NuTrek asking deep questions like “Can you really call war crimes bad?” and has silly moments like doing war crimes
The morale of Season 1 finale of Discovery is that omnicidal destruction of a planet is bad but enacting a regime change with the threat of omnicidal destruction of a planet is the kind of morals the Federation was built on.
Season 2 teaches us that people who think minorities want us dead are correct, but if you do a speech they will decide to not genocide you. It literally blames the actions of the minority for the hatred they receive.
So I think a lot of the communism happens back home on earth/other planets. This is a bit of a problem with some other socialist utopia scifi like The Culture novels and the Lancer RPG: socialism and sci-fi super tech, in concert especially, removes a lot of struggles which is great for the beneficiaries of it, but bad for compelling fiction, so a lot of the stories end up being about people on the fringes of the society (ambassadors, spies, soldiers, explorers) who have to interact with capitalist/feudal forces outside the socialist society.
EDIT: also, personally I don’t know about any exceptions to this, sorry
The Dispossessed features active tension within a socialist society. these active contradictions push the main character to defect - it’s one of the first things you learn in the novel. the story alternates between the plot at home in the socialist world that drove him to leave, and the consequences of his defection on his life and within the capitalist society he visits.
We need more ds9 emotes. We only have :rommunism: :quark: and :dax-stoked:
It’s overstated by the fans. Gene Roddenberry was a lib with a very utopian vision of humanity’s social evolution - he recognized that no poverty meant no capitalism, but he didn’t really have a coherent idea of how it got there or how it maintained equality. Just that at some point the nukes started flying and then we met aliens and then we got our collective shit together. So that’s why Trek is often extremely lib despite the foundations of its universe implying the existence of galactic communism.
TNG is socialist but you are just supposed to accept the premise, TNG is a far more philosophical show than DS9. Picard says we don’t need money anymore and that we “grew up” and you just accept it. At one point a time traveler from the 20th century appears and he starts asking about his stocks and investments and the crew just pities and laughs at the guy. The Ferengi are not particularly great yet(better on DS9) but they are obviously a take on capitalists.
Nobody ever said TNG is gay, in fact there was a pretty controversial episode about gender where Frakes felt it could have been handled better but TNG was not that liberal about it.
DS9 is where the gay realy starts. The actor who played Garak explicitly tried to make him gay towards to Bashir. Then there is the mirror universe plot. And then there is the whole Jadzia Dax character, Sisko regularly refers to Jadzia Dax as “old man” because he is referring to Curzon Dax the previous male host. Jadzia is straight though.
The main thing about Trek communism is there is very little time spent explaining how Earth realy works and how it looks like.
The best Earth episodes are on DS9 and they tackled the mass unrest and collapse of today, Homefront is realy about 9/11 before it happened. But it is important because Sisko’s father explains how and why he still works, what it means to live on Earth etc.
Past Tense is realy probably the most politicaly relevant Trek episode ever, basicaly the Bell riots is the major historical turning point. This is a major indictment of modern capitalism, realy the episode may as well be filmed today because it is so fucking on point.
And then the “meme” episode Bar Association where they quote the communist manifesto and form a union.
This is also what made The X-Files (and, to a lesser extent, Fringe) so great.
I know this is twitter but the comments read like tumblr posts which used to feel so much more… of a certain kind of sincerity I don’t have the words to describe. I’m aware of its flaws, but I guess I’m just feeling nostalgic for a social media that wasn’t quite so hollowed out by profit seeking.
I could be wrong, twitter won’t let me make an account so I don’t know how it looks :shrug-outta-hecks:
