For All Mankind season 3 showed how hard Star Trek’s utopia is to achieve

polygon.com:

After two seasons of an extended Cold War, For All Mankind moved into the technology boom of the ’90s. If the real ’90s were driven by a techno-optimism, For All Mankind explores an idea of what a utopian America driven by technology would actually look like. In this alternate space-focused timeline, the go-go ’90s are filled with electric cars, videophones, and moon-mining. Sounds pretty good, right? But over the course of the season, For All Mankind shows how even if the utopianism of the actual ’90s could have been translated into reality, we couldn’t have left our problems behind.

By the third season, For All Mankind’s alternate history has moved leaps and bounds beyond where our ’90s found us. The larger powers have wound down their military snafus in Vietnam and Afghanistan to focus on building military bases on the moon. The Equal Rights Amendment entered the Constitution thanks to the prominence of female astronauts, electric cars are readily available thanks to investments in technology, and the Soviet Union never collapsed.

It placed its own heroes, like Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman), Danielle Poole (Krys Marshall), and Gordo Stevens (Michael Dorman) alongside the Aldrins and the Rides. Real-life figures got moved around like chess pieces, with Ted Kennedy becoming president after Nixon, and Reagan after that. They talk with characters through a combination of voice actors and deepfakes.

Real-world characters exist in season 3, but they start to take the backseat to the show’s world. The rise of computers and the internet doesn’t factor much into the show, because all of the exciting technology, for decades, has been focused on sustaining life in space. While it’s not a one-to-one analogy, replacing “computers”