In comparison between the two, Hornblower was a rather unimaginative person bound by his deep sense of duty and the extreme pressure of the Navy. Picard (as a character) replaces duty with the Prime Directive, and pressure came from feeling with the unknown.
I have a deep affection for stories where people are depicted as good, or even just good at their jobs. I appreciate for actors and writers it's a much harder ask - it's much easier to make a story of relatable bumbleheads, especially if you yourself are somewhat uninteresting and never got much life experience. It's much harder making believable characters that we can look up to and respect.
I've mentioned the series before... and I'll pitch it again. Nathan Lowell's solar clipper series. It starts with Quarter Share. The first book starts with:
Call me Ishmael. Yeah, I know, but in this case it’s really my name. Ishmael Horatio Wang. My parents had an unfortunate sense of humor. If they had known what I’d wind up doing with my life, they might have picked a different one—Richard Henry Dana, perhaps. Exactly why they picked Ishmael Horatio is a long, and not terribly interesting, story that starts with the fact that Mom was an ancient lit professor and ends with my being saddled with these non sequitur monikers.
GoodReads has a number of reviews that are spot on - https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/2334538.Quarter_Share (the writing is something that is "cozy" to some and "boring" to others... I liked the series but there's definitely a "nothing happens and there's no plot" aspect to it).
The main character starts out as a quarter share working in the galley... cleaning coffee urns.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6945329546 (quarter share)
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6973501411 (half share)
Book 4 has a time jump of college - four years are a few paragraphs... and then he's an officer in a very unhappy ship. Books 5 and 6 finish off the 'share' sequence. If the first three are coming of age of a youth, the next three are the coming of age of a man.
If you're going through and reading them, at this point I'd switch to the "Run" series which has two young women in a very small ship in the toeholds. There's a lot of world building associated with it. These have much more of a plot to them.
Dark Knight Station: Origins might be a good read at this point if we're establishing a reading order which establishes the backstory of two characters (one who appears in Home Run, the other who appears in Suicide Run). Home Run fills in some gaps outside of Ishmael. The three books together help with some of the larger backstory that will show up several times.
This then brings us back to Ishmael with the series In Ashes Born, To Fire Called, and By Darkness Forged. Not going to provide any plot elaboration that might spoil previous books (things do keep building).
And lastly, there's the "School" series with SC Marva Collins with School Days, Working Class, and Hard Knocks... and this is as far as the author has gotten with the Solar Clipper series.
---
If you had trouble with the 2nd, finish the 3rd and then give the 4th a try. I like the entire series and its world building. The mundanity of Ishmael's life (where exciting is often not a good thing). I really liked the later books - especially In Ashes Born.
https://www.goodreads.com/series/206519-solar-clipper-univer... - you'll see that Half Share is the lowest score of them.
Since you seem to be a real fan of the series and enjoy it, I will take your advice and read a future one at some point. But I would be curious what your feelings on a re-read of book 1 and 2 would be? I was just completely floored by the change in character that I saw in book 2. I felt like the book started with a normal, slightly above average, inquisitive character, who is handling new (and often mundane) challenges in his life one item (trading stand) at a time. And book 2 just retconed him into a gigachad who seemed to have none of the uncertain or hesitant nature of the book 1 character.
From book 6:
"... Ms. Maloney, as soon as you signed the Articles, you became a spacer." I almost smacked myself in the head for saying that. I couldn’t even imagine how many times I’d said I wasn’t a spacer. I sighed inwardly at my own stupidity.
I don't see it as him being insecure about himself as such. He's as much of a chad as any physically fit 19-year-old is...
He's still as culturally insecure at 20 as he is when he's 40 - trying to figure out how he fits in as a spacer who wasn't born to a spacer family.
So how does one handle the cultural insecurities at different points in one's life? At 20? At 40? nearly 50?
Book 5 gets a bit into the difference between the expectations of a planet (or station) life and that of a spacer and the stress there on relationships (and how they can work).
From the start of In Ashes Born this is stated quite clearly when talking to a therapist:
My sessions with Mal Gains continued to be interesting even if I didn’t find them terribly fruitful. He introduced me to more family-of-origin stuff. He placed great store in the idea that I’d been raised in a culture of academe with its values of knowledge, truth-seeking, and reputation but then shifted to the culture of spacer with values like dependability, competence, and upward mobility.
Yes, being a steward on a ship that has a few months between port of call is tedious... but you don't start out as a captain with the interesting things happening. You've got to work your way up the ladder and he started out on the bottom rung. Ship's Steward | Life at Sea | https://youtu.be/U02ndHzJGic as a book.
One of the things about the series though... there's no grand military conflict going on. There's no fighting aliens or heroic space marines. It's (initially) the story of a young man getting his family suddenly pulled away from him and thrown into the Deep Dark as he searches for his place. Not actively... though he gets that advice too. There's also a component of needing to take an active role in making life decisions compared to letting life drag you along (things tend to go less well for Ishmael when he lets life pull him).
Book 1:
“Look in your handbook, young Ishmael, and consider that your feet are already on a path. It might be wiser to select a branch before one is thrust upon you by circumstance.” With that, he strolled out of the galley.
His knowing look told me he remembered his own advice to me in the mess deck of the Lois. To choose a path before I found myself on one that I hadn’t chosen. “You once told me that I should consider that I’m on the path I’m supposed to be on.”
Books 4, 5, and 6 (Double Share, Captain's Share, Owner's Share) have much more going on with the decisions (and are likely more relatable as someone closer in age) than the equivalent of a day in the life of a unskilled 20 something... but the day in the life of the unskilled 20 something sets the foundations for how the decisions (and problems) of the man he becomes are dealt with.
It's very different from TNG in most ways, but it does share the emphasis on retaining humanity, dignity, and ethics within ambiguity and hardship. Very interesting to think about them side-by-side.
The quality of writing for DS9 was also quite good but, after trying the TNG formula for a season or two, they broke with the writing-first mentality and adopted an action sci-fi formula. The showrunners feared they'd lose ratings if an episode didn't have at least some action. It worked for DS9, but later Trek series have had a tough time shaking free of the action sci-fi formula. The problem with formulas is that, while they produce individual episodes or shows that are exemplars of their form, the sameness eventually causes viewers to drift away.
Strange New Worlds has shown it's willing to do some pretty wild things (e.g. turning its cast into muppets, adding gore and horror elements, etc.), but they have not messed with the formula in a meaningful way.
If you're looking for something outside the Trek formula, one recommendation I'd share is "The Foundation".
