's actual impact and purpose, the things that make it so important.

 

Yeah but i would guess not eveyone wants to live in the same place. Some people want to live by the beach some don't. I would imagine there are far fewer bad areas.

 

If you have something to say about wealth inequality, that's great. Though many people want to know how you get from point A to point B. It is entertainment, but it is an entertainment franchise with a giant egg sitting right in the middle of it with no explanation (even a bullshit one) of how something like this is supposed to work.

They have introduced the idea of "no money" then kinda ignored it whenever it is inconvenient. Which kinda gives steam to these kinds of discussions.

 

I get that, but those discussions are so notorious in forums such as this precisely because they become unproductive as a result of focusing on a binary question of in universe "consistency" which we all know has no real answer.

What they rarely do is bring up the questions and lessons that actually could and should be drawn from an exploration of the topic. Those issues are thus overshadowed and the value Trek can bring to the table is lost in the mire of trivia.

 

Honestly, at this point, I think all we have left is the trivia. Trek has left the big ideas to others and is simply riding on its reputation.

 

You haven't seen the heads exploding about the political bias? Here, have some brain matter someone left on my jacket....

I'll grant DSC has been pretty simplistic and ham fisted about it, but so in retrospect were TOS and TNG at times. What we are seeing are very turbulent times with political and societal issues from fifty years ago resurfacing with a vengeance. Those are the very issues which inspired the commentary in TOS and made Trek so iconic as being as much a part of counter culture as mainstream entertainment.

No DSC may not quite be stepping up to the mark in terms of the sophistication the franchise heritage and reputation would leave us hoping for, but it's going a lot further and harder than VOY or ENT did. It's no longer politically silent, impotent or washed out and that is exactly where it has the potential to really matter. If it is to be judged those issues and how it addresses them matter far more than what the Klingons look like, what uniforms the crew are wearing, whether the tech is too advanced or whether they should have redressed the D7 so dramatically.

 

I'm trying to think about what the most recent thoughtfully-done "issue episode" of Trek was. Latter-day Voyager, although it was mostly dull as dishwater, could occasionally belt out a show like Living Witness, Barge of the Dead, and Lineage. Enterprise barely even bothered trying. There were some good episodes, but aside from Congenitor, they typically didn't seem like they had anything didactic they really wanted to impart.