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.

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.

Those thugs beating up Caleb Mir are not Federation. They work for the something or other empire. The judge who sentenced Caleb's mum resigned from Starfleet the next day, saying it was the worst mistake of her career and she can no longer work for an organisation that expects her to do things like that. 20 years later, Starfleet admits she was right, and offers her a job as Chancellor at Starfleet Academy, teaching the next generation to be better than the last one.

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?

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.

Tbh Starfleet Academy makes a U turn on that decision the minute after, explaining that because of the war/burn they were jerks but they regret it and try to make amends bla bla bla.

Academy gave me this utopia feeling, but in 2026 it made me more depressed than hopeful as I finally realized that I will never find a Starfleet Academy on our world, aka a bunch of peoples working together to make humanity better whatever if their skin is pink or they believe in the giant flying spaghetti monster.

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.

Some drumhead court-martial, lifelong prison sentence, violently separating a mother from her child and some goons beating up a prisoner

The key point here is that it is portrayed as horrible. Ake resigned in protest and only came back for the opportunity to make amends. The scene is there to show how far the Federation has fallen, in order to set up the task of rebuilding it.

Starfleet Academy has a justification for how shitty the world is, and IMHO it's approaching it correctly. There was a galactic disaster that almost completely destroyed the federation, so SFA is literally post-apocalyptic. But it's using that setting to tell a hopeful and positive story.

The core message of the show is that you can rebuild a just society even after it's gone so far down the shitter. You can choose to do better, to be better. This is culturally relevant.

Hopefully this spoiler will help:
Your concern is precisely the primary theme of the show.

ok, to give it a fair shake.

At the time of the start of Starfleet Academy the Federation and Starfleet don't really exist. They are indeed a mockery of their own ideals. It's the baseline for just how crappy the universe got. Shit was bad man. Academy sets this up so you understand what's at stake as they try to rebuild the Federation and Starfleet to bring hope back.

It is a Star Trek college show. It introduces us to some kids, the future of this show's setting. But there is an underlying message of hope and getting back to the better way.

I am neither endorsing nor criticizing the show. I'm trying to answer your point.

It technically goes back to Roddenberry.

First, Roddenberry still wrote the Federation as having some faults. A major plot point in Star Trek VI is that Starfleet is attempting a coup of the Federation to keep the cold war going. In early TNG, the Federation is seen as entertaining ending Data's rights and allows a Federation colony to deteriorate to the level of drug wars.

Roddenberry had also written a treatment for a post-Federation time where a Federation ship goes into the future and rebuilds the Federation from scratch. That show became Andromeda, but the concept ended up being used in Discovery and Starfleet Academy.

I mean, that point about seperating a mother and child, kind of forms the entire basis of the show as its what drive Captain Ake to come head the new Starfleet Academy. She feels like complete shit that it happened and wants Starfleet to be better in its rebirth.

And technically, Academy IS a "dystpian setting" because they had the galaxy wide apocalypse event that was The Burn that obliterated every warp drive and collapsed everything but it sounds like you didn't watch Discovery so you may have missed that.

Because the federation changes over time, there are good times and bad. One of the core values in many Star Trek stories is redemption through change, it's the central idea of this one.

Also because the federation is an allegory for whatever real world good guy alliance you believe in and fascist elements coming and going from the federation are a commentary on the real world.

there's a saying that goes something like "democracy is a fresh challenge for each generation." any trek show that shows what we can be without also exploring how we can (or can fail to) stay there is being overly optimistic at best and dishonest at worst. i agree that the execution often fails, especially in Picard and early Discovery, but later Discovery and Academy are shows not about a distopian future but about carving out a utopia within one. Discovery starts out in the SNW era and even in universe everyone can tell how messed up this crew is- note how Pike treats Disco with kid gloves versus how he treats the Enterprise like a ship of adults- but something very interesting happens when they make the jump to the post-Burn future, where suddenly the worst Starfleet has to offer are the best just because they remember how things could be. That offers them and the fallen federation (and the show) a mutual chance at redemption, and Academy is building off of that without Disco's baggage. Academy sees the same problems you do with the post-Burn galaxy and are working to turn it back into the one you remember. you could argue about the execution still, but the heart is there

It's been happening for a while; they keep wanting to make it "darker and edgier" which started with some episodes of TNG (The pegasus) and just kept getting worse (deep space 9).

During TOS, things were not exactly properly utopian either, but I haven't watched enough to comment properly.

I stopped watching Discovery after the first episode

watching the first 10 minutes of Starfleet Academy makes me want to bury the whole franchise

These are shows that historically have taken a couple of seasons to grow their beard, and you're judging them on (parts of) their pilots? Maybe you're just not as much into Star Trek as you think.

I'm on the same boat. Apart from Lower Decks, I can't watch the new shows. I keep hoping a new show might fix it, and be for me, but the longer it goes, the less I'm interested in Star Trek.

Lately I've been thinking about unsubscribing from all the Star Trek communities, as all the discussions and hype about the new shows is making me think I'm no longer a trekkie. I loved TNG, DS9, VOY and tolerated ENT, but the new shows are clearly not made for me.

