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Notes -
Well, I watched the first episode of the new Star Trek show, Starfleet Academy (free on YouTube if you want to see this thing yourself). Overall I'd say the show seems morally confused. It opens with a sequence that suggests a major disaster has created a crisis where civilians are starving, $Main_Dude's mother got caught up in crime solely to avoid starvation, and jailing her (thus separating her from her son) was a moral wrong so grave that the captain responsible ended up resigning over it. But also, the son himself, age 8 at the time, was already a skilled con artist, pickpocket, and hacker, who expertly escaped immediately after his mother's sentencing, and one timeskip later he's in prison in his own right with a rap sheet longer than your arm, all of which would seem to suggest that he spent his early childhood being explicitly trained in the criminal arts, probably by the mother herself.
Naturally, the aforementioned captain has decided to fix her past "mistake" by tracking this guy down, making a deal to get him out of prison, and forcing him to attend Starfleet Academy, against his will and under protest, and the main plot of Season 1 will reportedly follow his efforts to find his mother, who broke out of prison herself during the timeskip but hasn't been seen or heard from since.
There are plenty of other things to point and laugh at with this show - a non-violent Klingon named Jaden, a hologram who was programmed to act like a socially awkward teenager and attend school instead of just being programmed with knowledge and maturity directly, the Dean of Students being played by Stephen Colbert - but that fundamental confusion just kills it for me more than anything else.
Wait, I thought the Federation didn't have crime or poverty or the like? Okay, there was a natural disaster, I'll accept that as an explanation for starvation conditions at the start, but a career criminal? A con artist? What's the point of being a pickpocket in a world where money doesn't exist and you can get all necessary basic goods for free out of replicators? No one's going to be carrying around anything worth stealing, and anything you need you can get more easily and for less effort without stealing.
Star Trek Discovery had an event, which the beginning of Academy name-drops, where most of the galaxy's warp drives got wrecked, basically so they could have the Federation splinter apart and then slowly rebuild. Presumably that also did a number on all the Federation worlds that had relied on interstellar trade to keep their post-scarcity societies going.
And pickpocketing can still be quite useful if people carry around little electronic devices that grant them access to things, which is what we see the boy using it for.
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I have already said in the past here that my head canon ends with Voyager. Even in that universe, they have to deal with backtracking on the crime and poverty front of a Roddenberry utopia.
They do have crime, at least at the frontier. For example, in DS9 the Orion Syndicate is treated extensively. In “Prodigal Daughter,” they are dealing with a Federation species (Tril), but I think it is implied the law enforcement there is not Starfleet.
They also do have scarcity, and credits are mentioned in canon. They also have private property, e.g., Château Picard. In Voyager, being limited on energy, the ship has rationing, and therefore, for some reason, a cook? Beta canon suggests that normally there is some sort of replicator energy–equivalent UBI in credits, so there is effectively no poverty when there is no scarcity. My favorite part of DS9 is during the Dominion War, when the Federation rediscovers scarcity in “Treachery, Faith and the Great River.” Nog, coming from a society that still values money, demonstrates that efficient markets, or the “Great Material Continuum” in canon, can help reduce scarcity.
Of course, I do not expect Paramount to respect any established canon New Trek, thus my head canon ending.
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Wait, why?
Apparently holograms are their own "race" now? Also they got the guy who plays the Holographic Doctor from Voyager to come back, and they're setting up a mentor-mentee relationship, which makes sense if you can get past the absurdity of a holo-teen student existing in the first place.
Stupid/Interesting how conceptually different “photonic life forms” are treated by film makers compared to androids/robots, just because the actors can act human instead of playing a physical machine with gear wheels as brain. Even though the show makers know, I read an interview with Roberto Picardo (no hate for him, he is fun to watch and just wants to work) where he explains that his character is a bit gruff because he is a 900 year old artificial intelligence and doesn’t care much for friendship (as he experienced befriending 30 generations of biological people only for them to die). So an AI existing in a computer (or robot) is a soulless alien, the uncanny other, while an AI existing as a human hologram is like … a quirky Dschinn having fun?
The joi hologram in Blade Runner 2049 also was more “real” than a replicant sex bot, though of course Villeneuves actually had something interesting to explore here.
Anyway, I watched a few reviews and it looks like a flop.
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So, a shameless rip-off of the backstory from Kingsman, just crappier in every way?
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