I’d totally watch Desperate Redshirts. No, seriously. A show that followed the exploits and lives of the red-shirted crew members would be an appealing take on the franchise. See James Alan Gardner’s EXpendable series for comparison.
Who Wants To Marry A Star Fleet Officer
Bad Aliens’ Club
30 Spock
For me the problem is that all the basic premises are already covered.
- TOS: Original Series
2.- TNG: Sequel of TOS in a different timeline.
3.- DS9: The same concept but in a space station in the frontier. For me this was the best show in the franchise.
4.- Voy: Ok, so the Federation is too powerfull, let’s follow the crew of a single space ship lost in the beyond. Great idea, mostly poor execution. - ENT: The Federation is so powerfull that a crew of a single spaceship that everyday eats Neelix’s food is capable of returning home. Let’s push the reset button. Actually the idea was great, the execution horrible.
- Then you have all the films.
- Then you have excelent shows like Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica and Firefly that used most of the ideas left. You also have Andromeda that took away a great idea: the demise of the federation.
So, basically, you have two options (i) Bury the franchise for a few years and then try VOY or ENT again, and this time do it right or (ii) Came up with a great idea.
No offense guy but none of yours is great… and I don’t have one of my own.
Oh, come on, at any given moment there are 4 or 5 LOTR threads on the first page of Cafe Society: “Hey, What If Gandalf Wore A Crewcut?” “Were the Boromore from Smingadoof or Spawned by the Nappiuer?” and “Tolkein’s Cocktail Napkin Scribblings Indicate Frodo Was A Smurf.” You know, important stuff, started by guys like Skald the Rhymer.
Besides, I couldn’t wait. The people have a right to know, man!
OK, I could have waited a little …
EC, I didn’t mean that YOU should have waited. I meant that I, Skaldimus, would have waited, just as I forebear from opening as many LOTR threads as I have ideas for for fear of causing an overload in the warp conduits. I mean, even Qadgop and What Exit? have limits.
Brain and Brain, what is Brain!?!
The area of Star Trek that’s always been avoided is explaining the world. The setup of the ST utopian society defies all rationality. You’d need to really methodically create a plausible explanation for everything starting from parenting, schooling, economics, governmental system, etc.
I don’t think that focusing on a group of anti-utopianist terrorists works, nor about the whole system falling apart or anything since the utopian setting is the whole basis for Star Trek. It’s what really differentiates it from any other SF setting. Where other shows deal with plausible, modern day human interactions as set in the future, Star Trek takes a version of humanity that has advanced to a different level of life and watches it. Going into it saying that the whole thing was a sham to begin with, that Picard and crew were all guardians of a tyrannical, elitist society would be spitting on all of ST to date.
But so to show off the world, you’d probably need a crew of people serving different positions in society. School teacher, lawyer, politician, policeman, etc. You could have it that these characters are bound together in a club or they’re all family or something. As they go about living their life on Earth, the structure of society is slowly revealed.
A good overall storyline would be to set it in the days following the fall of the Klingon empire and how the peace between the two races is handled.
Possibly you could have half the show set on Earth and half in the Klingon empire.
It’s not unheard of. There is some evidence that things aren’t necessarily as they seem with the Federation. Look at Section 31.
Certainly I think it is fine to study in smaller studies. But to use as core of the new flagship series wouldn’t be good, I don’t think.
Ah, but…
In the TOS age, it was a writers’ Prime Directive that you would NOT go into any detail of how Earth society had evolved. Heck, the only Federation homeworld visited is Vulcan, once. It was only later, in the movies, that you actually get to Earth, and in TNG/DS9 that you actually get into what’s the politics and culture like. And to some people, that started deteriorating the franchise.
Also, the writers of TOS were aware that this WAS about human interactions as we know them, only set in the future with unusual challenges. TOS was not meant as straight SF, its real genre was Action-Adventure, in a SF setting. “It’s Wagon Train in Space” was the first-meeting pitch. But in his later time Rodenberry seems to have started leaning in the direction of making it indeed into Utopian SF. Then his successors decided that what we needed was more things going BOOM (questionable) and eventually, decon rubdowns (unquestionably good 
)
We’ll see what happens after this year’s movie. It MAY be that the right thing at the time is to let the TV franchise lie fallow for some time so the eventual reboot/reconcepting can be fresher.
The thing is, though: everyone hates utopian SF. That is why Star Trek is the only show that has ever used it.
Even the OP, who believes that the ‘utopian vision’ is intrinsic to the Star Trek milieu, thinks that the franchise can best be revived by focusing on the people who don’t share that vison: smugglers and profiteers who make a living by flaunting Federation law.
Yeah but it would be something new and interesting. It might suck as an idea, but that’s hard to predict because no one ever actually tried to say how one could reasonably expect a utopian society.
Are humans even biologically the same as we are in modern day? Are we injected with something that fixes our DNA (ala Gattaca) or has entire genepool been changed? If I remember right, there was the Eugenics Wars, which possibly led to mankind all being updated to a new biology.
Are children indoctrinated with a “Federationist” thought pattern?
How does the new market where there is no scarcity work?
These would all be interesting questions to ask and probably have real effects on the people that aren’t quite as utopianist as the word implies. There would have to be tradeoffs. But it would certainly be interesting to see what those are and how they would be relevant to modern society as we begin to move into an age where we could possibly start having a cure for all illnesses, where food could be fully grown in factories like test tube steaks, and where most of all entertainment can be traded and swapped around boundlessly.
