Sertou

All credit to Keith for his amazing artistic contribution of pencilling the first five issues of The Sandman, but calling him The Sandman's creator is a massive oversimplification.

It wasn't an "inescapable prison," it was a county jail in a small Indiana town.

My point is that there never was a utopian setting. Utopia's 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.

Nice! K'tinga class isn't it?

I said I thought the perks are handy, not game changing. I usually don't go deep enough in speech to unlock investment, etc. Still, they're more useful than the lock picking perks. Depending on my role play, build and where else talents are needed, I might go as far as "Persuasion" but there are usually other priorities.

Speech has some handy perks. You can bribe guards to ignore crimes, sell any kind of item to any merchant, increase the amount of gold specific merchants have on hand, sell stolen goods to specific merchants and pass speech checks more easily.

The cast of Blacklist was amazing. The writers, less so. They spent so much time telling us how brilliant Elizabeth was, but barely ever showed us. What they showed us most often is that the only way they knew to create conflict was to have her do the absolute stupidist thing possible in nearly every situation.