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> [at the hearing regarding the civil rights of androids like Data] > Capt. Picard: Now, the decision you reach here today will determine how we will regard th
by drybjed 16d ago
> [at the hearing regarding the civil rights of androids like Data]
> Capt. Picard: Now, the decision you reach here today will determine how we will regard this... creation of our genius. It will reveal the kind of a people we are, what he is destined to be; it will reach far beyond this courtroom and this... one android. It could significantly redefine the boundaries of personal liberty and freedom - expanding them for some... savagely curtailing them for others. Are you prepared to condemn him and all who come after him, to servitude and slavery? Your Honor, Starfleet was founded to seek out new life; well, there it sits! - Waiting.
> Captain Phillipa Louvois: It sits there looking at me; and I don't know what it is. This case has dealt with metaphysics - with questions best left to saints and philosophers. I am neither competent nor qualified to answer those. But I've got to make a ruling, to try to speak to the future. Is Data a machine? Yes. Is he the property of Starfleet? No. We have all been dancing around the basic issue: does Data have a soul? I don't know that he has. I don't know that I have. But I have got to give him the freedom to explore that question himself. It is the ruling of this court that Lieutenant Commander Data has the freedom to choose.
- chuckadams 16d agoAnd 20-odd years later, a terrorist attack prompts Starfleet to outlaw and eradicate his entire species.
- goodmythical 16d agoThus revealing what kind of people they were at the time. Humans do the same thing to humans all the time. We've banned and made efforts to eradicate: children out of wedlock, children who turn out gay, disabled children, jewish children, children who aren't "aryan", more than two children to a single family...muslims, christians, uyghurs, indigenous groups all over the planet, mongols... And it's not at all a thing of the past as in just the last 50 years we've had ~15 attempts at the exterminations of targetted groups of people.
- snickerbockers 15d agoNo it just reveals that the people in charge of star trek for the past decade are incompetent and have only a passing familiarity with the franchise. Of course it would be absurd to cast that judgement based of what could easily have just been a bad season but by this point its pretty clear that nobody running the star trek franchise actually wants to be running the star trek franchise. Thats why every new show has some bizarre cross-genre gimmick and they never try to just make a proper star trek.
- thaneross 16d agoEvery time I'm reminded NuTrek exists I get sad about what we've lost.
- moomin 15d agoHonestly, Picard asked a very relevant question to the modern age. What if our societal standards aren't what we thought they were, and we've just had rose-tinted glasses convincing ourselves otherwise. Of course, we never saw them actually deal with that properly, but S1 was a much more interesting series than S2 and S3 were.
- thaneross 15d agoThe writers flat out rejected Roddenberry's vision of a better future and here's a take on why. We've reached a point in culture of deep pessimism about humanity, and so the characters in Picard are just as dysfunctional as we are.
- deleted 14d ago[deleted]
- chuckadams 12d agoAnother reason is that actual utopias make for pretty boring writing. Humanity convinced itself that they lived in a perfect world, but most of the writing was about the cracks in that facade. Even the preachy and awful first season of TNG had the character of Q demonstrating that we still had a long way to go.
- mwigdahl 15d agoSame here, then I watch _The Orville_ and I'm happy again.