this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2026
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I am not an anti-woke person in the slightest, and I wouldn’t say Star Trek was ever subtle about its leftist ideals.
But it did use to present us with a more optimistic view of the future of humanity that was largely beyond the petty dramas we have today, while still leaving room for the fact that no matter how much you’ve progressed, you do always have to fight to keep the ideals and society you’ve built. Allegories for modern problems were largely relegated to interactions with humanlike alien species so that the theme of humanity itself being “better than it was” is left intact.
And it did lose a little something when the Alex Kurtzman era came along and took the federation and humanity back to the stupid ages in order to get the point across.
The scene in Picard where you have a character living in what looks like poverty despite it being a post-scarcity age, and trying to draw parallels between her and Picard, and the different classes we have today, because she lived in a trailer and he owned a vineyard, was just next-level misunderstanding the source material. Hello they don’t have capitalism, there’s no money. It was long established by this point that humans excel due to their drive to achieve, not command a salary.
It does feel like Star Trek used to be woke, but was a story from the mouths of people who had something to say, to now it’s woke, but in a very icky corporate-sterilized kinda way.
I doubt its going to get better, considering what its parent company has become.
God that scene in Picard made me immediately stop watching the whole series. There is just no coming back from that.
The same happend for me with the opening scenes from Starfleet Academy. How the heck can you portray a utopia with an introduction that is less humane than what we have now in developed countries?!
Yeah that Picard scene alone de-canonizes the entire show. Like you can’t just casually retcon exploitative capitalism back into hundreds of years of established lore lol.
"Vigilance, Mr. Worf."
https://youtu.be/1zq5jE61Urw?t=8m17s
Exactly it, modern Trek's wokeness is diluted and committeed to death, it's the writing equivalent of performative rainbow capitalism from corporations that now toady to the Trump administration.
Yep. Good analysis. Probably why I haven’t been able to get along with much of the Kurtzman era Trek. I’ve started Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks and find those two to be actually watchable, but Discovery and Picard I noped out of pretty hard after around a season each, and have no desire to even start Academy.
I will die on the hill that Lower Decks is not only the only nu-trek that is actual Star Trek, but that it actually belongs up there with the actual legacy Trek shows it parodies. And it’s got plenty of gay woke stuff in it. But despite being a parody, and forgiving the very rough first season (It’s ST, hello), it’s obviously that the writers actually understand what Star Trek is.
I fear a lot of people will write it off as “Star Trek does Rick & Morty” and it’s a shame. It has a TAMARIAN bridge officer for gods sake.
I would like to stress that they're treating all the gay woke stuff as entirely normal and common, just like original trek.
On the other hand, Discovery had a painfully long and exceedingly meaningless arc about a character's struggles with society's views on their gender... When said society doesn't have any negative views at all.
It felt like me gathering my family together to have a deeply emotional announcement that I always put on my left sock first.
Damn it! You've got me in tears!
Who’s character arc are you talking about here? I don’t think that describes anything that happened in the show.
I know Adira was an incredibly forgettable character in probably the worst Discovery season, but Adira's "I'm actually gender neutral" coming-out talk with Stamets half a season after they were introduced was incredibly mismatched with everything Trek.
Especially with the absolutely amazing way DS9 handled the Curzon/Jadzia thing.
Edit: to see an actually good way to handle a transition on screen, watch The Umbrella Academy.
The way DS9 did the "of course they're here and it's no big deal because it's the enlightened utopian future" inclusion with a character who was effectively trans was in the finest tradition of Trek, dating back to the first pilot of TOS. And you can tell there's a "but" coming up because of the otherwise well-deserved praise that we're heaping on here.
But "Facets."
The episode that was based on the Sybil TV movie. The episode that made joined Trill explicitly plural. And they made a beeline for the long hackneyed "evil alter" trope that the plural community has been unfairly saddled with since 1886. As well as the "slutty alter" trope, but it was already pretty well established by that point that Curzon was a horndog.
Not just that, but Jadzia was an actual character who had a personality and contributed to the show. Same for Chekhov, or Uhura, or dozens of others who were fully realized characters first and foremost.
Adira was just there, and nothing else. It felt like the entire character was just there to tick a diversity box, and nothing else.
Yeaaaaaahhhh...
We agree entirely. It kinda felt like the writers on Disco eventually started treating main engineering like an skee-ball machine. It's where they put the tokens.
You monster!
Lower Decks might actually be my favorite Star Trek, period. Including DS9 and TNG.
