If you scratch a bit, like you do with a penny on a Lotto ticket, you can see something else.  Not winning numbers, but an underlying corruption.  A sense that the rebooted Starfleet is, in essence, a reflection of our own, modern-day society.  Sure the spaceships are bigger, the architecture more daring.  But the same essential flaws are there.  People and governments willing to do Bad Things for what they perceive is the Greater Good.  And, as much as I enjoyed the reboots, I think that something has been lost, or perhaps is simply getting subsumed in all the lens flare and flashy explosions.

Roddenbery’s Star Trek was about the best in us.  Not just that humanity evolved and matured between now and the shining future, but that we were *still* able to continue to overcome our internal and external conflicts.  Granted, Roddenbery’s future without pockets has been bagged on over the years, it still remains the only shining, hopeful future out there.  When StarWars hit the screens, then Blade Runner, the future got grittier.  Every film or show had rust under the paint and clouds in the sky.  Stories focused on doing “the best we can” as opposed to becoming the “best we can be”.  They tried a bit of that in Star:Trek, the Next Generation, and threw a bit more in during DS9 and Voyager, but it never quite stuck.  You didn’t watch Star Trek for the gritty “realism” or the dystopic adventure.  You watched it because it showed the potential.  It gave us a version of the future where we didn’t irrevocably f*ck everything up.

I worry a bit that the new generation of Star Trek writers is more interested in showing us the flaws, in exposing the impossibility of a Utopian society, than they are in building new stories in a world where it is not only possible, but that it is *probable* that people will do the Right Thing.