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It’s a very Roddenberry design.

I don’t know, TNG could be up there, but it was also generally influential as a whole, so both its good and bad ended up getting carried over.

The entire exploding bridge trope came from it, as did evil admirals. It also set up the Enterprise as the flagship, with the best and brightest of Starfleet. Which also meant that people generally assumed it to be the norm when it was the exception, and that the hero ship was some special ship, when it was a normal ship of the line in TOS.

VOY Borg are really bad compared to TNG Borg.

They are, but more due to issues with overuse more so than anything. In TNG, we saw the Borg for all of 4 times. In Voyager, they were shown much more frequently.

But as far as the timeline goes, it also wouldn’t make sense to show an earlier iteration of the Borg, not when they were severely affected by the actions of the Borg.

I heard PIC stinks because it makes VOY Borg the main villains

I’d honestly argue that which version of the Borg to be a minor issue in Picard. Picard’s bigger problem was that it didn’t seem to know what it wanted to be, and kept leaping between multiple different plots and story lines, which confuses it a bit.

It arguably have been better if it has taken one of those plots, and run with it for the entire show. Like the matter with Synths and former Borg drones being treated as subhuman, vindicating the concerns Guinan and Picard had in the Measure of a Man, or visiting the TNG crew and seeing where they are now. As it actually was, it seems like the writers/producers felt that now they had Patrick Stewart, they wanted to do everything before it was too late, and the result was a bit of a mishmash.

The issue with the Borg tends to be more that they really aren’t very much of a threat by the end of Voyager, and were dealt such a blow that it would be almost impossible to ignore.

Their greatest threat, assimilation, is trivially curable, and it’s now known that their assimilation abilities are one of their greater weaknesses. The Federation might have issues with infecting someone with a pathogen to make the Borg assimilate them and self-destruct, but others have no such qualms, and we know of at least one species that did use such methods (Icheb’s parents).

Their adaptation is a greater issue, but even older Federation ships, like the galaxy-class saw good effect just cycling their weapons frequencies. The Voyager’s ablative armour would be well-studied after they returned to Starfleet, and dedicated anti-Borg weapons would have both been in active development, and also use.

As of the events of First Contact, it’s also known that not only are there Borg ruins on Earth that may still be intact and active, but that Borg ships are not as truly uniform as they seem, with Picard pointing out a weakness in a Borg cube that dealt catastrophic damage to it. Local signals, what he felt, scans of what remains of the area, and everything would have been thoroughly studied to determine how to both find and exploit those weaknesses on other Borg cubes, without a former privileged Borg unit at the helm.

It would be difficult for them to retain much of the mystique and terror of their TNG appearance, with all of that now.

It’s also been 800 years since then. It’s the third millennium, the seat probably is the belt itself at that point.

Discovery definitely feels like it, especially since you have people still arguing quite animatedly about how it’s not Star Trek, and might have Ruined Star Trek Forever, though I would rather imagine much of it to be recency and accessibility more so than much else.

The other shows are a bit less accessible, even if they are newer, since CBS moved it onto their streaming service, and off of Netflix, whereas Discovery aired on Netflix around a time when Netflix was one of the bigger streaming platforms out there, and more people who aren’t as into Star Trek or other CBS properties might encounter it incidentally.

But for the most part, every single successor to Star Trek has always been controversial, and deemed to have ruined it forever, though most of it abates when the next show comes around, and is then deemed to have ruined Star Trek forever.

Though TNG was by far the least deserving of it.

I actually wonder about that. Most of the complaints, like the ones about Stewart being a shakespearean actor who wouldn’t be able to handle the rigours of serious television, or being bald were nonsense, but there was a lot of good reasons to complain about early TNG. A fair chunk of the early episodes weren’t very consistently good.

We know it to be better in hindsight, but if The Next Generation had started today, and not only is the second episode a rehash of a Star Trek (1966) episode, but the fourth was Code of Honour? I would also be inclined to criticise it for being quite bad. There’s a good reason why a lot of the advice for people watching TNG is to stick around until Season 3, or start from Season 3, since that’s when it gets better.

And if you don’t, that’s what subtitles are for. Hardly much to complain about.

I always thought the things on the side were jubes of some variety.

Which is quite a shame, really. I had a BTX Dell, which had amazing potential to be upgraded, since nearly everything was just spring latches, and could be slid open quite easily. You could install and swap most parts without a screwdriver.

The potential to upgrade it was there, and then it just never materialised, so the entire thing ended up basically being useless.

They’ve existed for quite a long time at this point.

That’s how virtual puppetry/V-Tubing works. The camera tracks your face, and then moves part of a corresponding model, and unlike face posing inside of Garry’s Mod, or something like that, since it’s bound to a real face, it would move more or less like a human face.

eventually passing the test will be a fail because the actions requested are either too difficult for humans to understand or too difficult for humans to perform, at which point AIs will be trained on knowing the physical limitations of humans.

This also exists for some forms of captcha, which track how you complete a puzzle, or something along those lines. A bot would either be completely stumped, complete it far more quickly than a human would, or do it by snapping their cursor to the relevant parts, instead of moving it.