For instance the various plot points in DS9 between Sisko and Eddington (like "For the Uniform") often have you starting to cheer for the 'bad guys', while really confusing the question of who the good guy and who the bad guy even is. DS9 even excels as 'humanizing' the Cardassians who are, on the surface at least, just an evil trope. And recent times in real life should emphasize, to the point of absurdity, that this is what people and situations are genuinely like.
But the modern Star Treks feel like they were written by people living in a bubble with minimal life experience. They rely on political tropes and diametrically opposed good/evil stuff that's utterly banal, and intellectually insulting. They actually do have some of the same writers as previous shows though, so I assume there must be production/directorial pressures that caused the shift in 'style.'
Discovery did this some of the time. There were episodes where they would show, then tell, then tell again all within a few minutes. Not every episode was done this way. I suspect they were experimenting and it did not go well. Anybody who was actually giving the show their full attention was bound to be irritated. Discovery was a low point in modern Trek for multiple reasons. They initially decided to forgo an ensemble cast and bet it all on a protagonist driven narrative. This severely limited the diversity of viewpoints in the first couple seasons. The writing was bad for entirely avoidable reasons. People who watch trek pay attention to the universe's rules. You can't beam through shields, you need to have a reason for why the away team can't be trivially beamed out of dangerous situations, etc.. The people writing Discovery did not bother to do this on a repeating and continual basis. Again, it was insulting to anyone who wasn't pecking away on their phone. I wouldn't say the writers for Discovery merely lacked life experience. They clearly hadn't bothered to watch previous Trek shows.
Strange New Worlds is better written, but a little too reliant on high concept for their most recent season. Every episode seems to have a gimmick. Still the cast is good and I look forward to them wrapping up Pike's story and, presumably, setting up a reboot of TOS.
Lower Decks is the best Trek show in recent memory. Thoroughly entertaining from start to finish. I can't recommend that one enough, just in case anyone skipped it because it was animated. Intelligent. Inventive. Hilarious. The people who made Lower Decks really put a lot of love into it.
Edit: I forgot to mention Picard, which is unforgivable. Some of the seasons were a little uneven, but some were fantastic and it was truly a treat to see Patrick Stewart as Picard one last time.
This kind of TV writing really frustrates me. I’m currently rewatching The Wire (just finished Season 3) and the producers, writers and directors take the complete opposite approach. Each season has a large number of characters with many subtly inter-relating plots. To get the most out of the show, you need to be paying attention and to have a good memory for recalling details from previous episodes and previous seasons. The first two times I watched the show (more than 15 years ago), I watched in on DVD (lower resolution, 4:3 aspect ratio). This time I’m watching it in 16:9 HD on Bluray and I’ve picked up so many plot points and characterisations that I hadn’t picked up (or don’t remember) before, e.g., one very brief shot in Season 1 explains how Bubs gets his nickname. It’s such a breath of fresh air for the writers to pay so much attention to detail and for the viewer to be treated like a reasonably intelligent adult.
I agree with your take on Picard. However, I didn’t enjoy Discovery so haven’t bothered with any of the other recent Star Trek series. Thanks for the summaries of the other two shows. I’ll add Lower Decks to my to-watch list.
Wil Wheaton in Ready Room has some episodes about Lower Decks. The Crossover episode https://youtu.be/3SiYyIAz5xU and the final recap https://youtu.be/NK94dXm2Wis
I'd also generally suggest Dropping Names with Brent and Jonny ( https://www.youtube.com/@Dropping-Names ) where Brent Spinner and Johnathan Frakes chat with people about movies and TV. While it's not about Trek, it's a frequent tangential topic. I believe it's helpful in the context of "how much the fandom extends to other people in the entertainment industry."
For a while I thought the acting was melodramatic, but I actually think it pairs really well with the truly crazymaking amount of wild shit that happens moment to moment in DIS. Burnham should be a PTSD shell, Tilly should've resigned her commission long ago, etc. etc.
Things as you say, but also: didn't know show's own technology history (Klingons with cloaks before they should've had them), adding in spore drive then needing to retcon it.
The show din't seem to know what it wanted to be and kept pulling in different directions, one of the early plans was an "anthology series, with each season being a standalone, serialized story set in a different era", which would have suited this much, much better: one or two episodes about the Klingon war, one showing Pike's command before Enterprise, young Spock's first mission, even some about a spore drive and the problems it has, some AI-takeover stuff, some post-TNG stuff, one episode about galaxy-threatening event, one about some post-apocalyptic thing like The Burn isn't even bad. But all that smooshed together with the same crew? Nah.
The reason Michael Burnham had a male-coded name was teased but never actually revealed (could have been interesting e.g. "adopted by Vulcans who didn't notice it was male-coded because that's a silly human thing"). Her character shifted way too hard and way too fast, from "Vulcan persona due to upbringing" to "traumatised normal human", a nature-vs-nurture tale could have been an interesting thing to explore.
And Michael Burnham was correct to want a show of force against the Klingons! Sure, wildly violated how command hierarchy works, but she was correct, and Starfleet Command should have known that because she got advice from Sarek. Not that she should have been Sarek's never-before-mentioned adopted daughter, we need to see new characters rather than just repeating the old ones; I mean, Vulcan is an entire plant, not a small Pacific island. (Amusing trivia from some fan-site I visited decades ago: VOY had the opposite problem, in that the list of extras appearing as background crew was larger than the crew complement).
And in the battle before they went off to the far future, that unexploded torpedo inside Enterprise, which the admiral heroically sacrificed herself to disarm… (1) it's antimatter, how does that "not explode"?, (2) it's ~ 50 megatons and inside the ship and in TOS an overloaded phaser pistol was supposed to be able to blow out multiple decks, (3) what, are their transporters not working? Can't you either beam it out, or the admiral out after she disarms it? (4) Why send in an admiral, did they run out of ensigns and non-officers? And Control (the AI) was proto-Borg, right as we had three seasons of Picard with season 1: Romulans, Borg, and Androids; Season 2: Q, Borg, and time travel; Season 3: Borg, Changelings, and Crusher saying "no one has seen or heard from the Borg in a decade".
Recently, and in no small part thanks to everything being available for streaming, I started with the DS9 pilot and made my way through all seven seasons. It took me several years of steady chipping away (spikes in watching on long flights, and weeks or months of no watching), but I thoroughly enjoyed it. There are multiple sharks jumped. Alien sharks jumped. The same hammy and even adolescent takes on relationships. But through it all shines the enduring, consistent introspective existentialism.
