Look I'm not a trekkie. I watched my first Star Trek series five years ago as an adult. I know of a single other person IRL who watches Star Trek and they use it as sleep therapy. I don't care about the minutiae of canon. But this is straight up evil: the foundational fact of Picard s2 seems to be that humankind has two paths ahead of it. On one hand it can go to space and find a magical microbe that literally solve all of it's problems. If not then it becomes a genocidal space empire.
Trek canon on how exactly humanity built an utopia is somewhat vague, I guess? Priorities really do seem to change with each generation of writers. Vulcan solidarity reflect the quasi religious beliefs in alien saviors that rose up strong in the last century. WW3 and the eugenics wars are deep seated in the post WW2 psyche. Enterprise reminds us humans (and vulcans!) didn't have replicators when they eliminated poverty. DS9 was certain to make it about a political struggle. Sure, it was naive about it. The Bell episodes seem to think the internet would eventually unleash a torrent of regenerative empathy across humanity and boy did that idea crash and burn. But the end of the literal concentration camps was still triggered by actual resistance.
Oh, sure you might say: what about the mirror episodes? Those hit different. The parallel universe is about a campy cartoonish sort of evil and silly personality switcheroos. It's not supposed to be a critique of our actual human society. Picard is. People say that the writers of newer Star Trek don't 'get it'. Like, they don't realize Star Trek is supposed to be optimistic. They do. They've decided that is too naive about it, that they must make room for current issues like the climate collapse, but the way they've done so reflects their own worldview. A sort of ideology where, should effective altruism fail, then the only way forward is hyper fascism. The optimism of 'New Trek' is thus: there is nothing we can do on Earth but we can find salvation in space, either in the form of literal magic or new others to kill.
What the hell happened in the last decades that an egalitarian utopia is more 'pie in the sky' today than it was at the height of the cold war?
This element of season 2 really pissed me off, implying that climate change can be solved not by pulling together and fundementally changing our social and economic systems (and maybe a bit of Vulcan terraforming technology once we've made first contact) but by finding a magic space microbe on Europa is the most bazingabrained shit I've ever heard.
It's why I made the post. People rightly shit on Picard in general. RLM does a good job at it. But this is an angle that I don't see anywhere else.
Yeah, the RLM coverage was mostly funny and good but did occasionally dip into "Nutrek exists because people nowadays are too stupid for good Star Trek" which is an L in my opinion
you know i actually come at it from a different angle. sure, you can an argument in the sense of 'old trek wasn't made for the capeshit zeitgeist' or maybe even 'well, trek was always niche and if you actively hate it while trying to promote it to new audiences you end up with capeshit'. however 'people are too stupid for trek' is a bit masturbatory. im a dumbass. my brain hasn't been elevated because i know what the deflector disk is for.
i just like bajorans and romulans man.
Also thar somehow we're sending manned missions to a fucking moon of Jupiter in a year