When Did Star Trek Stop Believing That the End Does Not Justify the Means?

Sadly, not everyone is familiar with markdown.

What I like to say is that Star Trek: Picard (STP) is so bad it tries to retroactively drag Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG) down with it. If you take STP as canon, it means the Federation and one of its best Captains were lying all along about having principles. Red Letter Media did an excellent analysis of how terrible it was, and it depressed the hell out of them. Alex Kurtzman is so much of a hack he didn’t even bother asking why Star Trek is great, he just went straight for generic action sci-fi with interpersonal conflicts

Not sure why you're getting downvoted, I was already convinced it was LLM generated and I didn't even notice that bit. The fact that their response to you is completely different seals it.

no dear is my text and my reflections

Enterprise and Nemesis killed it, he revived interest.

Shut up.

Oh please. Surely we're of better moral character than the Q already [On the bridge of the Enterprise D]. At least by example of the mischievous loud one most seen. We can do far better at aiming high, than to aspire to Q. ... "What was it they called you on Brax, the god of lies?"

I think there's more to Lower Decks.

Lower Decks shows a crew that's certainly not as professional and dignified as the TNG-era ones but also one that still feels like the crews we saw back then. They might have issues but they're also dedicated professionals and they're all interested in becoming better versions of themselves. Even Mariner, who has a whole menagerie of deep-seated issues, manages to work through them with the help of her fellow lower deckers (and sometimes even the bridge crew).

"Cerritos strong" may be a particularly blunt implementation of the Starfleet ethos but it is one. The idea that they're all in this together and they're all working towards a better future for everyone underpins everything the characters do, even when they get drunk off contraband hooch. Ultimately, Lower Decks shows that flawed individuals can come together and achieve great things and that you don't have to be Jean-Luc Picard to do the right thing.

The show highlights the silliness of the Star Trek universe but it also takes a firm stance on the side of idealism at a time when the writing room seems to be staffed by 1990s comic writers.

I don’t think nostalgia is the issue.

I’m not saying old Star Trek was morally pure. DS9 in particular had characters crossing serious ethical lines. My point is that the line mattered: when someone crossed it, the story examined the moral cost.

What feels different in Picard is not that it is darker. It is the loss of ethical and character coherence. Too often the characters seem to react as the plot requires, rather than from the moral architecture built around them over decades.

Seven is the clearest example for me. Of course she should change after twenty years. But moving from discipline, logic, self-control and the struggle to build an ethical individual identity toward revenge and punishment needs a convincing bridge. I don’t see enough of that bridge.

Old Trek repeatedly asked:

We can do this — but should we?

Sometimes the characters answered badly. But the consequences of that answer were part of the story.

That is what I miss. Not the 1990s. Not old sets. The coherence and the ethics.

What’s up with double-spacing every sentence?

One of the multiple hallmarks of LLM text found in this post/some of OPs comments.

Enterprise got pretty rough in seasons 2-3. But that was a reaction to 9/11 and yeah a lot of people kinda had their minds broken by that.

Yes sure a lot and a lot.... but Seven is the clearest example for me.

In Voyager, she repeatedly learns to restrain impulse, revenge and Borg-style utilitarian logic in favour of individual rights and ethical judgement. In Picard, she becomes a vigilante and ultimately kills Bjayzl out of revenge even after Picard explicitly challenges that choice. ... she changed is nto mroe seven of nibe and all the character behind...

More broadly, Picard normalises extrajudicial violence, revenge and “necessary” moral compromise much more than TNG/Voyager did. My point is not that older Trek never crossed those lines . DS9 absolutely did. The difference is that older Trek usually made crossing the line itself the ethical problem of the story.

That distinction matters to me: not “nobody ever does wrong”, but the narrative still knows that the means require moral scrutiny.

Doesn’t NuTrek glorify Section 31, which is basically just that?

I always think about that TNG episode where the enterprise comes across that phase shifting technology but ultimately destroys it since it’s too close to stealth tech.

NuTrek would probably use it to 9/11 Romulus’s sun’s core and wipe their home world out just to stir up drama. I think the second part was a plot point in Picard so it wouldn’t be hard for them to insert either lol

agree

There is a season 3 of Picard???!!!

I stopped watching somewhere midway season 1 coz it was so stupid... But, they made 3 seasons! Dafuk.

I don’t actually think Picard arrives at the same ethical conclusions.

The synthetics are a good example. When they decide to activate the beacon and call for help, Picard’s response is basically to stop them and offer to take them away.

Old Picard, to me, would first have changed the perspective of the question: does a persecuted minority have the right to ask for protection? If yes, from whom? At what cost? And what happens if that protection destroys another population?