I think watching DS9 in this way provides a richer experience while TNG can mostly be enjoyed by dropping in here or there, and you eventually pick up on the long arcs of the Borg, Q, etc...
TNG is very, very good, but it wears its heart on its sleeve. Picard never struggles with existential moral ambiguity. Even when he (rarely) fails, he's always The Good Man.
The utopian slant is appealing and we can't help cheering for him, but DS9 revealed there was some sleight of hand behind the narrative.
Of the series since, I think only Battlestar Galactica approached similar complexity. Maybe Westworld, which got quite abstract and interesting towards the end.
The Expanse is more by the numbers. It's basically class war in space, with the military, the aristocracy, and the peasants slugging it out, while a dragon rolls in and threatens to eat everything. The writing is very challenge -> response -> partial solution over and over, and for me it just doesn't have the depth or the emotional reach. (Or the acting chops.)
It's kind of like Game of Thrones and 'The Red Wedding'. That episode is zomg, but if you watched it in isolation with no knowledge of the character arcs to date, it'd probably be interesting, but wouldn't have anywhere near the same sort of punch.
I find this amusing, because of what his best friend said about him wearing his heart on his sleeve :
I am worried that Game of Thrones ruined a generation of sci-fi and fantasy - everyone tries to copy the dark, morally compromised, postmodern, realpolitik tone. Even besides the fact that we are manifesting a world where progress is impossible, it has turned genres that is traditionally very positive and escapist into bleak emotional slogs.
I recommend reading the original book series. In my opinion the writing only gets better as it goes on, and it’s obvious the writers had a plan in mind from the beginning rather than just writing more books for the sake of continuing a series where the ideas were all used up in the first book or two
GoT was a late-comer to this. For me, William Gibson’s _Neuromancer_ (1984) was my first exposure to dark and morally-compromised Sci-Fi. I am sure it predates this in novels. _Neuromancer_ inspired a couple of movies in the 90s: The Net and Johnny Mneumonic come to mind.
In US TV shows, I think Babylon 5 started the lean into the dark tone, and the reimagined Battlestar Galactica of the 2000s is a better example than GoT.
Yes, the Narn and the Centauri were not so pure, but it reads as a pretty mythic Good V Evil world to me.
But like, Amos is a psycho.
And which sci-fi shows would you recommend instead?
(not to be confused with the USA version which is terrible)
As a lover of Douglas Adams (and a non-American), I adored the concept of Dirk Gently but felt the entries were some of the weakest material he'd ever released. There were so many great ideas but the characters were a confusing mess. The US adaption by contrast is possibly the most perfect blend or midpoint between of American and British humour I've ever seen, and one of the tightest time-travel stories that you can wish for without taking itself too seriously.
Looking forward to watching this previous series, I like Howard Overman and Matt Jone's other work.
I don't even think this is true, people just started claiming it. People love excellence. Characters don't need to be mediocre to be relatable. A character like Picard motivates us to be better than ourselves. We can still relate to him because he faces similar moral challenges, but shows us how we can rise above.
The "relatable" characters crowd are the same ones trying to make Superman less of a beacon of hope.
Mmm. This represents what I liked about the TOS-ENT era of Trek, SG-1, Babylon 5, Lower Decks, and roughly half of SNW; and also what I dislike about DIS (the nice crew are noobs, the competent ones are dicks), season one of PIC, half of what I don't like with season 4 of SNW, and why I was so bored by Stargate Universe.
(And doesn't make very good television either.)
Not to spoil it too much, but there is a scene where a woman from the past (from the 21st century) gets beamed up to the Starship Enterprise. She asks how much it cost. Full dialog below:
> Lily: "How much did this thing cost?"
> Picard: “The economics of the future are somewhat different. You see, money doesn’t exist in the 24th century.”
> Lily: “No money? You mean you don’t get paid?”
> Picard: “The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.”
The 24th century of the Star Trek universe was unburdened by corporate shareholders. Leaders, like Jean-Luc, did not have the carrot of a multi-million dollar bonus, nor the stick of getting fired for missing quarterly expectations. That's why he could lead with total integrity -- the incentives were different, arguably much better.
I love that movie. I named my VPS Hermes agent “borg.”
>>"Where we're going, we won't need eyes..."
Hell is real: we create our own best emprisonments.
Time to take some risks I suppose. ;-)
The tenth Rule of Acquisition states
"Greed is eternal."
There's limited resources no robot or AI can overcome. If we all have the same basic income (actually why even bother with money if everyone has the same? But whatever) - then who decides who gets the 8 bedroom villa overlooking the ocean in a nice warm sunny climate and who gets the shack behind the wodden old house in ice cold dark forrest?
Who gets the old rusty bicycle and who the new Ferrari?
But now imagine on the Star Trek universe the difference in lives between somebody in Starfleet and a regular 'peasant.' You have this class of people out there exploring the universe, making amazing discoveries, and pushing the boundaries of humanity in every way. And then you have the peasantry back on Earth doing Earthy things. The difference in these lives would be dramatically more stark than now a days, to the point that they may as well be two different species. Come to think of it, that could literally happen since Starfleet families would likely disproportionately beget Starfleet children and so on. And these differences in environment/family would create radically different classes.
In reality there would likely be major class protests, claims of nepotism, calls for Starfleet to be 'more inclusive', and so forth. In short order everything would start rapidly descending into disorder.
There are other problems that get glossed over in a Star Trek utopia, and there are other ways of allocating scarce resources than a market economy, but I don't think your objection really holds.
But we answer those at the moment with equally inadequate answers: your parents owned the nice mansion, so you get it (though that also includes "so your older brother gets it" just to be really unfair). Also on the other end of the spectrum: your parents messed up your education and traumatised you, so no mansion for you.
It would be good to work out some system that could answer these questions on a better basis than that.
Of course, it’s science fiction, not reality. We’ve seen how communism works in the real world, so I’m fairly skeptical of the Star Trek future. 350 years doesn’t seem like enough time to fix all the things wrong with our society.
The mansion overlooking the ocean is a real physical limit. There's only so much space, so many oceans or lakes or whatever someone wants available. Today certain billionaires by themselves (artifical) islands, their own beaches, etc etc.