Lower Decks relies a little too much on nostalgia and the supposed parody of older shows, and the parody often comes off as memberberries.
"Memberberries" 😂 What's that mean? I don't want to search it bc I'd rather hear from someone who actually uses this new word I've never heard 💜
It's from a Southpark epidode called "Member Berries" where they are sentient, talking berries constantly reminding people of glory past by asking "Member? Member X?"
Usually, they are remembering pop culture icons (mostly the OT Star Wars) but also political/societal things like Ronald Reagan, when "marriage was only between men and women" or "when there were no mexicans."
By their behaviour they are constantly evoking nostalgia and because of that they've kinda become their own pop culture icon as a meme to describe nostalgia bait in pop culture media
It's a good Southpark episode, I recommend giving it a watch.
Also: Memberberries supercut
Lower Decks is like a love letter to Star Trek and manages to be good Trek on its own. But yeah it is derivative and nostalgic as part of its blueprint . You need the context of the existing shows for it to be as good as it is, but I can’t really discount it for that.
No, I don't actually think that. While there are some gags that work on their own (like the play on prejudice with the Ferengi), there are so many more "remember that thing from TOS, TNG, TAS, etc? Here, have it again!" (like that giant spock skeleton or the Landru-episode or when Rutherford builds a Delta Flyer). And I don't quite like that.
Contrast that with Prodigy (why does that one get to be forgotten so often though? It is really good). Janeway returns as an Emergency Command Hologram, which is a callback both to Janeway and Voyager in general and to the episode about The Doctor, when he wanted to exoand his role and als become an ECH. But they told new stories with the Janeway ECH and made her a new character of her own. Same with Chakotay, who appears later as himself (not a hologramnor some other form of copy). The same character, but new story and developement (both Janeway and Chakotay get more character developement here then in all of Voyager). Then they got Wesley Crusher back, but instead of just rehashing the annoying teenager they explore his Traveler role.
Instead of pointing at things from past shows saying "See, you liked that, didn't you? We got that here, too!", Prodigy expanded these characters and explored new stories. And it did that well.
Lower Decks did that, too, sometimes. Sometimes LD did make fun of older trek, saying how dumb something was, ok. But mostly the references were mere easter eggs that were there for nostalgia bait.
Which was itself memberberries. He uses Gary Seven's office ferchrissakes.
Lower Decks actually added to the Star Trek universe in real ways. The whole idea of Second Contact vessels, Klingon non-noble culture, Ferengi TV, the Ferengi joining the Federation, Orion culture, etc. It wasn't only references or derivative at all.
I didn't say it added nothing. I explicitely said there is good stuff. What I do say though is that there is too much memberberries and too little new stuff.
It's a fair criticism. I am just more tolerant of the nostalgia bait, I guess, so it's difficult for me to see how much it would put many other people off.
I mean, you enjoy what you enjoy. As long as it's not Star Wars Movies outside the OT + Rogue One, I won't judge.
I also realize that I probably watch movies and shows much more critically than others and I am quickly annoyed by repetitiveness and overused patterns and tropes.
An optimistic view of the future read a lot more feasible in both the TOS and TNG eras than it does now.
A more optimistic view of the future during the…height of the Cold War? The show that released a few short years after the Berlin Wall went up, and the Cuban Missle Crisis?
I just don’t know about that.
Yes. A show that aired at a point in time where your dad rode a horse to work and you watch people taking rockets into space didn't have to reach too hard to think fantastic things were in store for humanity.
My man this was a point in time more so than any other that people genuinely didn’t think there was going to be a future for humanity to have lol.
No, it wasn't.
Oh you must be right then, not the people who were alive at the time and made and absolute shit ton of media about the exact thing you're contesting.
I mean it very famously was lol. But ok. I guess that specific period of time where the world lived in constant fear of nuclear annihilation, where schoolchildren were put through drills in school to shelter themselves from nuclear blasts, young men were being conscripted and sent off to war against their will, widespread social upheaval and civil unrest, and a wave of unprecedented political violence culminating in the public assassination of a sitting US President was full of… optimism
Ye,s it was. Maybe you should talk to your parents and/or grandparents about this. Mine lived and grew up in what then was West Germany. When my parents talk about the nuclear drills at school, the fear still returns to their eyes and they gaze into nothingness. When my grandparents talk about the air raid siren tests the trembling in their voices is heartbreaking.
That shit was real and terrifying. And I personally think this constant, everoresent fear was what made stories about an optimistic future such a success.