Hey, remember in ‘The Conscience of the King’ when we found out that the governor of a colony massacred half the population because they were experiencing a famine?

Remember ‘The Menagerie’ when we found out you can still get the death penalty in Federation?

Remember how Kirk consigned the populations of two planets, one of which told the Enterprise in no uncertain terms to not visit, to violent war, because he didn’t like the way they were conducting their ongoing conflict in ‘A Taste of Armageddon’?

Remember in ‘A Wolf in the Fold’ where we learned that Starfleet has alliances with less advanced worlds where the population is amenable to being “pleasure planets” for officers on shore leave to engage in sex tourism?

Remember when Kirk used a primitive culture to fight a proxy war with the Klingons in ‘A Private Little War’, and then abandoned them when he got a bit sad?

Remember that a founding member of the Federation, the Tellarites, were willing to keep a planet out of the Federation so they could continue exploiting its rich resources that the locals weren’t able to properly defend on their own, in ‘Journey to Babel’?

Remember ‘Patterns of Force’ where a former Academy instructor and renowned Federation historian introduced Nazism to a pre-warp society, even becoming their Führer?

Remember when we found out in ‘The Cloud Minders’ that an explicitly Federation member world maintains a rigid caste system?

Remember ‘To Short a Season’ where the plot was based around a Federation admiral who had supplied weapons to terrorists as a commander, resulting in a coup where the terrorist leader took control of their planet?

Remember how in ‘The Measure of a Man’, the Federation demanded that a sentient being, a member of Starfleet for 24 years, submit himself to be experimented upon so the Federation could make more of his kind for their own use?

Remember when in ‘The Survivors’’, Picard choose to do nothing to the being who committed complete genocide of a sentient species, claiming there were no laws to fit his crime?

Remember ‘The Offspring’ when an Admiral shows up to take away Data’s child for study, despite the fact that he won his right to live in ‘The Measure of a Man’?

Remember when Worf murdered a candidate for head of a foreign state in ‘Reunion’ and got off with a slap on the wrist?

Remember ‘The Drumhead’ when a respected former Starfleet admiral comes aboard the Enterprise and begins to persecute a crewpoerson based on who his grandfather was, on the basis of the fact that he committed a thoughtcrime, and Worf went along with it?

Remember in ‘Ensign Ro’ how a Starfleet admiral colluded with agents of a fascist states to blame refugees of that fascist’s states occupation of their homeworld for an attack the fascists commited, and to that end ordered a disgraced Starfleet officer to offer weapons to the refugeers?

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

Remmber in ‘Descent’ how Admiral Nechayev fed picard a bowl of shit for not deploing a virus that might have caused the genocide of the Borg?

Remember ‘The Pegasus’ where we learned that an admiral was trying to recover a lost Starfleet ship that could cloak, in blatant violation of their treaty with another galactic power?

Remember how in ‘Journey’s End’ the Enterprise is tasked with the forced relocation of Federation citizens to appease a fascist state, and then when those citizens refuse to be relocated, the Federation chooses to abandon them?

Remember how Admiral Nechayev ordered the Enterprise to aid a fascist state in rooting out the freedom fighters opposing their occupation of territory that used to belong to the Federation?

Remember ‘Captain Pursuit’ where Sisko is willing to release a sentient being who is being hunted for sport to his hunters?

Remember how often Sisko was opposed to the actions of freedom fighters working against the fascist state occupying their homes, beginning with ‘The Maquis’?

Remember ‘Homefront’ and ‘Paradise Lost’ when the Federation implemented martial law on Earth, including mandatory random blood screening of its citizens?

Remember when terrorist organization tried to implement their conservative ideals on a resort planet, and Worf joined them, and then saw no repercussions for doing so in ‘Let He Who is Without Sin…’?

Remember in ‘For the Uniform’ how Sisko used biological weapons against freedom fighters resisting a fascist occupation of their homes?

Remember how in ‘Inquistion’ we learned about Section 31, an secret organization within Starfleet intelligence that exists to carry out Starfleet’s dirty business?

Remember when Sisko used a former intelligence operative from a fascist state to trick a different fascist state into joining a war effort in, ‘In the Pale Moonlight’?

Remember ‘The Seige of AR-558’ where we see Starfleet officers committing war crimes, and collecting trophies off the bodies of fallen enemies soldiers?

Remember how in ‘When it Rains…’ we learned that Section 31 infected Odo with a biological weapon to kill the Changelings, and in ‘Extreme Measures’ that the Federation Council refused to provide a cure, even after one had been created?

Remember when Worf assissinated a foreign head of state in ‘Tacking Into the Wind’ at Sisko’s implied behest, and faced no consequences for doing so?

Remember how Janeway murdered a being, who had commited no crime and had been explicitly stated as being helpful to the crew, as he begged for his life in ‘Tuvix’?

