Surely there are two other watches–who are those people? Or are Kirk and the gang on the bridge 24 hours/7 days? Or am I being too picky again?
(signed) “Your sf (not sci-fi) pal in the Deep South”
I like Guanolad’s idea for an arc story. But going the soap opera route has some potential, too. Am I the only one who’s ever read any of the ST:New Frontier books? Some of the story lines are a bit hokey, but I really LIKE the idea of a crew that is allowed to have some warts, and is not always struggling valiantly to uphold the ideals of the Federation. There’s a captain who has a license to do pretty much what he pleases, and has a lot of emotional baggage to add complexity to his character (not 1-D like Kirk); the science officer who is half-Vulcan, half-Romulan & so has some unpredictable reactions to situations; and the Vulcan doctor who gets pregnant by the hermaphroditic chief engineer who is him/herself pregnant by the first watch helmsman… the possibilities are endless. ST:90210, indeed! 
The new Trek series is probably not going to be much fun for anybody involved, whether it’s the writers, the producers, the viewers, the actors, the promoters or the folks at Paramount trying to make money off it. I don’t want to seem pessimistic, but the whole project is doomed. DOOOOOOOOOOOOMED. I just hope no decent actors get stranded in the production somewhere…
The only possible good thing that could happen in Series V is to discover that Voyager has been declared officially non-canon along with Star Trek V and the Animated Series. But that’s not going to happen, is it.
Hey, I have an idea! Let’s do a PSYCHO!
Haul out the original scripts from 1966-69, dust off the original sets, do a little mending on the original costumes, and SHOOT THE WHOLE THING ALL OVER AGAIN, with new actors.
What the hell, it’d probably get more media attention and viewer interest than any kind of new series.
ELO !!!
They should do what they did in Next Generation, but spice it up. A live episode, an episode directed by Quentin Tarantino(the captain gets his ear cut off, but they replicate him a new one) More Klingons would be cool.
I hardly know her!
<rimshot>
This is way cool (and way ambitious).
What I liked best about Blake’s 7 (besides the high-school-theater-department set and costume design) was the way any character could buy the farm at any time. (Okay, we knew Blake and Avon weren’t going away any time soon, but still.)
Even the OS movies wouldn’t let Spock stay dead…undermining the power of ST:TWOK.
The worst part of the last two years or so of ST:TNG was the way Riker had become a co-captain…he’d just come so far from the hotheaded punk he was in the beginning…he deserved to have his own command and they had to keep coming up with excuses to keep him on the Enterprise. It woulda been cool if people could either die or transfer off and on the ship, just like in real-world workplaces. The galaxy is an awfully big place…
Saint Zero posted:
Too late. Deep Space Nine went to that well one time too many. Evil-Spock’s change of heart led to the Federation being wiped out and the human race enslaved. Thanks, Kirk, ya bastard.
GuanoLad posted:
You are also too late. There’s going to be a Roddenberry show with almost this exact premise: “Andromeda”
The Sulu-based show has been shit-canned by Paramount. Pity.
I just watched Star Trek: Insurrection again the other day and it sucks even more than when I paid to see it at the theater. I think it would have BENEFITED from Shatner’s direction.
One thing I’ve noticed about all the series, they seem to take place in grandoise, big-time scales, where every action is capable of starting galactic war or killing millions.
Here’s my premise… do a sort of “Special Operations” unit. In the Post-Dominion War era, there’s a lot less stability in the Federation, requiring them to find less-than-enlightened solutions to problems. It’d give an opportunity to make niftier weapons and gizmos, too. A sniper-rifle phaser…?
Anyway, it’d allow for more “behind-the-scenes” action, space battles between ships that are less than several hundred meters in length (I always liked dogfights between smaller vessels, anyway), and the characters would be more than Anal Starfleet Officers. And it’d allow plenty of opportunity for character carry-overs… don’t you think a Borg Drone would make an effective spy/assassin/whatever?
I agree with a35362 and GuanoLad’s idea’s. As I was devastated when B5 went off the air, the idea of a story arc is great!!!
Don’t count on your fingers, but I am OLD enough to remember when the original series was original. I had a sixth grade teacher who was in his first year of teaching and so not burned out yet. He loved fantasy and science fictiona and got us all interested too. When he told us to write a short science fiction story I remember one kid who lifted his plot right out of ST. Just changed the names.
(I wrote something awful about the sun going out)
So I would really like to have my interest in the franchise revived.
Oh, I was going to say something about “Guns of the South” and Robert E. Lee and automatic weapons, but I realize I’m taking all this far too seriously. Back in the Good Old Days when you read something, it was in the library and was very likely still there six months later. You could go visit your old friends on the shelves. That’s where I found TUNNEL IN THE SKY, the first sf book I ever read.
Now that library is a fruitstand.
(signed) “Another learning experience. I hate 'em.”
As much as I love star trek, I’ve gotten distracted over the past two series. I must say that a hiatus is in order - multiple years sans new star trek. Although a New Frontieer Series would kick ass!
And I like a lot of the other ideas too. But they need to spend some time between now and “new series” working out a cohesive history, and decide the fate of the universe. Cuz it’s not particularly believable now, even in the “i’ve suspended belief in anything real, and want to work this out entirely within star trek” sort of way.
So it was YOU who wrote Final Night for DC Comics!!! Finally we have someone to point the finger at!
I have a story idea. The Orion slave girls (the infamous green women) successfully revolted against their masters, almost wiping them out. What was left of the Orions got the Federation to help them reclaim their empire. The ex-slaves, calling themselves Dryads, then declared war against the rest of the Federation. Any Federation thoughts of an easy war after the Borg and the Dominion were immediately dashed when they discovered that the Dryads not only are great tacticians, they found weaknesses in the tactics of other great generals in the past, and avoided duplicating them. The Dryads captured Tholian ships, which they modified to be even more terrible than before. I am not entirely sure how this story will play out, though.
http://www.downtoearthcomic.com/
The September 10 strip.