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<blockquote data-quote="Mallus" data-source="post: 923589" data-attributes="member: 3887">Sure, drama itself is rooted in conflict; if Hamlet the man and his folks were happy and well-adjusted then Hamlet the play would bite... But drama, even the Utopian SF kind, is based on the notion that conflict is endemic to the human {and funny-bridge-of-the-nose alien} condition. My gripe isn't that Trek posits a Utopia, its that over the years its lost anything interesting to do with it. The conlict's between the Individual and the System have {almost} all been resolved in favor of the System in such as way as to rememble propaganda for the {fictional} state. And the conflicts between the Federation and the Not-Federation usually leave out all the juicy bits --like the relationsip between the Federation's ethics and its enormous wealth and technological prowess. Two interesting cases: the exchange between Sisko and Dukat where Dukat interupts Sisko's sermonizing by reminding him &quot;It's easy to be a saint in paradise&quot; . And Picard and the elderly God-guy who kept recreating his little house and dead wife on the blasted planet --Picard makes a telling point of telling him &quot;I'm in no position to judge you...&quot; Of course not, he's the product of a race with vastly greater material techology/magic who just made a race of 50 billion sentients extinct.Again, there's lots of material to mine from the-Fed-as-Utopia... but too often what we saw was just the writers&nbsp; failure of imagination.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Mallus, post: 923589, member: 3887"] Sure, drama itself is rooted in conflict; if Hamlet the man and his folks were happy and well-adjusted then Hamlet the play would bite... But drama, even the Utopian SF kind, is based on the notion that conflict is endemic to the human {and funny-bridge-of-the-nose alien} condition. My gripe isn't that Trek posits a Utopia, its that over the years its lost anything interesting to do with it. The conlict's between the Individual and the System have {almost} all been resolved in favor of the System in such as way as to rememble propaganda for the {fictional} state. And the conflicts between the Federation and the Not-Federation usually leave out all the juicy bits --like the relationsip between the Federation's ethics and its enormous wealth and technological prowess. Two interesting cases: the exchange between Sisko and Dukat where Dukat interupts Sisko's sermonizing by reminding him "It's easy to be a saint in paradise" . And Picard and the elderly God-guy who kept recreating his little house and dead wife on the blasted planet --Picard makes a telling point of telling him "I'm in no position to judge you..." Of course not, he's the product of a race with vastly greater material techology/magic who just made a race of 50 billion sentients extinct. Again, there's lots of material to mine from the-Fed-as-Utopia... but too often what we saw was just the writers failure of imagination. [/QUOTE]

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