Let me start off by saying that I love Star Trek. I grew up watching Star Trek, and it has profoundly influenced my life to the point that I've essentially internalized Roddenbery's vision for the future, a future where people of all races and nationalities live and work together and mankind ventures forth to the stars with a secular humanist ethics and a love of discovery and diplomacy and compassion instead of myopic bigotries and superstition and cruelty. To me, that's the core of Star Trek. Trek is ultimately an optimistic series where mankind struggles but eventually succeeds in mastering its own dark impulses, joins the galactic stage as a truly mature race, and ever pushes forth into the beyond. Without that core vision, Trek is nothing.
For decades now, Trek has slowly broken off from that vision and has slowly become something else entirely, something dark and nasty and... depressing. It's hard to say exactly when that started, but it has become increasingly noticeable and now with Star Trek Picard, it is super obvious and incredibly off-putting.
In TNG, we're told that humanity no longer has need of money, that disease and poverty have been eradicated, that people's passion in life isn't the accumulation of wealth or objects, but the improvement of oneself and one's skills.
Cut to ST: Picard and Earth looks like something out of Blade Runner, almost everyone are space racists and don't give a fuck about other people, no one is happy, people complain about lack of money several times, people are straight up dicks for seemingly no reason, terrorism is super in vogue, and apparently drug addiction and pop-up ads (dafuq) are still a thing.
And if that weren't bad enough, even the best people are just these abysmal wrecks of human beings who haven't done anything good with their lives for the past 20 years and just live for revenge or wealth or some sort of aimless self-indulgence. And by the way, there is little to no exploration whatsoever for these people.
And the brutality of this series... I mean, there have been some pretty messed up deaths on Star Trek, no doubt about it. But the tone and the casual brutality of some of these deaths makes Battlestar Galactica look like My Little Pony. It's just super grimdark in a series whose main selling point is that it's nobebright.
I had to explain some of this stuff to my brother. Imagine 20 years into the future where Jake Sisko is an adult, but he's living in some shack and his girlfriend is a heroin junkie and she owes the mob so they torture Joseph Sisko and burn down his restaurant. So Jake goes on this murder spree and shoves a red-hot poker through the mob boss's eye. That's the level of dark and twisted that Star Trek is on right now. And I've gotta ask, who the hell is this for? Cause it isn't for me and it damn sure isn't a family show.
Like honestly, I half expect to see Wesley Crusher covered head to toe with tribal tats and the word "damaged" written across his forehead and a deep scar over one of his eyes. And he wields an energy katana against a bunch of motorcycle-helmeted goons who continually teleport down around him.
Like seriously, wtf. I had hope that ST: Discovery would pull Trek around. I was bitterly disappointed. And recently, I've put all my hope in Picard's last ditch effort to save this franchise. An even more crushing disappointment.
Unless things change in a big way in the future, Star Trek is dead to me. And to my knowledge, the last ember of Trek still alive is in The Orville, which technically isn't Star Trek but shares the same aesthetic and central themes as TNG.
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