Whence next for Star Trek?

Discussion in 'SciFi & Fantasy' started by Starthane Xyzth, May 25, 2004.

  1. Janus58 Valued Senior Member

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    No, the "Eugenics wars" and the " World War III" were two different conflicts, at least according to generally accepted Star Trek Chronology.
     
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  3. Starthane Xyzth returns occasionally... Valued Senior Member

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    Do you have a link on Star Trek Chronology? I'm afraid I've been too stingy to buy the book.

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    Someone here knows more about it Star Trek than I do?! As the average stereotyper might say, perhaps there's hope for me yet...
     
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  5. Janus58 Valued Senior Member

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    I have both the Chronology and the first edition of the Encyclopedia. (I figure that I'll hold on to them for a couple more decades and then sell them as collector's items. This is what I did with my "Starfleet Medical Reference"; bought it new for $8.00 in the late seventies, sold it on ebay five years ago for $57.00)

    Both list the third world war as being separate from the Eugenics wars. Of course there could be some debate on that, but there is no debate that there were two separate conflicts.

    Colonel Green (The Savage Curtain) was a 21st century leader of a genocidal war. It is fair to assume that this is the conflict that Earth is recovering from during "First Contact".

    So, is this conflict the Third World War or is the Eugenics Wars? Maybe it depends on who you ask. Maybe there is some debate within the Star Trek universe itself. After all, in the Soviet Union, WWII was known as "The Great Patriotic War". So maybe some people tend to consider the Eugenics Wars as the Third World War and some consider Colonel Green's war as the Third World War.
     
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  7. Starthane Xyzth returns occasionally... Valued Senior Member

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    Then again, some people would say that the First and Second World Wars were really a single conflict, with the intervening decades a ceasefire. Some people today would consider all 3 Crusades as a single holy war, although they spanned several lifetimes for the people involved. In the fictional continuity of Star Trek, definitions can be far more fluid...
     
  8. buffys Registered Loser Registered Senior Member

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    I love trek, even the bad ones but I definitely think they should mothball the series for a few years at the least. Bring a future series in maybe 5 or 10 years and hire a completely new team to write, direct, produce, edit, design, everything. They have to completely "clean house", the problem with the newer spin-offs is the repetive stories, characters and design in my opinion.

    Have you seen enterprise's version of the distant future? it looks and acts just like every other iteration of the show, what's the point of making a series set in the far future if it just looks like voyager with slightly fancier ships and tighter costumes?
     
  9. Starthane Xyzth returns occasionally... Valued Senior Member

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    Funny, though, that the 30th Century we glimpse in Enterprise doesn't match the one we saw in Voyager. I mean, Captain Braxton and the crew of the timeship "Relativity" never mentioned a temporal cold war... perhaps that cold war will ultimately change the past someohow, leading to a new 30th Century?
     
  10. Gbz Unaq Registered Member

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    In a new star trek I think they should bring back Spock(or another friendly Vulcan) and a version of Data in some shape or form. In my humble opinion the rankings for trek episodes go as follows.

    1.) Original Trek and TNG tie here.
    2.)In close second is DS9
    3.) A mile away is Voyager (never saaw much of it)
    4.) In what should be 1,000th place is Trek:Enterprise (after seeing one episode never wanted to see any of it).

    The should bring back the Captain involvement and vulcans of O.G Trek. Not to mention a version of Data maybe a little android ethics of TNG. For examples of what NOT to do simpley watch trek:enterprise
     
  11. buffys Registered Loser Registered Senior Member

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    see, in my view, this is the problem with critics of every genre.

    I'd assume this was obvious but, if you "never saaw much of it" or have seen only "one episode", you can't really make a reasonable judgement (good or bad). I'm not even saying you're wrong, I'm just tired of people deciding what is good and bad before even seeing what is being discussed.

    you might hate TNG or love DS9 but your opinion is meaningless if you've never actually watched the show you're commenting on.
     
  12. Insanely Elite Questions reality. Registered Senior Member

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    It seems to me one of the biggest problem with treks are the 500?+ episodes.
    Where are the new Roddenberries? Gene was able to thwart the censoers and bring a great deal of contemporary issues into US households. A white man kissing a black woman is one of his crowning achievements in my book(first interracial kiss ever on tv). Enterprise had an Aids episode, so kudos to them. But so many storylines have been explored they need a host of writers to expand the world. Storyboarding an entire season would be a good start(like B5). Killing off non-red shirts would allow fresh interpersonslal dialogue. Or maybe even campy,like south parks 'you killed kenny' I would love them to explore propaganda, or the evils of concentrated wealth, or terrorism from the terrorists view, or naked aliens dicussing puritan morality.

    Star Trek still has possibilities, but they don't seem to be going boldly anywhere.
     
  13. Starthane Xyzth returns occasionally... Valued Senior Member

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    In one "unofficial" review of Voyager's first 5 seasons, Harry Kim is described as the show's whipping boy. The illness he suffers in the first episode is only one of many unpleseant things which befall him: as the reviewer said "obviously he's a descendent of Kenny McCormack from that small town in Colorado..."

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  14. Brandon9000 Registered Senior Member

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    Since it premiered on a Thursday night in 1966, I have loved everything about "Star Trek," and I hope they will continue making new episodes and movies. I, for one, don't need a break from it at all.
     
