Real Life in Star Trek, The Offspring: The outside world in Star Trek
For this episode, we talk about parenting, civil rights, and why the Federation would care so much about studying a new android.
This episode feels ahead of its time in the worst ways of the franchise, predicting the bleakness of the modern shows where we find out that people do have huge problems - like how various parts of the population don't have the right to parent their own children, because the Federation wants to "study" them - but the writers contrive a way to sidestep the issue, so that we now know that "utopia" has horrible policies but nobody cares enough to actually fight those policies except maybe (eventually) to the extent that it affects someone they care about.