That is where the real Star Trek dilemma would have been.

Not simply “don’t call them, come with me,” but a confrontation between rights, fear, survival and consequences, until the most ethical solution possible emerged.

That is why I don’t think the destination is the same. The old Picard was not looking for the solution that worked for him. He was trying to understand what was right beyond himself.

That difference is exactly what I miss.

I liked the cartoon, it's silly but it felt more true to the old series than picard

I cant recall what it's called right now, but it must have been good cause they cancelled it too

I don’t mean nostalgia. My question is whether we are losing a way of thinking that asked us to become better.

Star Trek used ethics, responsibility and self-reflection as part of the story itself. That shaped how many of us thought about power and humanity.

For me, keeping that alive is not about the past. It is about keeping our conscience active.

It's not the filmmakers that changed, it's the centralization of power of studios. Today's woke antifa supporter filmmakers are making youtube videos or podcasts, or trying to scrounge together crowdfunding.

Honestly same, I couldn't get more than a few sentences into this post, the formatting is horrible. I read a lot and the disjointed single sentence paragraphs lost me.

What’s up with calling Geordie “The New Spock”?

Everyone else gets their character names under their picture and Geordie isn’t even close to Spock. Data is way more Spock-like.

your udnerstanding is superficial. I suggest you to read again , understand better, and judge less

Could you elaborate? I grew up on TNG but wasn't really aware of the conflict at the time, so this went right over my head

Yes, I think this is part of the same problem.

Talking was always central to Star Trek, but the dialogue used to build the solution. It clarified the ethical problem, the scientific constraints, the risks and the consequences. You understood why a decision was made and what it would cost.

Now, too often, the talking feels detached from the actual mechanics of the crisis. Everyone processes the situation emotionally, then a solution appears, works almost perfectly, and the consequences disappear with the episode.

For me, the issue is not that they talk too much. It is that the reasoning no longer feels structurally connected to the outcome.

Old Trek could spend ten minutes in a briefing room, but by the end of those ten minutes you understood the problem better.

That made the resolution feel earned.

Now it can feel as if the emotional conversation is the resolution. ...

I enjoy Strange New Worlds fo

I've never managed to get that far. Because (like is stated and elaborated upon in the original post)...

The entire universe feels different.

Breaking coherence very early on in the first episode, to such an extreme, I cannot bring myself to carry on watching. It's like someone forgot the brief on what and who Vulcans are, what their culture's like, and did not pass it on to writers, directors, nor actors.

I don’t find that explanation very credible.

Picard had seven seasons and 178 episodes of TNG, plus the films, in which he went through assimilation, torture, captivity, profound loss, command failures, war and repeated moral crises.

Those experiences changed him, of course. But they never erased the way he thought.

That was one of the strengths of Star Trek: character development did not mean replacing a character’s moral architecture. Change had to grow from what had already been established.

So the issue for me is not that Picard changed. People change. The issue is whether that change feels earned and coherent.

After decades of seeing him confront trauma without abandoning the habit of asking what is right beyond himself, simply saying “the universe became harder, so he became harder” feels too easy.

Star Trek used to make that tension itself part of the story.

That is what makes this version of Picard feel less like evolution and more like a rewrite.

The knee-jerk reactions to the androids (anything synthetic in the end)

Which is kinda what we are seeing right now in Lemmys attitude with AI. In the future, a lot of Lemmy posters are definitely gonna be on the android/synthetics hate-train.

Not me though, because I love modern tech. :)

But that is exactly my point: this is where “the end does not justify the means” disappears.

Old Trek never said trauma would not change you. Picard was assimilated, violated and used by the Borg to kill thousands. In First Contact that trauma turns into rage and revenge , but the story stops him there. Lily confronts him, he recognises what he is becoming, and he changes course. His trauma explains the reaction; it does not automatically justify it.

Janeway does something similar in Equinox: desperation and anger push her too far, Chakotay challenges her, and the story makes that loss of perspective visible.

That was the point of the evolved humanity Star Trek imagined: not people without trauma, anger or fear, but people trying not to let those things decide what is right.

So saying “the universe became harder, therefore Picard and Seven became harder” is exactly what I am questioning. If circumstances are allowed to redefine the ethics, then the end has started to justify the means.

Old Trek asked whether we could suffer, be angry, even be broken , and still stop ourselves and ask: what is right beyond me?

That is the first thing I feel Picard has lost.

You talk a lot about trust, and I think that's an important factor. Sure, you can argue that the shows' utopianism changed entirely because the powers-that-be warped the messaging. That's probably true too, certainly now with the Ellisons at the top. But that's pretty recent.

