2 Ups And 7 Downs From Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 3.7 — What Is Starfleet?

There is supposed to be a metaphor, a message, in there somewhere, and we already knew Pike liked horses. As well as lassoing, Starfleet's job is also to put the odd space bronco out of its misery from time to time. That is, only if it has taken time out from being an evil warmonger that shoots first and redacts the number of dead later. Doing the right, the humane, thing is for when the horse falls down. Thank goodness! Now, Beto had a happier, sad conclusion for his video essay.

Star Trek has always been a piece of theatre — the famous 'morality play in space'. However, it has typically — traditionally — never sought to teach its viewers a lesson that they couldn't otherwise learn by themselves. The double fault of What Is Starfleet? was that it couldn't even make the fault of telling us what, or how, to think. On the contrary, its moral message, its metaphor, if there was one, was lost in the mess of a framing device and a confused plot.