Discovery Season 3, the new Trek of 2020 showed over and over again that the actual functioning of the United Federation of Planets was much trickier than we’ve previously thought. In the year 2399, during the era of Picard, we learned there was a huge area of space that the Federation couldn’t touch, one that instead was regulated by a group called the Fenris Rangers, of which Seven of Nine became a member. In Lower Decks, we learned that the famous Starfleet “First Contact” missions — the ones where a planet becomes a part of the Federation — were frequently followed by less glamorous, but hugely important “Second Contact” journeys.