However, it seemed to be one guy that wanted to do that, and the trial was held to examine if that would be right or not, and to establish the legal precedent.

At the same time, Starfleet also enabled it. The entire case would have never happened if it had just been Maddox asking for Data’s voluntary participation, but part of it was also that Starfleet was trying to compel Data to submit to the procedure, and also prevent him from leaving Starfleet to avoid it (hence the property angle).

We also know that the ruling was constrained to that one case both from Voyager, where it was outright stated to not apply to the Doctor, and because Data also had to fight Starfleet to prevent them from taking away Lal. While the fight was ended early as Lal died (possibly as a result of the emotional stress), it would not be too surprising if another legal battle resulted. Maddox might have started the events of Measure of a Man, but he was not singularly responsible for that whole business.

Wheras with the Pegasus, the investigation disappears into a hole and not touched since. Instead of punishing Pressman, he gets made Admiral.

We don’t actually know what happened from after the Pegasus’ cloaking device was revealed, other than that Pressman and the rest of his crew were likely to face court martial (and Pressman had “high-up friends” in Starfleet). He was promoted to Admiral before it was exposed, and it’s unclear what he was promoted for, since he was already Admiral when he tried to get it back.

Plus, you get the prestige of having actually made and perfected it yourself.

That means a bit, especially since the Federation places value on authenticity.

It’s the difference between going to ICA and getting a bottle of wine, compared to fermenting some yourself in a wardrobe, or buying a bottle straight from the vineyard.

Food too. A lot of problems with malnutrition and food deserts would be solved very quickly if you had a machine that could churn out perfectly nutritionally balanced meals.

Not worrying about potentially starving to death would free up a lot for people to go and do what they want to do, and to decline bad work environments.

If you didn’t have to worry about food, or bills, why would you stick to your rubbish job, instead of doing something you actually wanted to do?

But would just every random human have access to a replicator 24/7?

They’re cheap and easy devices. Almost every living space on a starship has one, as does every colony. The Enterprise originally shows up to deliver and install a batch of replicators for an entire colony in “The Survivors”.

Like, that would be a tally in the Utopia column, but even then, the amount of waste and trash produced would be a problem.

Not really. Replicators are two-way devices. If you don’t want something any more, you put it back, and it’ll convert it the other way.

If you were ever worried about rubbish, you could plonk a replicator down, and just use it as an infinite hole to throw your rubbish into, until it went down to a desirable level.

Even in an absolutely ideal situation like that, it would end like The Good Place where getting anything you want burns out your dopamine system.

You have that, but unlike in The Good Place, it’s not forced. You can spend all your time having fun, but eventually you would get bored, and want a challenge, and there are a great many challenges, between colonisation, and scientific achievements. There’s no Janet to ask for all the answers.

There’s also a social element. Culturally, the Federation values authenticity. Going to Vulcan to see a sunset is more value than seeing a hologram of a Vulcan sunset, much like how a photograph today means less than going to the same location it was taken, and seeing it for yourself.

Like I said I’m not a Star Trek expert, I just don’t trust a bunch of rich people working for the one world government telling us the 99.99% of humans we never see are living perfect lives.

It’s funny you say that, since they did abolish financial wealth in Star Trek, since at least the second show, for humans. Everyone gets the basics, and the rest depends entirely on who’s offering.

Going to do authentic pre-23rd century Cajun restaurant doesn’t cost buckets of money. Everyone can book and go there, anytime. It’s first-come, first-served. There’s no way to skip the queue, other than someone else pulling out, of asking them to give you their slot.

But it’s a lot more realistic if not everything was as perfect as we’re told, or even Starfleet officers believe.

At the same time, it is quite far into the future, and they have spent a lot of time and hard work cracking at their issues, with alien assistance.

Earth had to be basically rebuilt from the ground up, after all, and it’s over 200 years past that. Technology makes a lot of the issues facing us today, trivial. If we had their replicators, for example, we would solve a huge amount of issues today. Part of the issue of hunger, for example, is logistical. A single, easily portable device that can create almost endless perfectly nutritious food, and remove waste, would be hugely beneficial to solving it from that angle. Or even their shuttles, if we could just ferry aid directly to the location without concerns over how long it would take to get there, or risks of it being waylaid.

For reference’s sake, they’re about as far from us, as the USA is from its original colonies, and a lot has changed since they revolted and became a country.

I’d honestly go much further back and put it at The Measure of a Man.

A supposedly eutopian Federation should never have been in a position where it would need to go to trial over whether someone could be compelled to undergo a lethal medical procedure (Maddox admitted he wouldn’t be able to reassemble Data after disassembly), nor be reclassified as property/salvage so they could not legally refuse.

They would never do it with any of the organic humanoids in their ranks, how is Data an exception?

It basically proves Chancellor Gorkon’s words true. The Federation is an organic human(oid)s only club. If you’re not one, then any rights you thought you had go away as soon as it’s no longer convenient.

If Starfleet had wished to take Voyager’s EMH and vivisect his matrix to figure out what made him sapient, nothing would have prevented them from legally doing so, and neither the Voyager nor the Doctor would have legal means of preventing it.

