Star Trek Fan Argues The Franchise Never Lived Up To Its Core Concept

While Star Trek has always been perceived as giving an optimistic and utopian view of the future it portrays, one fan takes to the internet to argue that this view isn’t realistic at all, despite decades of fans holding new shows and movies to this standard.

Star Trekhas always primarily portrayed the far future of humanity, with interstellar travel and a world united in the face of a vast universe filled with other intelligent species. From the beginning, franchise creator Gene Roddenberry envisioned a hopeful, utopian vision of humanity’s future, where the human race had advanced and unified to the point of venturing outwards to help other races. This included ideas like Star Trek's positive portrayal of AI and advanced technology, portraying a money-free human society, and more.

However, this ideal was not long for the world, even under Roddenberry's short run as creative head, as one fan on Reddit pointed out in a robust and well-written post. On the site’s r/startrek board, user RhythmRobber penned a post with the bold title, “Star Trek has almost never been the perfect, war-free utopia we say it is.” In the several-paragraph long post, they would go on to make the case that Star Trek has never actually been the sort of utopia that even longtime fans tend to describe it as and lays the blame pretty squarely at the feet of one man: the distinguished fan favorite Captain Jean-Luc Picard, who was the main character of Star Trek: The Next Generation and the iconic character in the formative years of most fans of the franchise. Many fans point out that Picard is a better-written Star Trek character than Kirk, but this exact quality might be the issue.

RhythmRobber explains that because Picard was written to exemplify the best of humanity and see the best of humanity as well, this rose-colored view of the future portrayed in Star Trek would keep that utopian view in the minds of fans even as the narrative on screen branched further and further away from the ideal, even