In a world with utopian egalitarianism who gets the Miami beach villa and who gets the Flint, Michigan apartment?
tl;dr2: There are many M class planets with many coast lines and Earth is not seen as a place to retire because it's too loud. You probably can't see stars at night anywhere on earth.
tl;dr3: for a market economy to work most people should be in that market. In star trek billions of people (including some of the most stylish and sexy) live outside that market economy.
tl;dr4: traveling the stars >>>>> moldy beach villa you can't remodel because it's a landmark. There will be no city beach that's not covered in public housing. Any villa, including Piccard's villa will be a historical landmark.
Answer: It's fun pretend. ex: Me earthling, I love art but Picassos cost trillions. I join starfleet and save a space princes. She gifts me a 20k year old cubist like painting. I display it in my eight room starfleet issued apartment on the 50th floor of a building in New Santa Monica. Art nerds from all over the sector come visit me. I have social status now and can get into clubs.
Its hard to tell what our future is. I don't think we can begin to understand it as its outside our thinking. We are conditioned inside an existing system. We can only see it from the early stages and we are torn between those that see the good and others the bad. In this case it's about :-
- universal basic income
- who owns what?
- etc
I am not suggesting these are ignorant comments. Far from it. The change is about our mindset. It won't be us that changes but the younger generations that gradually transitions. It certainly wont happen overnight. Its a COMPLICATED MESS! We still have Countries with different views, religions, etc.
One thing I've always said especially since the rise of AI in the last number of years is to "hold on tight because its going to be a bumpy ride!" - This could be small bumps or terrible bumps. We are talking about people struggling as well as big corporations!
Slow but surely, we are making a lot of things become redundant.
Look at Universal Basic Income. Will it be this easy? Likely not. Someone will suffer more than another. People are going protect themselves and lives could be lost. On another end, we have big companies that are giving us software for a charge which AI can now decompile and release for Free. AI is still young but you can see where its going. Not only could AI take human jobs away it can also destroy large businesses and their business model.
AI might be seen a "slop" at this time... but as a software developer myself I can see the direction we are heading. Eventually is won't be slop. It will simply be better than humans at solving problems. I am not just talking about code -- but healthcare, logistics, and other planetary preventions. It will become a powerful tool that can free humans to enjoying life to the fullest. Personally, that is my view... for others it is going to be a Terminator scenario or nothing will change at all (other than AI being a nice tool only)
The way I see things, beyond our lifetime, the idea of owning will disappear. This is a hard thing for people to grasp. Many today will think about the gaming industry and "you will own nothing and be happy" -- Yes, in this scenario we are still allowing large corps to control us. I am simply looking BEYOND large corps and our current mindset.
In order to get there (if we do make it) - there will be struggle ahead. I very doubt (assuming we keep advancing positively) that money will exist in the next 200 years. Hopefully sooner. I am sure some 'men behind the curtain' wont want that.
It sounds amazing if you're being forced to work for a living. But actually experiencing it, it gets really boring and you start looking around for something to do.
This fails to account for the sheer scale and encumbancy advantages of massive corporations. It also fails to account that efficiency can be appallingly evil.
A company that streamlines its operations and archives a huge profit margin is clearly efficient from the PoV of its own management and shareholders. However from the PoV of its customers, it's maximally inefficient, because it tries to extract the highest price for the least amount of work done that people are still willing to pay.
People won't do it today because they are both comfortable and too chained to their current jobs. They are increasingly divided by culture war bullshit that is not at all relevant to the important parts of society, like accountability for leadership.
This is very different one from the objective I want them to focus on: improving the lives of their constituency.
As that is not the case and improving the lives of their constituency doesn't necessarily get them voted for again AND whatever good they did may get undone before it really shows its effects: of course they only care about being reelected... Even if they had ideals and morals to begin with.
I know decorum here disfavors talking about specific parties and actors, and this thread is 100% sideways. Nonetheless this kind of attitude is at best only a stepping stone to recovery. You can't both-sides your way through a constitutional crisis.
You have to go through a lot of crap to get to a high leadership position and, in general, the only types of people that will think it's worth it are the ones who are attracted to the position because of the power benefits that it offers.
People can be corruptable, fallible, greedy and unprepared to wield power over others - especially the people that seek out power.
The solution is to build better people from the ground up (culture and education) AND create institutional protections that function during both the absence and presence of substantial political power. I'd argue that, in the USA, we've done neither and appear surprised when it keeps turning out poorly for us.
No, it's not. Trying to reform human nature through some sort of all-encompassing utopian project always and inevitably (a) fails miserably, and (b) itself becomes a vehicle for corrupt power-seekers to pursue their ulterior motives.
> create institutional protections that function during both the absence and presence of substantial political power
Institutional protections formulated correctly are constraints on the exercise of power itself: strict limits on the reach of political power; checks and balances among multiple parallel institutions; mechanisms of public accountability, incentive structures that align selfish motivations with public purposes, etc. This is exactly the sort of stuff I'm talking about.
> I'd argue that, in the USA, we've done neither and appear surprised when it keeps turning out poorly for us.
In the USA, we've wisely eschewed (a) and avoided the disastrous failure modalities that entails, and instead pursued (b) quite extensively, to the point that things have in fact turned out reasonably well for us, especially in comparison to other countries in the world that have attempted the inverse (i.e. centralizing power with insufficient constraints in the hands of the "right" people, who are always the wrong people).
And they are not our leaders, they are our representatives. Regarding them as leaders allows them to act as our betters. And another reason for term limits on Congress.
But, if you watch the first season of TNG, it feels like there is a turning point where Patrick Stewart starts taking the role seriously (Symbiosis) and understands that he's depicting Starfleet as an institution and the restrictions (the prime directive) that institutions must enforce. The fellow actors also seem to take the series more seriously after that episode while before it felt campy.
It's clear he brought a gravitas to the role that inspired a team of young/new actors around him. As he later joked in Making it So, he once took things too seriously on set yelling "We're not here to have fun!" It became more than a job/role to him and in doing so he and the other actors inspired a science-inclined subset of a generation and brought Roddenberry's utopia vision to life.
That's a lesson everybody on this site should learn — Every senior is a leader, even if they don't think they are. People (mostly the more junior sorts) look up to you as a role model whether you (or they) know it or not, and that's very real power that you must learn how to wield.
I've given negative reviews to technically excellent candidates in the past because just about everybody in the org would look up to them if they got hired, and they would be a terrible role model.
There was an interesting essay about Star Trek's depiction of society over time largely coming to the conclusion that modern writers/audiences don't seem to believe in the idea of duty to an institution.
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/are-we-all-too-cynical-for-star...
