I'm watching TOS again. I never finished it back in the day. Not because I didn't enjoy it, it's just that TV shows, especially long episode length ones are easy for me to get bored of.
But TOS is the only Star Trek I like. I forced myself to watch all of Next generation and didn't care for it. Haven't seen the others, but with Deep Space Nine not being as much about self contained stories but long archs, I see myself hating that even more.
But this is about TOS.
I hear all the time "Star Trek was always a woke show...it's not for you right wingers, yadda yadda yadda".
Well after I watch an episode, I check out the review for it on Jammers reviews and I read the comments.
I swear about 90% of the comments for the original series are pointing out all the stuff they find "problematic".
"I love the plot in this episode, but I hate the portrayal of "insert woman character"
or
"Wow this episode basically took a pro-colonialism stance, that did not age well"
To me, if you have to constantly dodge landmines of things that irritate you in a show, then you're not the target audience.
It would be like me claiming that Marvel movies are right wing entertainment because of things like law and order, justice, etc. Then I'd have to go "but I hate this feminism inserted here, and this race pandering here" and on and on. It would be absurd for me to claim that Marvel movies are conservative if I'm having to constantly express my frustration with woke elements.
Likewise, while there are some philosophical underpinnings to the writers of Star Trek that are subversive and leftist, 98% of what comes through in practice is stuff that's refreshing to me as an old school Conservative Christian.
The very stuff they gripe about is some of the most appealing aspects to me about the show. The Star Trek writers essentially understood the nature of women and wrote them accordingly and realistically to reality as just one example.
And while they did have some left leaning tendencies that sometimes comes through, the thing people don't talk about is how influenced in Christian Conservative thinking even atheists were in their thinking back then by virtue of having grown up and lived in a Christian culture.
Modern Star Trek is an example of how post-Christian thinking has worked it's way into writing.
Well the original 60s Star Trek has so much thinking and viewpoint that was right in line with how normal people viewed things. Yes some liberal stuff got through, and they probably would have gotten away with more if they could have, but there are just generally character attitudes rooted in how men are supposed to be, and how women are supposed to be, and values rooted in at least the concept of objective morality, which they unknowingly are getting from the Christian society.
So I wouldn't claim that Star Trek is a Conservative show, but my point is that when I watch it, it's like a breath of fresh air, while the so called die hard Star Trek fans, have to scrape through with a fine tooth comb to extract the few things they like while having to give caveats about all the "problematic" things.
When there's a show with as much wokeness as the so-called "bigotry" that these Star Trek fans are finding in TOS, then I stop watching that show, I don't claim that I like it, and I certainly don't claim it for my side.
If Star Trek TOS was as "progressive" and "woke" as they claim, I'd be having a hard time watching it, instead of it being like a refreshing gulp of crisp water contrasted with the sewage that is modern day ideology and these "fan" comments wouldn't be filled with statements about how much this and that element are "tough to stomach" and "a product of its time".
Does TOS address any lore about what happened on Earth between the 1960s and whatever their future date is in the series?
The only lore I know as a casual is from the series that followed such as the fact that baseball died off with only a few hundred fans watching the final World Series.
And the whole utopia MacGuffin where some discovery (the machine able to materialize matter?) ending poverty/inequality/employment/warfare on Earth so that humanity was some unisex generic culture in leotards.
The vast majority of Earth's population was wiped out in WW3 and "the eugenics wars" which led to them building a United Earth government. Also French is a dead language but that's TNG lore. The utopia macguffin (replicators) isn't until after TOS either.
TOS was progressive in the sense that like most TV shows at the time there was always some writer who wanted to push commie propaganda and there was an executive who pushed back resulting in the version we got. ("Mankind has no need for gods. We find the one to be quite adequate.")
WW3 only killed about 37 million in Stark Trek.
Probably had more to do with the infrastructural and economic damage than raw population damage.
Between the 60s and First Contact, which is the earliest actual Star Trek material not counting time travel shenanigans or the Carbon Creek episode of Enterprise episode set in 1957, you have generally the same timeline until into the very near future.
Strange New Worlds more or less irons this out to the most confirmed order of things in it's pilot episode explaining how conflict started "with a fight for freedoms" and was called "the second [American] Civil War, then the Eugenics Wars, and then finally just World War 3".
A lot of the timeline has been retconned and moved around as TOS originally sets the Eugenics Wars as happening around the 1990s, which Voyager specifically draws attention to when they time travel back to 1997 and see it hasn't happened. SNW later explains this as various time travel incursions changing things in places but overall only postponing events which is why the Eugenics Wars still happens, albeit 40 years after originally mentioned, hence the more contempory near future event.
After that the various movies and shows take over filling in the details.
Replicators are a fairly late addition to the wider Star Trek universe only showing up from TNG onwards. Enterprise and TOS both still have food more or less prepared and stored at the time in varying ways depending on specifics like rank and setting. Archer being the Captain of Enterprise for example literally has a chef who preps his meals and those he might be dining with at the time for both personal/crew reasons as well as hosting alien visitors. The rest of the crew make do with a situation similar to vending machines or military mess halls with meals that can pick from but no options to input/request specific things that replicators permit.
Strange New Worlds isn't canon. They established TOS--->ENT as the main timeline and everything after with the Kelvin movies on is in an alternate reality.
SNW isn't in the Kelvin timeline.
Originally, TOS said that the near-apocalyptic Eugenics Wars and WWIII (which may have been the same thing) happened roughly in the 90s. Not much was ever said in TOS about how Earth had changed, other than that it had internal peace. It really wasn't that concerned with the topic. TNG is where it really went in on the utopian Earth thing.
I'm pretty sure the word "replicator" wasn't used at all in TOS or the original movies. Until STD, it was assumed that the replicator didn't even exist until the 24th century. Enterprise, which takes place in the 22nd century, makes it explicitly clear that even the Vulcans don't have replicators.
Most likely, it was a combination of cheap fusion power and Vulcan assistance that led to Earth solving all its problems. You can brute force a lot of problems with functionally unlimited energy. On a meta level, it was warp drive, because there's the whole Carl Sagan pseudo-spiritual thing about how space exploration is a higher goal for humanity - It's just a given that being space-faring and "evolving" are tied, at least for humanity.
You can read between the lines in TNG and the TOS movies to infer that the ME and the subcontinent were glassed in WW3. Given the lack of an Eastern or African cultural tradition or population, China and Africa probably didn't make it either.
That's mostly due to TNG being an American production and not authorial intent, but the breadcrumbs are there.
Even with the American production they still sink large parts of LA in 2047.
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Hermosa_Quake
I was just saying that the 24th century Federation flagship having the same demographics as 1990 LA was a consequence of it being a TV show that needs to hire extras, not specific intent.
Not sure. I'm not deep into lore for Star Trek anyways.