I think there's also an aspect of how much viewers would be able to suspend their disbelief if they were served '60s or even '90s era scripts today. Especially TNG was very diplomacy focused and based in mutual respect. My guess is there has been an erosion of trust in Western society in the meantime. Again, ultimately because Capitalism, I'm sure — but in a broader sense than I interpret from your comment?

I dunno, I don't have a neatly wrapped theory about this. Sorry if I go completely off on a tangent based on your comment.

I think the first season of Discovery tried to earnestly grapple with real world politics through the whole Klingon war/Mirror Universe arcs. All of Picard seemed to be about conspiracies and shadow governments, which certainly also speaks to its time of production... while dulling the shine on the utopian vision for the future.

And it's not just badmirals and Section 31 that have been at issue. We've seen plenty of disgruntled pirates (read: regular-Joe capitalists) turned terrorists in the eyes of the Federation. Our main casts have visited enough dystopian "slum" planets in the past ten years, where criminals organise and prosper, that the idealism of Star Trek is depicted as precarious.

Way out in the 32nd century, as Osyraa bites into a Federation-produced apple, admiral Vance comments that "it's made from our shit, you know". Way to sell post-scarcity, buddy. Nobody wants to know how the sausage is made. I think the past decade of Trek has done a good job of postulating soft values, standing up for minorities and diversity. It's been pretty shit (to stay in the vocabulary) at representing the very foundation of that sort of tolerance, though.

Trek should be a means to imagining the end of Capitalism, even if only as a background note for all kinds of weekly weird encounters and philosophical twists. But that is not just hard to depict in the 21st century — it's actively being played as downright unsexy in the shows.

Exactly. And I would go even further: trust in old Trek was not sentimental or naïve. It was the consequence of ethical consistency.

The writing was so coherent that, in several stories, a character behaving differently was itself enough to suspect that something was wrong — that they had been replaced, possessed or manipulated. The audience knew their moral architecture that well. Certain choices simply would not have belonged to that person.

That is how strong the character writing was.

Now characters can suddenly act against values built over years because the plot needs conflict, and we are asked to accept this as “more realistic”.

I don’t.

For me, it is weaker writing and a poorer idea of humanity.

Old Trek imagined trust as something civilisation could actually achieve: people listened, reasoned, shared a problem, challenged each other and still trusted the other person’s integrity. Ethics was not separate from competence — it was part of competence.

Modern Trek often replaces that with suspicion, trauma, aggression and interpersonal conflict. That may resemble us today, but then what future are we actually imagining?

If centuries of progress give us better technology but essentially the same ego, distrust and emotional chaos, then the utopian idea has disappeared.

And perhaps that is the real issue: we have become so accustomed to cynicism that ethical coherence now looks unrealistic.

To me, that says more about our present than it does about old Star Trek.

Exactly. Old Trek repeatedly put the moral cost of the means on the table.

Voyager’s entire premise was built around that question. Rick Berman described it as getting home “at any cost?” and immediately answered: it shouldn’t be at any cost. That was built into the show from the beginning.

Michael Piller was famous in the writers’ room for asking: “What’s it about?” Not just what happens, but what the story is actually examining: paranoia, responsibility, identity, parenthood, fear. The ethical or human question came before the mechanics of the plot.

That is why episodes like Caretaker, I, Borg, The Measure of a Man, Insurrection or In the Pale Moonlight work so well. The characters are not simply looking for the fastest solution. They stop and ask what that solution costs, who pays for it, and whether another path exists even if it is harder.

And the scripts were written with enormous precision. Robert Hewitt Wolfe said DS9 scripts were locked down because the shows were so technical and precise; dialogue was not something actors simply improvised around. The writers were protecting the internal logic of the universe and the characters.

So my point is not “the end never matters”.

It is that a good end never removed the obligation to scrutinise the means.

Old Trek constantly asked: What will this choice do to others? Is the damage proportionate? Is there another way? And sometimes the harder, slower road was still the right one.

That it was part of how Star Trek was written.

thanks

Thank ChatGPT...

Yus, this. Thanks for the vid. Good stuff

thank you for sharing

Did you see how everyone looked at Sisko, and how he talked about it afterwards with Dax like "Holy shit, I went too far, didn't I old man?" "Yes, you did, and you're lucky you got away with that shit, Benjamin."

The show highlighted the problem, and that it was not the right thing to do, and how Sisko needed to be aware of that going forward.

Imagine critiquing someone calling out Star Trek's modern lack of good morals while invoking the fate of the Husnock like it wasn't a prime example of the very thing you're whining about.