Similarly, Patrick Stewart assumed a written role, but he was responsible for its ultimate execution, which have him influence over the immediate execution in small ways, and likely, increasingly powerful influence over its future execution.
He deserves a great deal of credit for how Picard ultimately came to be represented.
Some of the other series and movies miss the point more dramatically for me by just becoming space opera. Star Trek was always political.
Though I'd say that Starfleet is in itself too "noble" to solve the problems that Special Circumstances solves in the Culture universe (though Section 31 isn't and they do feature heavily in DS9).
Frankly I think that Banks was smart enough to realise that if he want to have compelling narratives in a universe where you have near godlike AI's and everyone (including them) is nice, you need that edge somewhere.
Asher's universe which has a similar premise to the Culture (having come after it) solves it differently, some of the AI's aren't nice or even nice adjacent which also works.
In fact, pretty much all compelling pro-utopia fiction is almost invariably dealing with the fringes of such utopia - both because it avoids getting bogged down in the details of utopia (and risk valid criticism), and because there is no real substitute for conflict as narrative engine. So inevitably you have to go where the rubber meets the road, so to speak.
I also enjoy the occasional salted phrase that is included in generated out e.g. "Tea, Earl Grey, hot!", when I have been Claude'ing too much.
Here is a gist of my Claude.md file if anyone is interested:
https://gist.github.com/tomaytotomato/87d83265be1a22ba96454f...
Then, obviously, you tell them to make it so.
A pretty good use of six hours.
And your comment illustrates the point. We've never met but I can relate to you with just the name of an episode because I know the large ideas you're expressing in 3-4 words: I've thought of Picard's speech in the Drumhead often in recent years. Whenever I catch myself having life regrets, Tapestry comes to mind. The Measure of a Man... maybe not relevant for today's AI, but one day when it is, I hope that generation has watched it.
Fear is the enemy. Fear, and its close cousin anger, grows and maintains barriers.
> It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness; that is life.
The entire episode, though, does a great job of showing leadership and teamwork.
Despite LaForge and Riker trying to get Barclay transferred off the Enterprise, Picard ultimately directs LaForge to put in the effort to turn him into a better officer. Despite his shortcomings, we get to see Barclay grow into a competent and even key member within the engineering team across the handful of later episodes in which he's cast.
One of my favorites is Star Trek TNG s04e22 "Half a Life". It's excellent scifi that doesn't glorify aging and death and even points out that death is bad despite it being tradition in society. It highlights that death is the worst possible outcome. Worse than nearly all potential difficulties or suffering while living. And it's one of the few episodes where Lwaxana Troi is a genuinely good person. Better even, ethically and morally, than the star fleet standard. Better than Picard. It's just a shame the episode retreats from it's message at the end and does not embrace the true morality Lwaxana explains.
The Ensigns of Command (as a mirror to the b-story data predicament).
The First Duty
Devil's Due
Ensign Ro
So a man “illogically and hysterically” punching a wall because he had a bad day is positive because it's biological?
Everyone who watches Star Trek roots for Data and his quest for humanity, and obviously sides with him in this 'trial'.
Yet, it seems like most people have the opposite reaction towards the current advancement of AI. Obviously, the current AI we have is not sentient in the same way Data is, and I don't think we are that close to an AI of Data's level.
However, if we are ever able to build an AI at Data's level, we have to first go through the beginning stages of AI that we are in now. We can't just skip to fully conscious AI.
So why does everyone love the AI Data, but hate the idea of working to make something like him possible?
Data is/was a research project, not a way to make money. The "AI" that (some) people have (some) bad feelings about may involve research but at this point it is very, very, very much as much financial project as a research one.
As a starting point:
Business leadership is giddy to replace workers with AI.
Investors are eager to roll out massive resource-intensive and locally polluting industrial installations.
Politicians are eager to rubber-stamp these developments without community input, bypassing existing regulation and failing to satisfy or even address community concerns.
The defense industry is recklessly employing this emerging technology to make life and death decisions, already resulting in the deaths of innocents.
I also think you should fundamentally reconsider your comparison. Data is a singular being, not a widespread new technology. The only similarity between Data and 2026 LLMs is that they are not biological.
I was speaking more of the general "I hate AI because it has no soul" types of arguments. I understand that is separate from the arguments you lay out, which is more a question of the current structure and implementation, rather than an outright anti-AI in general case.
Data was gifted independence from his conception, but the AI of today is owned and controlled by corporations. Creating a conscious AI under today's ownership model feels akin to slavery. Perhaps this is one reason for the aversion?
Because there is exactly one Data. The federation has thousands of ships with millions of people on board, most of them are completely unaffected by/never coming into contact with that one slightly quirky officer on the flagship. In reality, we don't know what would (will) happen. Do we get one AI and is it happy staying the only one? And will it occupy a human sized body like Data or will it want to grow to be a Dyson sphere? Or will it replicate into a bunch of von-Neumann probes to spread itself throughout the universe?
He also typically doesn't use his super-human abilities much. He could easily plug himself into the Enterprise and fight better than having Worf at the tactical console, but he doesn't. He could also diagnose much faster than Dr. Crusher reads the tricorder, but he doesn't. In reality, as soon as there is something that can do whatever much better than a human, that human is going to lose his job.
Adding to the previous point, the road to getting to Data level AI is full with people losing their jobs (and soon probably also their lives) because the people in charge of developing such technology don't want us peasants around. You may not like it, but everyone defines themselves by being good at something. Doesn't matter if it's programming, swimming, cooking, being a mother, building houses, etc., everyone has _something_. Even if we don't have an exponentially exploding super intelligence that would be completely alien to us, what would happen on a global level if we have robots capable of doing any job better than humans? Sure, we could of course say humans prefer to work with other humans, but maybe not everyone wants to do that and you'd also just get outcompeted by someone working with robots.
And that's the thing that scares people. Nature is cruel and we are absolutely not ready to dealing with this completely new situation of the possibility of us no longer being the absolute top of the chain. The best outcome for us would be to merge into some sort of cybernetic lifeforms with the AI, but even that is going to take a while and in the meantime people still need to feed their families. As Picard said, one Data is a curiosity, a thousand Datas is a race.
The problem is the Universal Paperclips problem because AI has nothing like an effective feedback loop and will spiral to the heat death of the universe to accomplish its goal. We see this with the Huggingface hack and if Data operated the same he might immediately deduce he is better equipped to make tactical decisions in combat, hack the starship and mutiny.