I personally disliked the first episode of Starfleet Academy, but I'm glad I watched past it. So far in this show, the point (and it's very explicitly stated) is that Starfleet and the Federation are NOT supposed to be like that, and that change starts with the youth.

The whole separating the child from the mother is turned in the first episode, and that tension creates character motivation in both the child and the captain who carries it out. Who admits on screen later that episode that it was a huge mistake and it's why she leaves Starfleet for 20 years. At the period in time that the separation happens the federation has pretty much fallen apart because of the burn (due to some unexplained physics phenomenon warp technology failed over a hundred years earlier). So yeah it may seem like the federation was a utopia by our standards, but it was really a demonstration of a cooperative rather than competitive future (Communism v. Capitalism). And even in that future nothing is perfect, shit happens, you have to deal with it and do the hard work of building strong community.

One of the most central lessons of the whole franchise is sumed up in the kobyoshi maru, a test from the 22-2300s era of trek that is a literal unwinnable scenario. The lesson: it possible to make no mistakes and still lose. Pick yourself up and do your best.

Because from a literary and media standpoint, utopias are boring. The Federation has never been a utopia. It is a post scarcity society with utopian ideals, but with plenty of flaws to balance out those ideals. In the TOS era, those flaws included penal colonies, the death penalty, albeit for only one crime, contacting Talos IV and lots of infighting among member worlds.

Without conflict, there is no drama. Star Trek has long found conflict in pitting the Federation against less high-minded adversaries, the Klingons and Romulans, the Borg, the Cardassians and the Dominion, the Kazon, etc. That is fine but after 60 years it is also sort of played out.

To your point about Discovery, it's first season took place before the Federation's ideals were fully codified in policy - general order 1 had yet to become "the prime directive" for example.

TNG trek took place later and was closer to the utopian ideal. But still wasn't perfect. The Federation tried to force Data to undergo study as a guinea pig and tried to take his daughter from him for the same reason, they supported unaligned worlds against internal dissent and left untold numbers of Federation citizens to the mercy of the Cardassians in the interest of keeping the peace.

During the Dominion War, the Federation was fine with setting aside it's ideals as a matter of survival.

During the burn, the federation no longer had the resources to support it's high ideals so it shrank and degenerated. Now. It is on the ascendant again, able to right past wrongs.

have you seen the animated Lower Decks series? I love it.

but yeah, a lot for newer star trek stuff I don't think was written by people intending to follow the series

they stared downgrading the federation in DS9 man.

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.

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.

@Chemo
> Why do they turn Federation into a dystopia?

I had the same niggle, but I'm hoping it's a way of setting up a redemption arc.

Like when they replaced Captain Georgiou with Emperor Georgiou. She had to learn the value of the Federation's way of doing things. But they also learned a thing or 2 from her.

I don't follow Trek as much as I used to.

I'd guess that the problem is that it's hard to come up with stories in a happy world where everyone gets to choose their own path.

If you pretend Star Trek stopped after First Contact, it's a lot better. I really don't understand why they keep trying to make new trek, or who is watching it. Who is it for? It's too fast, too action-y. Too many camera angles. The writing and acting feels like teen drama. Where is the professionalism, the decorum, the reserved nature of Starfleet? And what little humor there should be, should be dry.

How in the hell is this the same federation of TNG, Voyager and DS9?

Clearly it isn't. Why should it be? It's the far future. Giant prison colony, shock collars, cruelty, punishment with no semblance of a fair trial on screen; clearly the Federation are the bad guys now, or at least adjacent to them. I was prepared to accept that premise. Could be interesting... but no, they immediately shove that concept under the carpet and pretend it doesn't matter because this one person involved feels really bad about it. It was all just another convenient plot device with no meaning, and they moved right on without stopping to think about it. It's utterly lazy writing, the kind where they go with whatever half-baked idea they come up with first whether or not it makes any sense for the characters and story. I say that with confidence because I've seen so much of it before. In this case the character they betrayed was literally Star Trek itself, but they're doing it all the time in smaller ways.

Anyway I'm off to rewatch DS9 instead.

Thanks for the warning. Any show that continues Discovery’s bullshit isn’t going to be worth a watch in my opinion.

So, you jumped on the conclusion that you don’t like any recent Star Trek series, even though you didn’t even try listening more than ten minutes of the first episode of each—while remaining fully biased, yet you insist on criticizing every decision based one whatever you assume all these new series are about, and shit on them, hoping to reinforce your opinion about them.

This is what you sound like: "Huh, so, I opened the book, read the first sentence of the preface, didn’t hook me, so fuck it didn’t read it at all, but let me tell you all how this book is so bad and doesn’t explain anything about what they claim to do, and how they should stick to writing then exactly how they did 60 years ago, just like my grandma used to…"

Do you truly want the answers you claim to seek?

Then how about you actually attentively listen to those entire series in full. You’d be surprised how they might give you more answers than you could possibly imagine.

Stop wasting our time. You want to criticize the new series, at least have the decency to actually watch them first.

Star Trek is just a media product now run by business people trying to make it appealing to mass audiences

Besides the awful plots and settings the writing and acting is horrific and as far as I’m concerned Star trek is over and academy is just fanfiction slop