The one episode I actually watched at random was the singing episode. I shut that shit off like it was radioactive.

How else would means be justified, except by ends?

The phrase is “the ends don’t justify the means”; it’s particularized. Those ends don’t justify those means. Other means may be justified. You don’t use an axe to remove a fly from your friend’s forehead, in the ancient Chinese proverb, but you might use a rolled up newspaper. The ends justify some means, not others.

In retrospect, I feel like there may have been some anti-black racism in the Star Trek scene, despite the ideals of the show. I was 5 when TNG started.

When Voyager came out I remember my dad making a comment about how “there’s never been a black Vulcan before,” and me thinking, “why does that matter?”

Old-school rage bait, I think. To try to make the reader go, “They made Spock a black guy??”

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.

agree

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.

U.S has lost that for sure. It's utterly devoid of ethics. Multiple Western nations are following that path.

Neocolonialism, piracy, genocide. Our countries have become the worst versions of ourselves.

:(

That is a different argument though. Poor ratings or advertising performance do not tell me whether the writing still understood what Star Trek was trying to do.

Old Trek was built very deliberately. Michael Piller’s famous question in the writers’ room was essentially: “What is this story actually about?” The plot came after the human, ethical or philosophical question.

Roddenberry also imposed strong limits on how Starfleet characters should behave, because the future was supposed to represent an evolved humanity. Writers could challenge those limits , DS9 did it constantly , but they had to know which ethical line they were crossing and why.

That is why so many episodes feel coherent even decades later. The conflict was not just “what happens next?” but what is the right thing to do, what does it cost, and what does this choice say about us?

Whether Enterprise had enough viewers for UPN is a commercial question.

Whether Star Trek still had that intellectual and ethical architecture is a completely different one.

tyhank you for your great answer and thinking, I really appreciate you, and I understand your reading, but I still disagree that the ending reaches the same ethical place.

For me, the future of old Trek was not built simply on trust. Trust came from an ethical framework. Old Picard would not just ask a persecuted minority to trust him and the Federation that had already outlawed them. He would first ask: do they have the right to seek protection? From whom? And when does protecting one persecuted group become the destruction of another?

Trek had already spent years asking these questions with Data: when does created life become a person, when does ownership become slavery, and what obligations do creators have toward the beings they create? The Measure of a Man is basically built around that question.

And this is where the Alliance of Synthetic Life bothered me too. They are supposedly a vastly superior synthetic civilisation, yet their reasoning is essentially the most basic human response: you persecuted us, therefore we will destroy you. That felt incredibly simplistic.

One of the strengths of old Trek was that other species did not simply think like humans in different bodies. The Founders in DS9 are a perfect example: their entire perception of identity, individuality, solids and belonging comes from being Changelings. You can disagree with them morally, but their reasoning grows from what they are.

That was what made the encounters interesting. The alien civilisation brought a genuinely different logic to the table, and Star Trek used that difference to make us look at our own conflicts: race, religion, power, minorities, occupation, fear. from another angle.

So yes, the synths eventually stand down. But for me the more interesting Star Trek story was the ethical argument that should have happened before that decision.

tyhank you for your great answer and thinking, I really appreciate you, and I understand your reading, but I still disagree that the ending reaches the same ethical place.

For me, the future of old Trek was not built simply on trust. Trust came from an ethical framework. Old Picard would not just ask a persecuted minority to trust him and the Federation that had already outlawed them. He would first ask: do they have the right to seek protection? From whom? And when does protecting one persecuted group become the destruction of another?

Trek had already spent years asking these questions with Data: when does created life become a person, when does ownership become slavery, and what obligations do creators have toward the beings they create? The Measure of a Man is basically built around that question.

And this is where the Alliance of Synthetic Life bothered me too. They are supposedly a vastly superior synthetic civilisation, yet their reasoning is essentially the most basic human response: you persecuted us, therefore we will destroy you. That felt incredibly simplistic.

One of the strengths of old Trek was that other species did not simply think like humans in different bodies. The Founders in DS9 are a perfect example: their entire perception of identity, individuality, solids and belonging comes from being Changelings. You can disagree with them morally, but their reasoning grows from what they are.

That was what made the encounters interesting. The alien civilisation brought a genuinely different logic to the table, and Star Trek used that difference to make us look at our own conflicts: race, religion, power, minorities, occupation, fear. from another angle.

So yes, the synths eventually stand down. But for me the more interesting Star Trek story was the ethical argument that should have happened before that decision.

I completely agree.What I loved about old Trek is exactly this: it did not just present a moral position, it kept reopening the question from different perspectives.

A treaty could be legal and still create injustice. Neutrality could become complicity. Resistance could be understandable and still morally difficult. Starfleet itself could be wrong. And the characters were forced to reconsider what they thought they knew.