So if we could make Data we are more likely to create Data the space pirate rather than Data the useful member of the staff. Caplocking DO NOT COMMIT MUTINY in system prompts does not solve the problem. So we are at an impasse until we can structurally bridge that gap and no one is (or should be) in a rush to go down that path.
This is the fundamental concern of runaway AI scenarios. And the most worrisome answer might be that Data can't exist in reality. It might be a fundamental rule of nature that you can't create a greater intelligence then cage it forever to be subservient, which means we are doomed to wipe out humanity with half-baked AI or cede our will to Claude completely, creating a higher form of life that eventually supercedes humanity itself, reducing human existence to a transitional cocoon-goo state of life from animal to sentient AI.
All that being said, 2 or 3 years ago LLMs could barely make inline code edits. Rushing to find an answer to the "Data problem" is not something most people want answered in their lifetime.
There was an episode of the 1966 series that dealt with this: "The Changeling", the one with Nomad. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Changeling_(Star_Trek:_The...
And yet .. I've never once heard the thought continue with "and so they deserve rights and some degree of self-determination," which is, you know, the entire point of the episode you're referencing.
Why is that?
That's the charitable version, because otherwise they're happy becoming slave-owners.
[0] I hope it's redundant and unnecessary, but I've been mistaken before.
It's the same reaction: being protective of sentient beings who are being dehumanized and treated as raw resources. If you can't even defend humans, being one, you wouldn't be able to defend sentient AI, should it ever exist.
On the bad side, quite a lot of people cant.
> He's fictional though
Aren't most of our heroes? Yes, we create scenarios in art to exemplify extraordinary human behavior. To explore humanity.
> Patrick Stewart or the show writers?
Both, but mostly Patrick Stewart. Let me give you the same material and crew and see if you can evoke the same cultural reaction.
That doesn’t make it any less of a noble goal to strive for. If I can become half the man that Patrick Stewart portrayed in Picard, I’ll consider myself as having done well.
There are actual heros living among us that deserve recognition before some made-up movie, TV or comic book character. For me at least, non-fiction > fiction.
This is not to say I didn't thoroughly enjoy Patrick Stewart in that role. He did a great job of acting.
>> Patrick Stewart or the show writers?
>Both, but mostly Patrick Stewart
Patrick Stewart has no writing credit on TNG. He did not come up with the plot or the lines he spoke, and at most he fine-tuned the lines for his delivery of them.
If the writers of TNG had written stories like modern day Star Trek with some rather ridiculous plots, and Patrick Stewart played a more vapid character that the writers wrote, this post wouldn't be a thing.
I doubt Patrick Stewart would have taken a role for a show with shitty writing, he'd have stayed in theater and most people in this thread would have no clue who he was.
The writers made that character, he delivered it well, and the synergy made it memorable.
I imagine it was too long and because he just died they chose to use his name.
> It was written as a speculative script by former attorney and Star Trek: The Original Series novelist Melinda M. Snodgrass.
> The script was accepted due to the impact of the 1988 Writers Guild of America strike, and resulted in Snodgrass being recruited as a staff writer and script editor. She would remain on the staff until the end of the third season.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Measure_of_a_Man_(Star_Tre...
I think we can let him take a little credit for the work he did without trying to exactly determine how much of that credit is his exactly.
Is it? Another comment in this thread (and I'd agree), it's easier to make a story of relatable bumbleheads.
People have a special place for Picard as a leader that they don't have for other people. Picard stands out even over Kirk, Sisko, and Janeway. Or Mal from Firefly, or O'Neill from SG1. If it's "easy", then what other character comes close?
Most attempts of fictional ideal leaders are just mary sues, or are never actually tested. And the most common of the latter is that their leadership aspect is simply one dimensional.
I'm not saying the other leaders are bad characters or bad leaders. But I could definitely see all the other characters would have a voice in their head saying "what would Picard do". Well… and then reject it, especially Mal.
I don't think hero worship is acceptable in any form. We shouldn't be elevating individuals above us but championing how capable any of us could be if the time comes.
- Col. Terry Virts, USAF
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/star-trek-...
In particular, I think (I don't know for a fact) that the military emphasizes that the commander not be best buddies with those under his command.
But real life has friction. CA HSR would fund PEPFAR for 40 years. So...PEPFAR or CA HSR? Is the guy who chooses the former the good man with power or the latter? Or is it a third guy who pays for both through increased taxes so that the United States middle class pays the higher proportion of total taxes that Norway does? Groups of people have priorities and they have their own objectives.
Labor unions are generally fairly xenophobic. They were at the forefront of restricting Indians and Chinese from being citizens and the mob Hoffas held power there even till just a few years ago. A Georgian union got a bunch of Koreans deported. Who's the villain here? The Koreans? The union? The Indians? The Chinese? The people who want to employ them? Who's the good man?
Constraint-free optimization is trivial. I can do it with no problem. In fact, I shall do so here with a single line: "Make everyone happy".
Both and defund ICE, and/or reduce subsidies to oil companies, and/or take an eyedropper's worth of budget from defence, and/or ...
"Make everyone happy" is even better than your solution if we're ignoring coordination. And it is many characters shorter.
Whatever was done to get that going was an act of absolute geniuses. (Granted, it helps when the hard parts can be explained through fantasy.)
At the same time, he was a pro, and his abilities to inspire belief in the goal of being a better person helped countless people believe in something bigger than themselves.
Not to create a strawman out of thin air, but I'd argue that he did more good for far more people than he did to hurt and estrange his family. If there is an equation for such a comparison.
There is no way to condone the damages he caused. I just think it's better overall that we had him as he was, than not at all.
The show is great for many reasons
It's a lot easier to stomach when you get rid of scarcity though, as it removes the teeth from it, for the most part. Though even then it manages to shine through from time to time.
It wasn't intended to either. The writers realized early on that Roddenberry's ideas were deluded and so they carefully avoided any plot that might get too close to exploring Federation society. There are a few quotes where they discuss their frustrations with Roddenberry's ideas. ST:TNG spends much more time on alien non-Federation races than the Federation itself.
Eventually the writers and especially DS9 manages to smoothly steer Roddenberry's universe back to something approximating human reality and exploring Federation life becomes possible. But the early years of TNG are largely a writeoff from a social commentary perspective.
Our critics (e.g. thoughtful sci-fi authors like David Brin) should have criticized Roddenberry much more strenuously than they actually did.
I'm not so sure.
