this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2025
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TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name
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I mean, like what you like. I think you can still have utopian fiction that explores when characters fall short of their utopian ideals, or the boundaries of a utopia, or the shortcomings of a particular form of utopianism. It helps us understand that it's not magic, it doesn't just happen, it's what could be, if real people all worked very hard against the systems and people preventing it.
And I'm not a space lawyer but I think technically Sisko doesn't do any war crimes in that episode, he's just accessory to 2 normie murders.
"In half an hour that entire planet will kill you. I am banking on evacuation procedures being 100% reliable"
And what if something went wrong during the evacuation? How many billions of civillians would have died? He attacked a sentient population with weapons of mass destruction.
Ohhhh, ok, we are talking about entirely different episodes. I thought you were misquoting "Erase that entire personal log" from In The Pale Moonlight. Yeah, the one where he gasses a planet is not the best.
Yeah, and it's my fault. but again, it's Sisko doing "un trek" stuff because of their immoral nature.
spoiler
At the end of his log entry, Sisko wrestles with having condoned forgery, selling prohibited materials, bribery, and murder for the good of the Alpha Quadrant. After thinking about it, Sisko declares that he can live with it, and that—if he had to—he would do it all again. He then deletes the log.This shit is no good. None of this is "utopian science fiction". They are meant to be better than us in Star Trek, and good is meant to prevail without comprimising its principles when things get difficult. It's not meant to be "yeah, con people into going to war through lies." We are meant to aspire to be like Picard. This kind of stuff is the writers giving up and saying "nah, humanity will never change".
If that's the case, why even bother uniting earth or any other planets? Nothing fucking changes. Might as well just have it be star wars with replicators and teleporters.
It can still be utopian and aspirational without every character being those things. The same way you could have a show where you explore the concept of Justice by having a profoundly unjust main character. Or a show about Sin with a righteous main character. Sometimes you explore a theme by demonstration, sometimes by contrast.
Sure, but Sisko, the Pegasus and section 31 show the corruption of those ideals permeate the entirety of Starfleet and the federation, and it's not "just a few admirals"