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Current Events » in reply to How about STTNG?

Good question
Robert — (archived)

I'm not sure that TV or movies should be held to the same high literary standards as novels. Nevertheless, ST:TNG is a good example.

My early impression of the show was that by the time it took place, the Federation had grown so powerful and so secure that it was hard to scrape up credible threats around which to base a story. The early story lines seemed to be dominated by diplomatic misunderstandings handily resolved by an enlightened Picard, personal angst such as Data's desire to be human, and so on. Thus, I think, the writers eventually had to invent the Borg as a menace sufficiently over-the-top to threaten even the mighty Federation, and to give the CGI folks scope to create splashy space battles (that scene of the wrecked fleet at Wolf 359 comes to mind).

A second indication that the Paramount machine knew about the problem comes from the least of the TNG movies, Insurrection. There's a lot of dialog about how the Federation had become soft and complacent and effete, enervated by too much civilization, and that the time had come for it either to rediscover militancy and expansionism, or be swept aside by nimbler newcomers.

The parallel series like DS9 and Voyager also provide some evidence of the utopian bind. DS9 had to invent the Dominion as their Borg analog, and adopted the practice popularized by Babylon 5 of telling stories that spanned multiple episodes. Voyager had to throw the ship to the other side of the galaxy and deprive it of the Federation's support system to create a situation in which the ship and crew are credibly threatened, and thus demonstrate their superior Federation values in overcoming each threat.

Looking at the whole sweep of the series, Enterprise and TOS fit into the mold of stories about the establishment of a utopia, while TNG started out being somewhat about the realization of that utopia. There are utopian references everywhere in TNG, like the one in which Riker haughtily sniffs that he doesn't carry cash, and the need to invent "cold-pressed latanum" to get around the utopian bind posed by replicators which ensure that every Federation citizen can have anything material that his little heart desires. It continued into the movies--in First Contact a 21st century human asks Picard how they paid for the construction of the Enterprise, and he mumbles something about how "we do things a bit differently in my time."

So I guess I'd say that ST:TNG and sister series were utopian, and at the same time illustrated the dramatic limits of a utopia in fiction.

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