  15. onewiththeuniverse onewiththeuniverse Registered Senior Member

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    In the original Star Trek there was an episode where Robert Lansing played an earthling who had been abducted by aliens and returned by means of a transporter like device in his office or apartment I can't remember which, but he was sent back with a cat that he was able to communicate with. His mission was to stop Nasa from launching a rocket and Kirk and the Enterprise crew were trying to stop him. I think Lansings character was named Gary 7. He was something like an interplanetary James Bond. It was a story written by Gene Roddenberry and it looked like a pilot that was not picked up. I think a lot could be done with agents working for an alien race in deep space, abducted from their home planets, trained and genetically enhanced mentally and physically to be sent throughout the universe working covertly to protect the known and unknown universe. I don't think that this alien race was ever again mention in any future episodes of any of the Star Trek original or spinoff shows. Since this race was unknown to the Federation in the original show, knowlege of them could still be limited to Kirks log from his run in with Gary 7. In the new show the agents on missions could occasionally bump heads with Star Fleet.

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  16. Hypercane Sustained Winds at Mach One Registered Senior Member

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    I wish Trek actually had a main plot.
     
  17. Brandon9000 Registered Senior Member

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    "Assignment Earth" was a pilot that was not picked up. "TV Guide" described the plot as "Robert Lansing stars as Gary 7, a human messiah trained by aliens to save mankind from itself." Bear in mind that this was the Vietnam era, the Cold War was very scary, and there was a general feeling that the world was in a lot of trouble. Co-star Teri Garr has said that she is glad it wasn't picked up, because she doesn't much care for science fiction.
     
  18. onewiththeuniverse onewiththeuniverse Registered Senior Member

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    Now if I were Teri Garr and I did not like scifi and knew this was a tv pilot and I was hoping that it would not be picked up, why in the hell would I be even in the show, that sounds really stupid to me and then she goes on to do Close Encounters of The Third Kind. Most be the money?

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  19. Nasor Valued Senior Member

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    I think the main thing holding back StarTrek from being a really great setting is Gene Roddenberry's influence. Roddenberry's universe was an interesting one, but he always wanted the show to be about a glorious human future were everyone worked together in blissful cooperation, there was no war or greed, and everyone was dedicated to peaceful exploration.

    While that's a fine vision of the future, it make a really boring premise for a TV series. Roddenberry's residual influence is a big part of the reason why the people in Starfleet don't seem to actually be in a military organization, and is responsible for a lot of the shows hokiness. You always end up with a bunch of boring boyscouts fighting against the evil alien(s).

    The only really interesting Trek show, in my opinion, was DS9. It was also the one that was farthest from what Roddenberry wanted Trek to be about. You had a cast of characters that included a former terrorist who was still pretty angry a lot of the time, a shapeshifter that basically had no ethics, an alien symbiot that had a dozen competing personalities inside her, an incredibly greedy and unscrupulous merchant, and a former spy who was trying to lay low. Now that's the sort of setting that makes for some interesting stories.

    I saw a suggestion somewhere else a while ago that Startrek should start a show that featured all-new characters, settings, and stories with every episode. Sort of like the Twilight Zone used to do. That would probably be interesting. Infinite flexibility, the opportunity to explore any race/situation/facet of the trek universe at will, and it would actually be possible to kill all the characters at the end of the episode every once in a while, rather than the usual “Will the warp core explode? Of course not, there's another episode on next week...” sort of thing.
     
  20. Starthane Xyzth returns occasionally... Valued Senior Member

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    The creators of DS9, Rick Berman & Michael Piller, did actually say that they wanted to move away from the "stfling niceness" of The Next Generation and introduce more scope for character conflict.

    And Odo definitely did have ethics: that's why he worked in law enforcement, and why he refused to rejoin his own people when he discovered that they were the Founders of the Dominion. He even killed one of his own kind in the name of his morality, which no shapeshifter had ever done before.

    Let's not forget Gul Dukat, who was one of the show's most interesting characters. He went through every role, from beauracrat to hero to enemy to religious maniac. In fact he should have been on the main cast list - he was certainly more important than Jake Sisko, for example.

    I still approve of Gene Roddenberry's idea that humanity is basically good, and that our better nature will shape the future. Still, it seems too convenient that so many humanoid alien races should be available, to act as new exponents of the negative qualities in humanity!

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    Perhaps those despotic military empires, like the Romulans and Cardassians, are reasonable analogues of how mankind might have bcome in a few centuries - if communists or fascists had conquered the rest of us in the 20th Century. As we are now, a utopian future of the Federation seems to be more likely... on the whole. :bugeye:
     
  21. Alpha «Visitor» Registered Senior Member

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    Regardless of what happens on screen, there's still the books, and always room for tons of fan fics.
     
  22. Nasor Valued Senior Member

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    True, but then again he was also the head of station security under the Cardasians...you would really need to have a lot of 'moral felxability' to be a security officer under those guys.

    I think Odo gradually got more and more moral as the show went on. Probably inevitable for someone hanging around with all those federation do-gooders.
     
  23. Starthane Xyzth returns occasionally... Valued Senior Member

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    If the Federation are becoming wearisome to viewers because of their unrelenting righteousness and decency, perhaps what we need is a series set on the darker underside of the Star Trek galaxy - centred around the clandestine missions of Section 31, for example.

    Or a shift of focus to the post-Dominion Cardassians, trying to rebuild their empire; or to a remotely situated "anti-Federation," governed by conquerers and opportunists. The Interstellar Concordium, referred to in various roleplay and computer games, might fit the bill.
     

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