Rights being conditional hardly seems like the kind of thing that belongs in eutopia.

If we want to be way more Trek, going by all the times that the shuttles got stolen, it should instead have been a scene of his stepfather going “my car!” upon seeing an empty, open garage, and then doing basically nothing about it.

The federation existed for barely a millennia in its first incarnation.

A millennium is still a good long time, in fairness. There are entire countries that haven’t even come near to that.

Remember when Picard ordered the creation of a virus that might have potentially committed genocide against the Borg in ‘I, Borg’?

The admiralty also ordered it and its deployment.

From memory, Picard got into trouble with the admiral because he ultimately decided against using the virus.

I was alienated by those anti-android resentments in Picard

Funnily enough, this isn’t actually anything new. The Federation has historically harboured sentiments against sapient androids and holograms, not intentionally, of course, but more that they don’t believe that they are people. Just look at the treatment the Doctor/Mark I EMH, Data, and the ExoComps received. The Doctor had fight to regain the rights to works he made, and had the Voyager crew factory resetting him whenever he had a human problem, Data had to fight to be recognised as enough of a person to avoid being dismantled, and then had to do again to avoid having his daughter taken. The ExoComps’ sapience was initially taken as malfunctions, and they were lobotomised, to be used as bombs. The Borg nearly got a genocidal virus unleashed upon them, by the Federation, and Picard specifically got into trouble for not deploying it.

To paraphrase Chancellor Gorkon, the Federation is a human(oid)s only club. Everyone else gets pushed to the wayside.

How in the hell is this the same federation of TNG, Voyager and DS9?

It is also the same Federation that saw no qualms about using multiple genocidal weapons against their enemies. The moment they were threatened even slightly, out comes the big G.

Sure, Wolf 359 had a considerable death toll, and one of the Federation core worlds was threatened, but the automatic reaction shouldn’t have been attempt genocide at the first opportunity. DS9 at least made an attempt to show that they were breaking the rules of engagement by putting down self-replicating subspace mines.

Similarly, the Dominion War. The Federation response to realising a rogue organisation had unleashed a virus designed to wipe out one of the main species of the Dominion seems to have been to sit pretty and wait for them to be forced to the negotiation table, rather than work towards a cure, and try to send it over ASAP. If it wasn’t for the DS9 crew going out of their way to make a cure, one might never have existed, leaving them to die. It would be unimaginable, if, during the Federation-Klingon war, the Federation had simply sat back, and told the Klingon Empire “good luck” in response to both Narendra-3, and the Praxis incidents, instead of offering aid. Nor did they just sit back and tell the Romulan Empire to go away when their main star blew up.

Voyager at least gets a little pass since they were working on their own, and didn’t have the support of the rest of the Federation backing them up, but ethically, it’s still not a good look for them to promote Captain Janeway for her work assisting Admiral Janeway in deploying the neurolytic pathogen that we know ultimately wiped out the Collective.

Star Trek is supposed to be the ONE fiction with a positive, utopian view on mankind and the future. I totally get the attraction of dystopian settings but for that I can read some Warhammer 40k novels. This really makes me furious.

I would be a little curious about where that came from. The Federation is better, but it thinks of itself as a perfect utopia, when TNG shows it to be more due to hubris on the part of the Federation, and that they not only have some ways to go, but have to work to stay there.

In my opinion, the difference between the Federation as it is now, and the way it was back then is that the flaws are more front and centre now.

Whereas previously, it seemed to be treated as more of a case of it being the actions of a lot of bad eggs within the Federation. Starfleet famously has issues with the admiralty trying to order reprehensible things. Similarly, for DS9, where it’s left ambiguous whether Section 31 is a rogue organisation made of people who think that the Federation is “too soft”, and thus needs people to do the dirty work behind the scenes, or a clandestine black organisation. The actual flaws within the Federation, like the mess about what rights to personhood androids and holograms had, were mostly skated over.

Compare that to now, where we see a bunch of Admirals convene to decide to blow up Kling/Qo’noS. In older shows, it would have just been one admiral giving the order, and the decision would laid solely at their feet, rather than something that would be attributed more to Starfleet, or the Federation in general.

In early TNG, the Federation is seen as entertaining ending Data’s rights and allows a Federation colony to deteriorate to the level of drug wars.

There’s honestly a good argument that Data arguably had none at all. His status was automatically changed to “property/salvage” the moment that he exercised his rights in a manner that Starfleet found inconvenient, by not wanting to be irreversibly dismantled.

The Enterprise might have treated him as a person, but they were unusual amongst Starfleet for doing so. We know later on, that the Sutherland considered him to be little more than a legged computer, and nearly mutinied against him because they interpreted all his actions in that light. Considering Data’s storied history of serving in Starfleet without having the support of personhood the Enterprise crew gave him, it would not be at all surprising if the Sutherland’s attitude was the norm, and the Enterprise was unusually accepting, on account of being the best and brightest of Starfleet.

Just for comparison’s sake, how does it compare to modern episodes? Are they still shot within the span of a single week?