Agreed - there are different flavours of optimism. TNG presented a promise that one day, humanity will overcome the petty squabbles and bad ideologies it’s mired in today. There’s a place for that, but I think there’s more appetite today for a focus on how we’ll achieve that future - that we can and will fight for it.

Honestly, if I were pitching a concept to attract some fresh attention, I’d go with a “Star Trek: WW3” series. Set it around 2240 to 2250, feature Khan as a big bad, maybe sprinkle in some E.T. interference a la “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” to keep that essential sci-fi flavour. You could also mine the Reeves-Stevens novel “Federation” for some inspiration. The point would be to make it feel contemporary and topical, but ultimately show that when that tipping point into Star Trek’s future arrives, we’ll be able to tip in the right direction.

I think there’s definitely room for different tones and ideas, as long as we also have SNW to keep that classic Trek approach alive.

IDCLIP

You forget the option of puppetry! The best aliens have always been puppets.

Honestly, I think this has more consistently been Star Trek’s approach. Early TNG was the exception. It really pushed for an “evolved humanity” model for Star Trek, where something has fundamentally shifted in our collected psychology. Examples like Dr. Crusher speaking like its remarkable that people used to fear death, or Picard dismissing religion as childish superstition come to mind as particularly strong hints that we’ve changed a lot.

But later Trek pushes against this: DS9 with it’s murky way arc, Voyager with episodes like Equinox and Scorpion, and even late TNG with Pegasus and Journey’s End. They are all more likely to see the “evolved human” as something to be tested by the story, with the drama coming from the possibility that it might fail that test.

And I think this is for the best. If humanity is too evolved and too perfect, the series can feel a bit heavy on U.S. exceptionalism - with the very American coded Starfleet going around to other worlds to fix and moralize about other peoples’ problems, but never needing to self-reflect or improve on themselves. I think a healthy balance is needed to actually model the qualities that allowed humanity to improve in the first place (and that we really need to see more of in the world now).

Gay men are men, trans women are women.