I caught up on Star Trek: Picard. My main thought: What is the point of western civilization if even Star Trek can’t be hopeful?
Star Trek was, at some point, about a future where humanity had overcome its issues. There is no longer any war on earth. There’s no scarcity and money is a thing of the past. Humans are motivated primarily by curiosity and a desire for self improvement.
Star Trek was, in a word, utopian.
It feels like TV writers can’t imagine utopias anymore—or, at least, they assume no one wants to watch them. So we don’t get a utopian Federation in Star Trek: Picard. We get a Federation that is, at its core, corrupt. A Federation where an admiral tells Jean-Luc Picard to “respectfully, and at long last, shut the fuck up.” A Federation that long ago betrayed its values and can’t be trusted to do the right thing.
So what’s the solution? A plucky team of outsiders who can save the day! What was a show about people working inside an institution to expand humanity’s knowledge is now essentially a comic book movie, where individuals need to fix things that broken institutions cannot.
I am so tired of this kind of fiction. At some point these stories were corrective, expressing how disappointed we are with slow progress. But we’ve been telling this tale for decades. It feels like we’re stuck.
We face huge problems, including climate change, that no rag-tag group of heroes can solve. We need to work together. We need to build, and trust, systems that combine our efforts. That’s hard to imagine in 2020, which is the point. Fiction is supposed to help us imagine.
Right now all we’re imaging is how things could become even more broken. Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the Red Mars trilogy, put this well in a fantastic essay:
The situation is bad, yes, okay, enough of that; we know that already. Dystopia has done its job, it’s old news now, perhaps it’s self-indulgence to stay stuck in that place any more. Next thought: utopia. Realistic or not, and perhaps especially if not.
No one has ever accused Star Trek of being realistic when it comes to technology. I wish the current incarnation was wildly unrealistic when it comes to society, because we could all use a utopia right about now.