Voyager Endgame - Janeway destroyed the federations hope

[Senko]

So I finally finished working through the voyager reviews and the one on Endgame got me thinking. In the future Amiral Janeway came from we have happy people, voyager cruising over the golden gate bridge to fireworks and confirmation its 20-30 years in the future. In the now canon future of Picard we have a divided federation, romulan refugee's and a broken picard trying to mean something.

Is it just me or does it seem like Janeway in saving Tuvok, Chaokotay and Seven may have destroyed the federations hope for a bright future and possibly even caused the destruction of Romulus's somehow as a side-effect of the ripple changes from altering history? To take it all the way she may have even potentially cause the death of the federation itself in Discovery as the msyterious cause of all deutrium blowing up . . . we do see a mysterious absence of the temporal encforcement branch perhaps the first step in her plan we destroying the future federation so no one could come back with more advanced tech and stop her one swift, decapitating strike to dispose of them since once her plan succeeds it'll be a new future with them restored anyway.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

You still have Macy's day parade in the middle of the Depression.


That's the kind of nuance that Star Trek adopted recently that has people scratching their heads when they see blue collar workers on a destitute place like the moon.

[clearspira]

You still have Macy's day parade in the middle of the Depression.


That's the kind of nuance that Star Trek adopted recently that has people scratching their heads when they see blue collar workers on a destitute place like the moon.

The reason why things like that bother me is that in a post-scarcity society ''blue collar workers'' should be a thing of the past. Who the f-k would want to labour away all day when they don't need to?

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

You still have Macy's day parade in the middle of the Depression.


That's the kind of nuance that Star Trek adopted recently that has people scratching their heads when they see blue collar workers on a destitute place like the moon.

The reason why things like that bother me is that in a post-scarcity society ''blue collar workers'' should be a thing of the past. Who the f-k would want to labour away all day when they don't need to?

That's a speculative assumption really.

A practical issue I'll give you is that automation should wipe those people's jobs out if this was theoretically consistent. Problem is that that's probably part of the metaphor, just with immigration phobia instead.

Class-wise, there's nothing solid that Star Trek even gives us about Earth except for what Picard says in First Contact the movie and the general melancholy tone that is obviously a product of 60's social standards and network TV tropes from the 80's that solidified Star Trek as a dorky social universe.

[AllanO]

Class-wise, there's nothing solid that Star Trek even gives us about Earth except for what Picard says in First Contact the movie and the general melancholy tone that is obviously a product of 60's social standards and network TV tropes from the 80's that solidified Star Trek as a dorky social universe.

I think I agree with you that the particular focus of any given Star Trek show is not necessarily a representative sample of what life is like in the future. So it is hard to know if the future Janeway averted in Endgame is, much better or worse than the one we see in Picard. However I think you might mean that the idyllic view we have of the future Earth is because somehow things were always generally fraught and tortured and we were just focusing on the best parts and so a flawed future is what is presented in Picard say is more accurate general picture, I don't think that I think the flaws we see in Picard may be a rather small part of what the future is like and so that a more accurate general view is the idyllic view we normally have.

The first reference I can remember to their being no money in the Federation Earth is in Star Trek 4: The Voyage Home (but Kirk may have just been trying to get out of paying the bill). However we get a long spiel about humanity having evolved past the need to accumulate things in Neutral Zone and it seems clear that the implication is that most of the normal markers of wealth and status have withered away. So I don't think it is just First Contact that implies some kind of post scarcity situation in the Federation.

That being said I don't know that we see much in the latest Trek shows that did not happen in TNG or classic Trek. There are Romulan refugees in Picard but there are Bajorian refugees in TNG.

I think we see various kinds of essentially repetitive manual labour in Star Trek before we see the workers on the ship yards of Mars in Picard. I am not clear what is meant by blue collar in this context: is it the kind of work (repetitive manual)? Or the imagined compensation (we actually don't know how the ship building crews on Mars were compensated if at all etc.)? Most of the repair work say O'Brian or Rom does on DS9 seems similarly manual and repetitive or indeed most of the work that the none-bridge officers presumably do on the Enterprise and other star ships.

I think one of the ideas is that this is the implied frequency of bad stuff is much higher. I don't see that it is just that whereas in say TNG or TOS we were following a crew of uniquely talented and gifted people (the only half-Vulcan in Star Fleet, the only self-aware android, the only Klingon raised by humans etc. in the Federation), in the new series we are more often uniquely damaged and hurt people (maybe not the only but one of the few drug addicts, ex-Borg, PTSD suffering private ship captains and so on in the Federation). It seems to me that the future in Picard on Earth and elsewhere is just about as idyllic and in other Star Trek show, it is just we are focusing in on the darkest most obscure cracks to find things, which is why the normal Federation types who meet the main characters (or are the main characters) are some combination of gob smacked and horrified at the situation suggesting it is highly abnormal.