That is what made the episodes so powerful. They were not simply telling us what to think — they were making us think.

And often they did it through different species, occupations, conflicts and political systems that clearly reflected real human problems without reducing them to slogans.

That depth is exactly what I miss. Every episode could leave you with a real ethical question after it ended.

thanks

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.

Do you think Roddenberry would be pleased with how Enterprise was handled?

It's always been a discussion, not an unspoken agreement. Every series and film has characters with each of those viewpoints. A viewpoint may go unmentioned for a season but it's there.

You might be observing that there are prominent moments for one viewpoint more so than the other.

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

The only cartoon for me was from the 70s...

lower decks, and i agree! despite being unapologetically modern, it somehow feels more inline with old trek than new trek.

i was sure they’d kill it after a couple seasons, it’s honestly wild we got 5.

bro they called Uhura a white skin

I basically just gave three (or at least 2, as the DISCO one maybe is a bit iffy) examples of modern Star Trek scrutinizing the means despite the obstensibly good ends.

Also, another example is S2 E2 "Ad Astra Per Aspera" borderline almost literally puts "the moral cost of the means" (keeping good genetically modified people like Una out of Starfleet) that is ostensibly done for the ends of preventing another Eugenics Wars. I wouldn't hesitate to call this episode one of the best in the whole franchise, very much in the tradition of court case ethical discussion episodes like "Measure of a Man".

I don't think one can make a blanket statement about newer Star Trek quitting "believing something"; sure, it may be uneven in quality (maybe more than classic)*, but dismissing all of "NuTrek" out of hand is akin to throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

: I mean, there's whatever DIS season 2 was, Section 31, most of PIC, etc., but also, it's not like good swathes of classic Trek aren't also kind of crap - I mean, there's the time Riker murdered his clone and nobody batted an eye, as well as TOS S3, TNG S1, and the inconsistency of VOY. Even in the good classic episodes, it's not like every one is "do the ends justify the means" - in addition to other ethical themes, classic Trek still had room for simply "Cool sci-fi s** happened and we have to deal with it", not to mention episodes focused on interpersonal drama like "Data's Day" or any of Deanna's "Oh f*** my mother is on board" episodes.

I’m so confused. Who said that? Why was the comment I responded to edited to say the same thing you just did?

That sounds enticing. For as much as I simp for TNG the thing I hated most on it was the moralizing. Even though the writers politics would align with my own, they undermined the premise of the setting by creating this unusual situations then trying to project 21st century morality on to every one of them.

More open ended quandaries sound refreshing. Alright, I'm convinced. My DS9 marathon is hereby abridged. Gonna watch TOS for now

thanks

I think we are talking about two slightly different things.

Your example is about proportion: some means are appropriate to an end and others are excessive.

My point is more about moral legitimacy.

A method can be effective, proportionate and still be ethically wrong because of what it does to someone else.

That is what Star Trek used to examine so well: not only “will this work?”, but what are we becoming responsible for by choosing this way of getting there?

thank you

Can’t you find something better to do? this are my thoughts.

thank you a lot for your answer and input.
I understand the examples, but I still think there is a difference.

Having an ethical issue in the plot is not the same as really exploring it.
What I miss is the reasoning: different positions being confronted, the consequences being questioned, the characters actually struggling with what is right rather than simply reaching a solution.

In episodes like The Measure of a Man, I, Borg or In the Pale Moonlight, the ethical question was not just part of the story. It was the story.

That is what feels different to me now. The themes may still be there, but they are often used as part of the sci-fi scenario rather than examined with the same depth.

So my point is not that modern Trek never raises ethical questions. It does.

I think it no longer stays with them long enough.

thank you for your comment jsr, for sure TNG and Voyager, for me, keep the ethical or philosophical question much more consistently at the centre of any episode. but also DS9. DS9 maybe is darker, more political and sometimes more commercial in its storytelling, although it still constantly makes you think. a lot.

And it still does something very Trek: it uses species to reflect us. The Ferengi are probably the clearest example , they exaggerate greed, profit, sexism and status to such an extreme that they expose how poor and ridiculous those behaviours can look when you see them from the outside.

So yes, I agree that For the Uniform is not DS9 at its best ethically. But I still see it as an exception inside a series that largely keeps questioning power, war, occupation, religion and responsibility.

What changes much more clearly after Voyager, for me, is the centre of gravity: spectacle and drama increasingly become the engine of the episode, while the ethical or philosophical question becomes secondary.

That is the shift I am talking about.

true

OP wrote that in another comment. CTRL+F, my dude. using an AI to write your trek love letter is so fucking cringe.

