My point is that there never was a utopian setting. Utopias are perfect by definition and therefore boring. The Federation is something much more interesting than a utopia. It’s an imperfect culture that aspires to better itself in the attempt to achieve utopian ideals. That it fails and tries again is part of what makes Star Trek interesting.

Because from a literary and media standpoint, utopias are boring. The Federation has never been a utopia. It is a post scarcity society with utopian ideals, but with plenty of flaws to balance out those ideals. In the TOS era, those flaws included penal colonies, the death penalty, albeit for only one crime, contacting Talos IV and lots of infighting among member worlds.

Without conflict, there is no drama. Star Trek has long found conflict in pitting the Federation against less high-minded adversaries, the Klingons and Romulans, the Borg, the Cardassians and the Dominion, the Kazon, etc. That is fine but after 60 years it is also sort of played out.

To your point about Discovery, it’s first season took place before the Federation’s ideals were fully codified in policy - general order 1 had yet to become “the prime directive” for example.

TNG trek took place later and was closer to the utopian ideal. But still wasn’t perfect. The Federation tried to force Data to undergo study as a guinea pig and tried to take his daughter from him for the same reason, they supported unaligned worlds against internal dissent and left untold numbers of Federation citizens to the mercy of the Cardassians in the interest of keeping the peace.

During the Dominion War, the Federation was fine with setting aside it’s ideals as a matter of survival.

During the burn, the federation no longer had the resources to support it’s high ideals so it shrank and degenerated. Now. It is on the ascendant again, able to right past wrongs.

And TNG has appearances from several TOS cast members reprising their original roles; Deforest Kelly, James Doohan, Mark Leonard and Leonard Nimoy.

Not every show appeals to every Trek fan.

Just as Enterprise didn’t appeal to me, so Academy won’t to others. But if the show goes on long enough it may attract those trekkers who find appeal in a semi-angsty drama among a college age cast in a progressive academic setting.

Eh, TNG had a rough start too, but became awesome. Note that it took two plus seasons to become consistently good.

Academy has lots of rough spots, especially in the writing, but it is not irredeemable. It just needs time to find its tone and audience.

You can also get extended service updates from Microsoft for at least a year. $30 for up to 15 computers, although there are also a couple of ways to get then free. 1000 bing rewards points, or enabling Backup to sync your settings to OneDrive are supposed to both means to get them that will become available soon.

Eh, it’s no more problematic than the many canon retcons we’ve gotten. It may be there was an element on both earth and the Lanthanite homeworld that maintains Lanthanite immortality, but that element was lacking on Flint’s planet.

It’s an appealing theory, but how would you square it with the end episode reveal that Flint was no longer immortal since having left earth? Was McCoy just wrong when he reported that readings from the earlier tricorder scan show that Flint has been aging normally since he left Earth’s environment, and will soon die? We know little enough about Lanthanites in general, and Pelia in particular but it is implied that they are an alien race, so their long lifespan isn’t likely to be linked to remaining on earth, unlike Flint’s. Perhaps it wasn’t leaving earth that cancelled Flint’s immortality, but some element on Holberg 917-G?

Sadly, Earl Boen died of lung cancer in 2022.

“I was convinced up until the reveal that the “alien” was a sort of scavenging species 0 of the Borg, with the robotic look and the ability to adapt to phaser fire.”

I suspected the Pakled myself. That would have been an even bigger tonal mismatch, so I was glad to find that I was wrong.

Totally agree about Mitchell. Rong Fu is really good in the role and deserves some love from the writers. Mitchell is a recurring character rather than a regular, so it may not be an apples to apples comparison but still, she’s been there from the begining.

Bring Detmer in and give her some years overdue character development.

That’s a fair caveat.

SNW has been overusing it as a plot device. In TNG it was a one off gimmick to bring back Scotty. Still, I wondered why they didn’t buy Batel time from her Gorn egg infection by putting her in the pattern buffer. It seems like an idea that ought to have at least been discussed, but I don’t recall that it was.

To be fair, it was used the way in the TNG Episode Relics, when Scotty spent 75 years stuck in the Jenolan’s transport buffer, so quiite a long precedent.

It totally was. It’s no coincidence that it was Scotty who caught the entity and Scotty who is taken over by it years later in Wolf in the Fold.

My only complaint is that Ensign Gamble got this great episode, while Jenna Mitchell has yet to see an iota of character development and more than a few minutes of screen time away from the helm. Of course Gamble had to die for the privilege, so I guess that’s fair. Still, I think the writers owe Rong Fum some love.