Like I think the Romulan refugees are a bigger deal than the Bajorian refugees (or any of the other waifs and strays they ran into across all the series), both in terms of number and the sort of implied geo-politics of the future, however even in older shows there was a sense that outside of the Federation things could get pretty wild and lawless with Orion pirates slavery wandering about and so on. The failure of the Federation to help the Romulans is a serious sort of failure of the ideals of the Federation, but heck when the Klingons faced a similar crisis in Star Trek 6 there were factions inside Star Fleet willing to resort to murder and intrigue rather than try to find a way to help the Klingons and end decades of feuding and war. Yesterday's Enterprise implies that the Federation and Klingons were one star ship away from devolving into another destructive war. So the failure of Federation ideal in the Romulan crisis seems not unprecedented in the hall of Federation failures to live up to its own ideals.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

The first reference I can remember to their being no money in the Federation Earth is in Star Trek 4: The Voyage Home (but Kirk may have just been trying to get out of paying the bill). However we get a long spiel about humanity having evolved past the need to accumulate things in Neutral Zone and it seems clear that the implication is that most of the normal markers of wealth and status have withered away. So I don't think it is just First Contact that implies some kind of post scarcity situation in the Federation.

That's right I got them mixed up. So they're not capitalistic, is what Picard refers to, while Kirk says they don't use money. The former implies I think that they don't have much in the way of private acquisition I think, while the later can be confined to technological innovation technically.

[Senko]

Yep its been said in a quite a few star trek episodes that they have no need of money because replication is so cheap and easy now. Kirk dismisses a pile of gold and gems as something they can easily do and its several hundred years past his time. The Bajoran's were a small group who lost ground to an invader, the Romulan's were a massive star empire that apparently dissapeared along with their homeworld since non of those refugee's are going to the presumably hundreds of Romulan worlds. That's just so much in Picard that doesn't seem to fit with every representation of the Federation previously and Discovery appears to have casuallly wiped out the entire 29th century time travelling society (though as I said we don't see them dealing with Admiral loose cannon) in favour of making Michael even more of a special snowflake.

[King Green]

So Janeway IS causality! Now I know why Mr. Chip the Spider tells Janeway "bad decisions", every action she perceives has little to no consequences...to her.
Chuck made a good choice of her consciousn as a spider.

[Link8909]

I think we see various kinds of essentially repetitive manual labour in Star Trek before we see the workers on the ship yards of Mars in Picard. I am not clear what is meant by blue collar in this context: is it the kind of work (repetitive manual)? Or the imagined compensation (we actually don't know how the ship building crews on Mars were compensated if at all etc.)? Most of the repair work say O'Brian or Rom does on DS9 seems similarly manual and repetitive or indeed most of the work that the none-bridge officers presumably do on the Enterprise and other star ships.

Indeed, also while we aren't shown, I'd imagine that the hard labor that is suppose to not be there is more maintaining the machines that do the heavy and dangerous work, overseeing said work, and getting in there when necessary, while I agree that automation would be a thing like with the Synths, that doesn't mean that there is not human oversight, you still need people to drive the Work-Bees and fix the machines if they break.

[Link8909]

I think one of the ideas is that this is the implied frequency of bad stuff is much higher. I don't see that it is just that whereas in say TNG or TOS we were following a crew of uniquely talented and gifted people (the only half-Vulcan in Star Fleet, the only self-aware android, the only Klingon raised by humans etc. in the Federation), in the new series we are more often uniquely damaged and hurt people (maybe not the only but one of the few drug addicts, ex-Borg, PTSD suffering private ship captains and so on in the Federation). It seems to me that the future in Picard on Earth and elsewhere is just about as idyllic and in other Star Trek show, it is just we are focusing in on the darkest most obscure cracks to find things, which is why the normal Federation types who meet the main characters (or are the main characters) are some combination of gob smacked and horrified at the situation suggesting it is highly abnormal.

Agreed, just because we didn't see the darker elements of Star Trek, doesn't mean they were never there to begin with, Deep Space Nine is often praised (but first shunned) by fans because it was willing to challenge the utopian future of Star Trek and highlight the darker elements of the franchise, creating some of the best episodes of the franchise, it was willing to say that Starfleet isn't a perfect system, the characters were deeply flawed and in many cases didn't live up to the ideals of the Federation.