Its kinda happening.
Remember they went kinda went on a rant about how this issue would happen on TNG or STV where they would have a "debate" and weigh the pro and cons, which would mean the anti immigration people would be able to make their case.
Instead everyone is cartoonish evil.
But now borg queen stealing police legs...
Mike made the same point I did about slapping some sci fi themes over the current day stuff. You can tell an immigration and xenophobia story so easily with sci fi. Just showing it current day with humans isn't sci fi just because there's a time travel element. It's grating. He pointed out that there wasn't always a clear right or wrong but both sides would at least be given some space to talk in past Trek. Sure, we'd get plots where one side was definitely wrong, but we'd still get their "why". There's none of that in Picard. It's just bad because bad.
The left's school of thought boils down to nothing more than "this is bad because we say it's bad" and to even ask the question as to WHY it's supposed to be bad makes you part of the bad people because only to bad people is it not self evident why something is bad.
When pressed beyond "this is bad because it's bad" it boils down to coldly judging people by their skin color where "white=wrong" and "not white=right" or other identity based caste system reasons.
There's also the "nice" and "pleasant" factor, when it comes to the situation with the border it isn't "nice" to just say that people suffering bad situations have to be actively kept out because it's at the end of the day not the US's problem and we can't help all of these people.
It's perfectly rational, but it's not pleasant and it's not "nice" therefore it's bad, all reason and looking at the bigger picture be damned.
Leftists refuse to acknowledge that life isn't always going to be pleasant and there's nothing we can do about that, they operate in childlike logic.
And let's not beat around the bush as to why there's such a desire to have completely open borders and endless numbers of people flood in pushed so hard, so that the elites can actively replace the US's population with people they at least think will be a lot more subservient and easier to control, there's no rational reason why we should roll over and accept that.
The elites want to turn the US into a third world country where their enclaves are unaffected but all the "bad people" that do things like vote for Trump have literally gone extinct, there ain't gonna be any "Star Trek" future if these people get their way.
Or, as they allude to in the review, you could tackle all of them... in episodic structure, like the old Trek would do. The theme of this episode is X, so both the A and B plots explore different angles, motivations, ideas, perspectives before they filter through the defined personalities of the characters into the show's resolution.
However, as The Wire came out before this show, now everything TV needs to be written longform. And, well, it's so hard to choose topics to randomly throw into a shitty, generic sci-fi setting - so just throw them all in. Because there's really nothing unique about the setting, institutions, characters, so-on of Picard or Discovery. So why expect that you could then use the setting to explore real-world contentions in meaningful and interesting ways?
Why did episodic become so taboo? Was it because shows like House were so formulaic? At some point the phrase "monster of the week" became dirty words that TV now actively avoids.
That Guinan stuff is the most cringy shit I have ever seen. I'm guessing a skilled editor could re-edit the episode to make her look like a classic dogmatic Star Trek villain ALA Let That Be Your Last Battlefield.
I don't know the full context and I assume she's referring to humanity as a whole, but the way she says "you know they're killing the planet?" makes it sound like she's talking about white people are at least white men (and maybe she is)
Not hard to follow the logical endpoint of that attitude, if one group of people are killing the planet, then they should be killed first.
And is she seriously comparing businessmen to Klu Klux Klansmen? Da fuq? You know how hard all businesses simped for BLM?
I assume it was a reference to people like Trump, not just businessmen in general.
This isn't just heavy-handed and one-sided, it's aggressively untrue.
Aggressively untrue is just how the left operates now.
It's like Mike said in the review, they don't want to write a Star Trek show or probably even a science fiction show. They want to write whatever they want and coast off the Star Trek name. From the clips they showed it looked like the ICE plot is something out of a modern day police show than a science fiction show. They absolutely could do what you said and use the Star Trek formula to tell their tales about the modern world but don't give enough of a shit about Star Trek to tell a competent story.
I really hope they actually use Trump himself and have Picards crew of alcoholic, drug abusing, murderous thieves beat him to death while shouting how bad he is. You would think the writers would use an OC who is a knock off of Trump that might be the puppet of an alien threat but considering how unsubtle the show is that it will be the actual Trump and they will make sure to mention his name 20 times so the audience gets it. It would be funnier to see geriatric old Steward get into a fight with an actor playing a fat old boomer, but if Trump is the villain one of Picards companions will be the one to kill Trump.
It wouldn't surprise me if they really are as blunt as to literally make it Trump and not a stand in.