Honorable mention to some of the aliens they interact with in Enterprise, before the Universal Translator was fully working. Though technically they weren’t the Federation yet.

Actually, progressing in an interesting if not promising way. There’s been a ton of debate about how to handle the Ireland/North Ireland border due to brexit, and what they’ve recently settled on is basically creating a sea border between North Ireland and the rest of England so that the land border between Ireland and North Ireland can stay unrestricted. I’m not an expert, but this guy is and he’s made several videos about it I like: https://www.youtube.com/@williamcfox/videos

I instantly love this image, what’s it from? Some kind of Tomb Raider comic?

Well with Data it’s different, they didn’t know how to make a copy of him, only papa did and it took him most of a lifetime.

Transporter shenanigans are, admittedly, just something you gotta hand-wave.

Maybe the academy is just a terrible educational institution. Basically all we see of it is weird mind games, like simulated terrorist attacks and tests you automatically fail… Maybe Picard thought of the gardener as a mentor because he was the only adult there not fucking with him.

No, they relinquished Tarak Nor

In fairness, there was a whole episode of ds9 about obrien struggling with his trauma.

Maybe their therapy techniques are as advanced as their other forms of medicine?

It can still be utopian and aspirational without every character being those things. The same way you could have a show where you explore the concept of Justice by having a profoundly unjust main character. Or a show about Sin with a righteous main character. Sometimes you explore a theme by demonstration, sometimes by contrast.

Ohhhh, ok, we are talking about entirely different episodes. I thought you were misquoting “Erase that entire personal log” from In The Pale Moonlight. Yeah, the one where he gasses a planet is not the best.

I mean, like what you like. I think you can still have utopian fiction that explores when characters fall short of their utopian ideals, or the boundaries of a utopia, or the shortcomings of a particular form of utopianism. It helps us understand that it’s not magic, it doesn’t just happen, it’s what could be, if real people all worked very hard against the systems and people preventing it.

And I’m not a space lawyer but I think technically Sisko doesn’t do any war crimes in that episode, he’s just accessory to 2 normie murders.

Why? It’s widely considered the best episode of ds9.

To be fair, did any of us have great social skills for the first decade or two after activation?

Humans are the real space orcs

The bribe was the settlement payout. The censorship is just a bonus.

Throw in the episode where they go back to 90s California too, call it Hella Voyager

You could stick it in the middle somewhere. A side story we didn’t see on screen. Or, they could remake Year of Hell or something.

Listen, if Bashir can casually turn Sisko into a klingon in an afternoon, outpatient, I’m pretty sure becoming my fursona gender transition is nbd

My boring dayjob is to sit in front of the holodeck and shoot anything weird that comes out.

I only recall seeing the hallway bunks in Lower Decks, and I think that was intended as a joke.

I don’t think “reasoning” is the right perspective to examine Picard’s comment from. He’s not making a debate point, Picard is politely telling Ralph that he’s acting like an assclown and that it WILL stop.