I just don't get it. What is the freaking problem of those directors, trying to rewrite federation into some kind of dystopian tech fascism?
I was annoyed by the first Star Trek movie by JJ Abrams, with those police cops. I was alienated by those anti-android resentments in Picard. I stopped watching Discovery after the first episode, because the main protagonist was sent to some kind of labor prison for disobedience, where prisoners regularly die. I didn't think it could get any worse but just watching the first 10 minutes of Starfleet Academy makes me want to bury the whole franchise [edit: and stopped watching]. Some drumhead court-martial, lifelong prison sentence, violently separating a mother from her child and some goons beating up a prisoner. How in the hell is this the same federation of TNG, Voyager and DS9?
Star Trek is supposed to be the ONE fiction with a positive, utopian view on mankind and the future. I totally get the attraction of dystopian settings but for that I can read some Warhammer 40k novels. This really makes me furious.
Fortunately there is still Strange New Worlds.
Please spoiler me, when this bullshit in Starfleet Academy gets turned around in some twist, because otherwise I will just ignore the show.
I was talking about the sentence for Nus Braka. Maybe I'm just a crazy communist but in my depiction of a better world society knows better ways to deal with criminals then to just lock them up.
I don't know what your perspective on fair trials is, but a single judge rushing into the chambers, asking the felon 2 questions and immediately declaring the sentence. No attorneys, no hearing. That's some North Korean shit.
It was pretty obvious from the first 5 minutes that this was not a short trial, and that what we see is not the full trial but the final veredict hearing. There's even mention of the captain vying to lower the mother's sentence.
There's a difference between a trial and a sentencing.
They only say it was a Penal Colony. Maybe they marooned him on Ceti Alpha V... or put him next to Tom Paris or Kassidy Yates in a Penal Colony with an ankle monitor. The Vulcans might have put him in Ankesthan K'til with T'Pring's prisoners. Who knows.
First, Court Martials are held to a different standard than civilian courts. I don't necessarily agree with that, but it is a fact. Second, your take is implying that we saw the whole trial and not just the sentencing. I guess when Anisha Mir claims "You said you would help me!" to Chancellor/Captain Ake (who then explains that getting the sentenced reduced was helping), we're all just supposed to guess she hallucinated something and not that there was more to the trial than what we saw?
Drumhead was about hunting specters that aren't there. It was about reducing everyone's freedoms because of nebulous claims of national security. This isn't what we see here. There were no false claims of injustice, there was a tangible crime that had been committed.
Unfortunately, Earth was still independent at that time, so New Zealand is out of the question.
Bring us...Space New Zealand!