I am not an anti-woke person in the slightest, and I wouldn’t say Star Trek was ever subtle about its leftist ideals.

But it did use to present us with a more optimistic view of the future of humanity that was largely beyond the petty dramas we have today, while still leaving room for the fact that no matter how much you’ve progressed, you do always have to fight to keep the ideals and society you’ve built. Allegories for modern problems were largely relegated to interactions with humanlike alien species so that the theme of humanity itself being “better than it was” is left intact.

And it did lose a little something when the Alex Kurtzman era came along and took the federation and humanity back to the stupid ages in order to get the point across.

The scene in Picard where you have a character living in what looks like poverty despite it being a post-scarcity age, and trying to draw parallels between her and Picard, and the different classes we have today, because she lived in a trailer and he owned a vineyard, was just next-level misunderstanding the source material. Hello they don’t have capitalism, there’s no money. It was long established by this point that humans excel due to their drive to achieve, not command a salary.

It does feel like Star Trek used to be woke, but was a story from the mouths of people who had something to say, to now it’s woke, but in a very icky corporate-sterilized kinda way.

A more optimistic view of the future during the…height of the Cold War? The show that released a few short years after the Berlin Wall went up, and the Cuban Missle Crisis?

I just don’t know about that.