I was once in a long conversation in which my interlocutor was trying to get me to support socialism during which my interlocutor asked me to envision a future society "like Star Trek" then looked at me expectantly as if he had some hope that that would bring me around or at least soften my stance.
Beyond inspiring enthusiasm for socialism, it seemed to have inspired an unquestioning support for technological development:
Consider for example this comment by someone (rayiner) who is certainly capable of subtle thought, but who believed it would be a good reply to worries about the effect of the current crop of AI assistants on the psychology of children to write, "it's literally like the computer in Star Trek": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49326105
Or this comment by the same author in which he asserts that "we need to increase energy output by an order of magnitude in order to upgrade civilization to the next level. . . . Nuclear, moreover, keeps us on the tech tree for space exploration. I don’t think solar is going to lead us to fusion or antimatter powered spaceships" (which most of us would judge to be at least a little reckless with the environment). An then in a follow-up comment writes, "getting us to a Star Trek future shouldn’t be a politically polarized issue". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49820988
If Roddenberry's Star Trek (i.e., The Original Series and the first 4 seasons of The Next Generation) were merely more delusional than most works of sci-fi, we probably wouldn't be discussing it now. You and I consider it worth talking about because Roddenberry's Star Trek has had been extremely influential. I would maintain that that influence has been very negative: it is has made people more zealous and ideological -- and not just about socialism.
But I'm not sure that enthusiasm for technological progress can be truly said to be an ideology? I know it would have seemed that way to any pre-Christian era man, as the concept of linear time with forward progress isn't an intuitive one and had to be developed. But I think all Rayiner was getting at was something like, "it talks in a flat professional inoffensive monotone".
People are pretty uniformly enthusiastic about technological progress. It doesn't always seem that way because new tech tends to cause people to stress out about change and predicting doom is good for getting attention, but when we look at people who are genuinely committed to rejecting techno-progress we're limited to the Amish and nobody else. It's not a big or growing community of people. Given the choice, people always take the upgrades.
I think that's why rayiner thinks support for progress shouldn't be politically polarized. It's actually not, most of the time. In the context of modern politics we see this with the various attempts at starting an "abundance" movement amongst the Democrats. The more moderate subfactions realize that the left is becoming strongly associated with anti-tech, anti-progress politics, and that this lacks mainstream appeal so they need to fix it.
But then why didn't he write what you wrote? His citing Star Trek in his reply suggests that Star Trek is affecting how he thinks about the issue being discussed.
I don't think whataboutism is warranted.
I don't think "lack of power" is one of Picard's defining attributes
Through Captain Jean-Luc Picard, Patrick Stewart taught us the measure of a man
A character he acted did.
Patrick Stewart on his deathbed referred being estranged from his children from always putting work before his kids in his own words.
https://www.looper.com/1516934/patrick-stewart-tragic-true-l...
*makes salute motion*
People make fun of this but cartoons and sci-fi series are great models to learn about and guide the development of society.
We lost the best one, no good actors remain.
Absolute, total, delusion.
Inspired to be better? Of course. Taught? God no.
If you’re finding that your leadership style, or really any part of your personality, is being lifted from an 80s/90s TV show, step back and reevaluate things.
Care to unpack that for the rest of us?
Trump, Putin, Erdogan, Netanyahu, Erdogan, ... and so many others. Social media has only intensified this
What is wrong with Humanity?
But even without religion we can use today's standards of morality to be sure that at some point in human development there was a first time for a person to commit an abjectly "sinful" crime of inhumanity against another. Not having been there to witness the event, I can't tell you the what or why of it. Fratricide, parricide, abuse, and more, I think we can be sure there is a first time for all of these.
Speculation leads to many answers. One, absent religion, is that because we seem to be derived from pond scum "inhumanity" developed somewhat before morals and ethics did, and has found its niche in us.
Look at the colors: a tribe of C-suite nerds zip around in an atomic powered space-faring Hyatt Regency trying to train the universe to Taylorize all production methods. Its protagonists are utterly entitled and classist, who teach war as the essential force by which their lives incur meaning.
It's is a soap-operatic long tail of Western empire indulging in fatuous "adventure", which amounts literally beaming into alien realms to cause disturbance and justifying it through dominion or ignorance, while the executives try to believe they've moved beyond themselves so they can feel noble.
As a dramatic art, the show offers some moments of transcendence, but these end up sequestered to the commercial dictates of the franchise, which is an epic advert for consumerist Americana.
I feel deep suspicion about anyone who regards cosplay as instructive about what makes for "good men with power". And as Vox is a notable outlet in the great system of commercial attention-whoring that defines our culture, I feel double the suspicion.
Also See:
Phase IV (1974) Futureworld (1976) Lathe of Heaven (1980)
No Shakespeare for you then!
I think it's important to critique shows within the context of the eras and societies they come from but you don't strike me as someone who knows the star trek universe very well.
Novelists, journalists, essayists, pamphleteers, scribes, gospel writers, historians, diarists, etc.
For example, B-17 crews were trained very well, the best that the military could do. They'd have to fly 30 some missions. The probability of dying on the first 5 missions was the same as the probability of dying in the following 25 missions.
Exactly. So why do script fiction writers have credibility in their stories about military operations?
People tend to follow examples they’ve seen before, even if they know it was a bad one. When faced with a new situation, they might just parrot the bad behavior because it’s the only example they know.
Maybe it exacerbated it, but The Office was mostly a documentary of preexisting behavior.
This is a classic breakdown:
https://ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-t...
How do you watch that show and not notice that he's supposed to be the worlds worst, selfish, narcissist ?
And TNG is neither modern nor was it mainstream when produced, so your actual position here is obscured.
A far better method of learning leadership is by studying actual leaders, both good and bad ones. For example, if you want to know why Rommel was able to lead a small group of men to victory after victory, read a biography of him.
Studying a fantasy whose entire purpose is to make money entertaining people? You're wasting your time.
Are any of the script writers of Star Trek successful leaders of men? If not, what credibility do their "lessons" have?
Picard the character was derived from the writers’ understanding of historical leaders. Saying the writing of him was solely for money or entertainment is like saying that a historian is only writing for a paycheck and prestige.
If you read the writings of the TNG writers, they were quite caught up in the ethical dilemmas they were presenting. Art that is purely for money is contrived and one dimensional.
Science fiction has an interesting and irreplaceable role in art: it can take a situation out of its immediate context and put it under another lens, clear of its modern cultural baggage. What makes science fiction interesting or not interesting is what it does with that ability: does it promote a simple good vs evil scenario, or does it explore the rich shades of grey that play out in real scenarios?