I had done a word find before responding, apparently I hadn’t expanded my view to all of the comments at that time. That’s a big mistake, but even if it was corrected, do you seriously think an LLM would print out a sentence as poorly formatted as that one? I thought the whole thing about LLMs is that they sound convincingly well written while containing false information. While it does contain a blatantly wrong fact, “a not only white skin and woman,” is not how a convincing machine would write because it’s just not grammatically correct.

I see OP’s account is new enough to be skeptical but there are too many basic writing errors for me to think it’s an LLM? What goes through your head when you see that? Do you think they’re using a basic model that’s more likely to make such mistakes? I don’t know, I don’t read much LLM output at all, maybe they make more writing mistakes than I was led to believe.

Oh god, I don't even think LLMs have a "tell" anymore, it's really just the overall "vibe" of the text. They'll get some stuff wrong, they'll use weird spacing, formatting, and then other replies from the OP seem incongruous with their original "writing style." You kinda have to look holistically at it. Which is terrifying, because just like with some AI graphics, soon you won't be able to tell them apart from a real human bean.

I think you're under-selling the level of depth Picard goes into here. You're limiting your analysis to what happened in that isolated episode, when Picard is a serialized narrative that is making a much larger statement when taken as a whole. It confronts the theme of how we deal with an overwhelming threat through different facets of a number of different scenarios, only one of which is Soji's decision in the last episode.

We see the Federation’s isolationist response to the loss of their shipyards, the neglect it leaves the Romulan refugees in, and the anti-synth sentiment it breeds. We see how that hardline attitude impacts even Federation citizens caught up in it, like Rafi and the Rikers. We also see the Federation's response of the perceived threat of the Ex-Borg, and the effect that has on Hugh and Seven. And we see the Zhat Vash's response to the knowledge of the "super-synths" and the terrible price the Romulan people pay for that.

All of these are maladaptive, fear-based reactions to the same sort of existential threat the synth colony faces in the final episode, and they're all contrasted to the choice the synths make there. It's all part of the same theme being dealt with through the entire season. The answer given to the question of "do the ends justify the means" in the last episode may just be one sentence long, but it’s the final sentence of an essay that started in episode one.

You said in your initial post that when a character crossed the line, Star Trek stopped and examined what that meant, and that's exactly what's happening throughout Picard. That's why the tone is so grim for most of the season. As Picard said right up front, crossing that line means you're "no longer Starfleet" -- you lose something of yourself. And the entire season is driving home that point, but also showing the process of recovering from a mistake like that, and setting a better example for the next generation.

In that regard, I'd also push back against your comment about the synths. Star Trek has a long history of showing that technological advancement is not always accompanied by commensurate wisdom. The synths are like Data was in much of TNG: remarkably intelligent in some ways, childlike in others. A key difference being that they have pronounced emotions, so instead of child-like wonder and curiosity, they're prone to emotional over-reaction. So maybe V'Ger is a better comparison than Data -- an enormous super-intelligence, prone to child-like tantrums.

I've appreciated this talk because, like I said, I do think Picard really failed narratively in a lot of ways, so I'd usually not bother to take the time to defend the things that do work. But it's nice to take a moment to do so, lets me appreciate it a little more myself.

is there a policy against ai written posts? because this ticks all the boxes

Bit late to the party but for a real example Pike commited genocide on a hunch in SNW...so yeah I can see New Trek genociding Romulans

You would have preferred the genocide to have been not on a hunch?

Would have prefered them not commiting genocide but at least discussing it through would have been interesting. Are they ok commiting genocide for the future of humanity? And not just ehh lets just do it.

The way I would have liked it most would be them discussing it coming to the conclusion that genocide is never ok and that they are stopping it and then a temporal agent stops them from stopping it or something...

at least discussing it through would have been interesting.

I think him having to make a snap decision without complete information is far more interesting, both dramatically and as an exploration of themes that have been present in the franchise since the beginning.

It's interesting that your preferred solution is to remove all agency from the characters.

Yeah, dont think I would have liked my prefered version much either.

What do you mean with its more interesting?
My read of the moral is now %hat its fine to commit genocide if you think its for the greater good. History past and present always shows that the people commiting genocide at least say its for the greater good...

Nearly every time travel story ever told in Trek has been about doing whatever you need to do to preserve history. The aliens in the episode are a large-scale Edith Keeler, with the chief differences being the sheer scale of it, and the fact that unlike Kirk, Pike didn't have the steady voice of Spock insisting that this is what had to be done.

And, from the point of view of preserving known history, Pike's hunch was correct, and now he has to live with that.

So yeah, I think it's pretty interesting.

Lets just agree to disagree :D
Glad you enjoyed it

The means are justified because they’re proportionate, and that makes them moral. That’s the moral foundation of war.