Remember in ‘Nothing Human’ when we learned that the Voyager database includes the works and psychological profile a fascist scisentist whose research involved committing atrocities on the population of a planet his people had occupied and forced into labour?

Remember when Tom Paris was senstanced to solitary confinement on the bridge by Janeay, an act that is currently considered cruel and unusual punishment, in ‘Thirty Days’?

Remember ‘Equinox’ where we learn a Starfleet crew has been knowingly capturing and murdering sentient lifeforms to fuel their ship?

Remember how in ‘Shadows of P’Jem’ we found out that the Vulcans maintained a long range listening outpost under a site they declared sacred to their culture?

Remember in ‘Cogenitor’ when Archer refused to grant asylum to an alien being who was kept in sexual slavery?

Remember when Archer tortures someone for information in ‘Anomaly’?

Remember in ‘Damage’ when Archer orders the NX-01 crew to board an alien ship and steal vital components of their warp drive, leaving those beings stranded in a hostile and dangerous region of space?

Remember ‘Kir’Shara’ where we saw Shran torture Soval to assess the truth of informaiton he was being given?

Remember in ‘Bound’ how Archer accepted a gift of three slaves?

Remember ‘Star Trek: Insurrection’ where the Federation was allied with a state that keeps slaves, and agreed to force relocate a population so they could gain access to the resources of that people’s planet?

DISC did a lot of bad things to Trek just for shock value. But in a utopia there still has to be rules, Burnham committed probably the worst crime in the Trek universe, she disobeyed a direct order, started a mutiny and opened fire on an alien ship, which started a war killing millions. The only reason she got out of prison was because her boyfriend from an evil universe broke her out of prison under false pretenses hoping that since she started a war in this universe that she was just as evil as her counterpart. How messed up is that? Then her redeeming moment is she seized command of the ship and starts a civil war and threatens to blow up another species home world to end the war she started. That’s some cowboy shit right there. All because he has unresolved child hood trauma. She deserved to got to federation vacation colony for life.

Kelvinverse would have been great as a big budget sci-fi franchise if it wasn’t set in the Trek universe. You can pretty much ignore Kelvinverse movies and pretend that it was just a fun experiment.

SFA and SNW are just trying to undo the mistakes of DISC.

PIC got a lot of things wrong but shared trauma from an unprovoked attack by the Romulans hacking Androids and forcing them to attack people would trigger mass panic and fear that it could happen again, I don’t think that’s far fetched.

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.

I think it’s extremely disingenuous to equate “bad things happening sometimes” with “dystopia.”

The point of everything you mentioned (except for the police in '09, which you don’t actually seem to have an issue with aside from the fact that they exist?) is that these things can be overcome, which is precisely the opposite of a dystopian setting.

The people in the image aren’t even members of the Federation… they’re Torathan, it’s explicitly stated, by Chancellor Ake, that the Federation has an agreement with them that would allow Mir to be released to their custody.

The Burn did a lot of crazy things to the Federation, and one of the lessons explicitly stated in the next episodes is that the Academy is back to teach these cadets how to be better. There was some backsliding during the Burn and everyone is trying to get better again.

The Pirate (Nus Braka) given the sentence was a pirate who was killing Starfleet officers. The mother (Anisha Mir) was sentenced to time in a rehab colony with visitation rights. Rehabilitation implying the sentence is not a life long sentence. Both of them were, ultimately, involved with the death of an officer. It wasn’t a “Drumhead” type trial, there was no witch hunting the innocent here: Two people involved with a theft that ended with the death of a Starfleet officer were tried and convicted of crimes; one of them is known to be a member of a dangerous criminal organization.

Picard once left Tim Russ’s character poisoned to die in a Baryon sweep for stealing Trilithium Resin. Star Trek was never super perfect when dramatic effect is involved.

Already some amazing points here, but I will add one thing:

No matter how utopian your empire becomes, those who grow up in utopia do not have their guard up watching for evil in every corner. The Star Wars flipping back and forth from Republic to Empire over the millennia makes sense.

The federation existed for barely a millennia in its first incarnation. A fall of a galactic empire makes sense. Rebuilding it makes for good story.

Especially, and I can’t stress this enough, when it is a parallel to the world we live in. Trek has always been a way to mirror events and teach moral lessons… But most of all, hope.

Not a big trekie, but I never trusted the “Earth is a giant utopia and everything is perfect” story

Like, I’m sure there’s a class of people most of Starfleet is made up of like Picard, but not everyone on earth owns a fucking vineyard.

I always thought The Expanse was probably how it really was. No one “has to work” because there’s not enough work. So the majority of the population gets a little UBI and blows it on drugs and alcohol to numb the emptiness

Like, do they even show “current earth” that much in Star Trek? Or is it just wealthy Starfleet members talking about how awesome their lives were?

I dunno, it’s just an unbelievable story. If it’s really supposed to be a perfect utopia, it’s just unbelievable writing.