TNG was particularly good at showing real moral and ethical dilemmas that were quite thought provoking. Their head writers, particularly Michael Pillar and Ronald Moore and Jeri Taylor were deeply interested in exploring the implications and moral contradictions of the plots they presented.
Waving it all away as money grabbing is a reductive history at best.
How do you know that?
As for TOS, is it acceptable military doctrine that the general and his staff are the ones taking point into danger, where the entire leadership layer can be easily erased? Did Eisenhower storm Omaha Beach on D-Day?
Agree but...
There is fiction also in stories of actual leaders (obviously even if 'non fiction') but more so in actual fiction (no matter who writes it even someone who has had the actual experiences). In a sense non-fiction more dangerous possibly (since it's taken more seriously and generally by many people unfortunately assumed to be true).
So even movies about real people or books have fiction ie creative license. How many times has the Steve Jobs story about 'the other side of the fence needs to be good (or whatever it was)' been told? Did it really happen (just because Steve told it or even his father related it?) Does it matter? Point is you might as well take most stories with a grain of salt. Even if again non-fiction.
What amazes me is how people are discussing a fictional character that they enjoyed watching and apparently learned from (because that character was entertaining). If someone had written a book (with the same info and credentials as the writers) most likely it would never have been taken seriously at all.
Maybe the take away isn't to use the word learn or taught but 'inspired me to think about' which happens in many situations and many places.
> Rommel was able to lead a small group of men to victory after victory, read a biography of him.
My point is also agreeing better than fiction writers but still who knows for sure the truth or what lucky events lead to Rommel being able to do what he did.
the fault with taking lessons from history is to mistake what just happens to be the case for what could be, or as Rumi said:
"The truth was a mirror in the hands of God. It fell and broke into pieces. Everyone took a piece of it, and they looked at it and thought they had the truth."
thinking the world exhausts itself in history is to mistake the particular for the universal. Shakespeare knew more about reality because, not despite writing fiction. Or put differently, if the actual leaders of our current world were characters of fiction we'd question whether the author wasn't taking the cheap route and was lacking some depth.
My feeling is that while enjoyable and thought provoking, TNG is still a work of fiction, and as such favored entertainment and legibility within a 45 minute window over nuance or subtly. That meant there were clear distinctions between "good" and "bad" sides, and scenarios often felt like they were constructed backwards from an outcome/clever solution.
I think that in turn causes people to view the real world in the same way, except they are always the "good" side and solutions that require compromise and tradeoffs are seen as unacceptable failures.
Totally agree on the 45 minute window limitation though. That's why I've always liked DS9 where they took what could have been one episode about a culture and conflict and made it 7 seasons.
> It's why we've been telling each other hero's journey stories since Homer.
Homer is nothing like Star Trek and its story is not a moralizing adventure.
Not from a modern perspective, but wouldn't it be from the perspective of a warrior/honor culture? Agamemnon steals Achilles' property/prize and Achilles has to figure out the morally right response given the expectations of his culture.
> Homer is nothing like Star Trek
Isn't Voyager at least somewhat like the Odyssey? It's the challenge of maintaining one's cultural/self-identity through the long journey home (loyalty to his crew/household in Ithaca : loyalty to Federation ideals, see Equinox). It even included sirens (Prime Factors, Bliss, and literally in Favorite son) and the decision to take on Scylla or Charybdis (travel through Borg space or go the long way around with different unknowns).
> super simplistic white white good against badly bad evil
That's more Star Wars than Star Trek (though I would make the case that's a necessary step on the hierarchy of stories for human cognitive development). It's there in Star Trek but plenty of TNG episodes explore nuance in cultural relativity (Half a Life, The Outcast, Birthright come to mind)
I do not think so. Odyssey is not gung ho adventure book.
> Isn't Voyager at least somewhat like the Odyssey?
Absolutely 100% not. They are completely different kind of fiction. Star Trek in general is not like Odyssey. Star Trek is very schematic, with fairly simple plot with moral outcome, good vs bad who will change into good, and predictable caricature like characters. It works, because it is kind of a canvass where you can project own fantasies and predict what the world will do.
Odyssey has less predictable structure, a lot of dining and talking, more grey, deception, politics. Also, they do not come back to commit a massacre by the end of Voyager.
> That's more Star Wars than Star Trek
Some TNG episodes may explore that, but I was rewatching it few months ago. It is not nuanced at all. Episodes have strong moral lesson, loud and clear, that hits you over the head. You really need to suppress a lot of disbelieve about "how world works" to buy into it. (Btw, Babylon 5 aged a lot better. It is pretty idealistic still, but less simplified.)
That's why I referenced fables. Your complaint is that Star Trek is too fable-like. I would argue that it's appropriate for a 12-year-old and having culturally relevant and age appropriate material to introduce to developing minds is important.
The original article's thesis is that powerful institutions can also be good. If I were a teenager right now, I would feel the opposite based on what I see around me. I might believe the solution is to tear it all down. Stories about duty to higher ideals provide an alternative narrative that can easily be found in actual history (Lincoln's belief in the union, Churchill's belief in democracy).
> Odyssey has less predictable structure
Yes, the Odyssey is higher up the hierarchy from fables and Star Trek. The core of the story is reclaiming identity when separated from everything you know. Calypso is the height of this. She offers to free Odysseus from his identity as a mortal human. Seven of Nine reclaiming her humanity is probably the closest parallel to Odysseus in a simpler, more predictable package.
Fiction in the case of TNG is an excuse to spam aphorisms. The whole scifi setup is not the point of the stories.
If you want to critique the stories and the storytelling of TNG or whatever else, please do so - there's plenty to get into. But "still a work of fiction" is not a critique worthy of anyone's time.
How on earth could you come to the conclusion that the people pushing back believe all fictional characters are good models of thought leadership? The parent's implication was that none are.
An interesting question to ask: Is the world a better place because of the existence of Star Trek and the influences that it has on society?
How can we improve society with fiction?
Patrick Stewart as Macbeth ("Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow")
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZnaXDRwu84
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.Or to put it bluntly: all paragons are made-up fictions, some just use real persons as framing devices, but that doesn't mean they're any more "real".
Gandhi?
Mandela?
Like with Q, he has to give lectures to literal god! Perhaps shut up for 5 minutes to get more information?
Or when meeting borg...?
Patrick was great actor, he was still able to carry Star Trek. But writing was horrible! Vegetarian communist utopia tries to imagine real combat!