This makes me wish even more for a Star Trek spinoff about the lowest-ranked people on a starship.
Even aside from its cartoonish style and stories, the characters in Lower Decks are too high ranking and too involved. They’re ensigns, and they often interact with the captain. They’re almost never in the dark about what’s happening, and often they’re instigating things.
What I want to see are the non-commissioned people, like Chief O’Brien in his TNG days. It would be really interesting to see things from the PoV of a character who had no say in what was happening, who didn’t really know what was happening except in rumours, and the only time they heard from the top-ranking officers was in ship-wide announcements and so-on.
I’d especially like to see a security team of literal red-shirts beaming down to a hostile planet. Not as part of a standard away team involving the highest ranking officers on the ship. I want a squad of NCOs who are expendable to go down to secure a site so that it’s safe enough that the first officer and doctor can beam down. So many of Star Trek’s episodes are about politics, espionage, secret deals, etc. I’d love to see things from the PoV of a red-shirt security NCO who isn’t cleared to know any of that, but is just told to beam down and secure the landing zone / beam-in zone. Or, better yet, is part of a team that’s sent out in a shuttlecraft weeks ahead, and has to set up a stealthy observation post and camp out, waiting for the Enterprise to arrive. I want NCOs in dirty work gear, not clean uniforms, camping out on a lonely planet not because they’re stranded, just because they have orders to set up the site and wait for the ship.
I recently started TNG and saw that episode for the first time a week or two ago. When she died, I literally did not believe it right up until the end of the episode because of how anti-climactic her death was. I was absolutely sure it was going to be a fake-out.
When the episode ended, I had to look up why she was written out because I was so utterly perplexed.
… And it turned out Tasha really died, though the article did mention the actress returning on a few occasions. It sounded like the first season was a little rough behind the scenes, and the actress was also worried that the role would be too repetitive(?)
Ultimately, I feel kind of bad for the actress since TNG is widely revered as one of the best sci-fi series and she missed an opportunity to be a major part of it; but I can understand why she felt the need to leave. Plus this change gave Worf more time to shine, and also made room to introduce Guinan; so I really can’t be mad.
I also still find it pretty touching when the cast references Tasha and mourn her (like Data’s hologram in the episode where they legally have to prove his sentience).
Reminds me of that crazy scene from Picard where they get holographic popup ads on their ship.
It might just be my crazy conspiracy theory brain, but I feel like they’re trying to normalize advertising in a supposedly idyllic and utopian future society to make us see them as more of a necessity than they actually are. Same thing with Raffi living in poverty and Picard having private ownership of the means of production (his vineyard) with employees. So much for that “money-free socialist utopia.”
I never even thought about Picard’s vineyard like that. It is odd that a society that seems largely modeled off of libertarian values would include generational estates. The concept of usufruct may have been unknown by the writers of TNG when they were fleshing our Picard’s past. Or it was just a bit of our cultural bias bleeding into this “utopian” setting.
Raffis story doesn’t get a pass though. It seems like they were going for gritty and edgy in a way that was straight up contradictory to the federations ethos when they came up with that bs. The whole first season of Picard was pretty backwards in its portrayal of the federation imo. Haven’t watched the 2nd or 3rd season yet so idk if they unfucked any of the worst stuff
I mostly agree with you except the libertarian part. Is that a misspeech or something? The Federation is pretty far from being (economically) Libertarian.
Libertarian in the OG sense, more commonly called libertarian socialism or anarchism. Didn’t realize I left the socialism bit out. I hesitate to call the federation anarchist because there’s still plenty of hierarchy but it seems to be modeled after a vaguely left-libertarian ideology of some sort
The original Liberals were actually a bunch of mill owners in 19th Century Manchester (at the time the most technologically advanced city in the world) who got together to ask challenging questions like “why should we have to pay taxes?” and “what if we basically owned our employees? And their children”.
Marx and Engels lived there for a time and witnessed the conditions the working people lived in first-hand.
Libertarianism is explicitly based on the ideas of Manchester School Liberalism. The British Liberal Party of the 19th Century was all about free market ideology, in contrast to the (theoretically) more centrist modern party. In Victorian Britain, Liberal own you.
Broader socialism has its roots in the French revolution and liberalism too. But you don’t see anyone making a case that Marxists are liberals due to their common ideological heritage. Because it’s silly. It’s almost like divergent ideologies have to originate from somewhere and within a particular historical context. It’s unproductive and pointless to say “z came from y and y from x so z is the same as x”
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