In an age where the datedness of copyright law is an issue, and people with prosthetic limbs are running faster than those with natural limbs, it’s an interesting thing to look at.
What will life be like if we can successfully move to the next stage of existence, allowing ourselves to live entirely off technology, with no particular need to work or advance the world, where all of us have perfect genes and the only reason we age and die is because we choose to do so?
You would really need to get together a group of professional scientist/fiction writers to hash out a full universe complete with a government setup, economy, laws, school methodology, plausible technologies. You couldn’t just grab Hollywood script writers and give them a vague universe to set stories in.
Necessarily, the technology would need to be revamped quite a lot, as sort of a reboot of the series.
Not really… the utopianism was there from the beginning as a backdrop. Trek started out with the premise that humanity had largely solved its problems such as war, greed, and personal conflicts. Supposedly, this setup allowed an optimistic view of man’s future, while still allowing the cast to encounter allegorical analogs of human foibles on those ‘strange new worlds.’
This was Gene Roddenberry’s idea from the beginning. He wanted to use the show as a platform to promote a positive social message: that problems immediate to the viewers, like the Cold War and the battle for civil rights, were ultimately soluble. He believed that progress would continue, that people would learn to set aside their struggles over resources and ideology, and eventually inherit the stars.
This is why it is important to recall that Roddenberry’s Star Trek was a colossal failure. Ratings were lousy and the show barely lasted three seasons. The movie franchise was solely attributable to the success of Star Wars.
TNG probably only lasted as long as it did because most of the time Roddenberry was too sick to fuck it up. He became strident because he still believed in utopianism, while everyone else realized how ridiculous the idea was. In the 1960s it wasn’t outrageous to imagine a benevolent society based on socially progressive, nonmaterialistic values, even if people hadn’t quite figured out how to get there yet. But the 1960s are gone forever. He lived too long.
His successors continued to cling to the utopian premise out of inertia; but every step the franchise has taken since then has been away from Roddenberry’s vision, because nobody except Roddenberry ever wanted it. That is the only way it can survive in the future.
People have said that Superman could never continue on for much the same reasons. But Superman deals in tradeoffs. Star Trek has never been able to do that very well since outside of the Prime Directive they never really introduced any boundaries on life in the future. Explaining all this stuff would give the series the chance to do similar things as they do with Superman where the question isn’t whether he’ll win the battle, but what rationalising he has to do to justify his choices.
Any other flaws aside, I think that ‘exploring motivation’ was a major theme of the attempted Superman movie reboot. If I recall aright, the overwhelming popular response was that he needed to be breaking shit up more.
Superman has much the same problem as Star Trek, which is why his film franchise has also been languishing. His motivation was “Truth, justice and the American way.” That doesn’t work anymore, because nobody believes it.
Yeah Spock’s Brain was prolly written during Rodenberry’s “lets write a story while on crack!” phase.
I’d personally like a show about the Enterprise J. Maybe the Federation has new problems in that timeline. Maybe there’s a civil war, a plague, or a massive scientioligcal like cult threatening the federation with koolaid. All those powerful aliens, one could start a cult very easy.
“Spock’s Brain” was written by Lee Cronin (a pseudonym of Trek producer Gene L. Coon, who was under exclusive contract to Universal Studios during Trek’s third season and couldn’t produce work for Paramount under his own name).
About the utopian society. Thing is, you’ve got replicators making anything anyone could want. This is the basis of Star Trek’s utopia. The idea of rebels who hate the Federation is kind of silly, because first, what’s the point since you’re living in a utopia, and second, if you don’t like it just get on a ship and head thataway.
My own personal theory is that Star Fleet isn’t a governmental organization. It’s just a gang of obsessed hobbyists. Take Sisko’s father’s restaurant. He doesn’t run the restaurant to make money, money is irrelevant. He runs the restaurant because he likes to run a restaurant. It’s his hobby, and it gives him social status to be the guy who makes the effort to create this restaurant experience. Hobby farmers give him their home-grown vegetables because that’s their thing. There’s a kind of economy, but there’s no money involved because it’s all trade in status and luxury goods. Not even luxury goods, because any luxury good can be created out of a replicator. And any experience can be simulated at the holosuite. So why would anyone actually work?
So Sisko’s dad’s restaurant is kind of like my brother’s homebrewing hobby. His homemade beer isn’t any cheaper than supermarket beer, and he doesn’t sell it or make a profit. So why does he do it? For fun.
The only reason anybody does any work in Star Trek is for fun. Probably the vast majority of people on Earth see no need to do anything resembling work at all. We just hardly ever see these people on screen because they aren’t interesting. We only see people who work for fun…like the guys in Star Fleet. Star Fleet isn’t a governmental organization. It’s a gang of hobbyists who explore the galaxy for fun. Sure, there are military ranks, and an academy, and everyone has to agree to obey orders and so on. But the only penalty for not following Star Fleet regulations is that you don’t get to play Star Fleet. All those battleships and exploration vessels are like hot rods and racecars put together in your uncle’s garage. They are built for fun by guys who just like building spaceships, and flown for fun by guys who just like flying spaceships. And most people on Earth think the Star Fleet guys are a bunch of dorks and nerds for dressing up in uniforms and exploring dangerous parts of the galaxy rather than going to parties and watching holoTV, kind of like how we view people today who expend a lot of effort to climb Mount Everest.
Some people contend that Star Fleet can’t be a group of hobbyists because we see on screen that Star Fleet acts as a government. But we’re just seeing things from the Star Fleet side, and besides even a hobbyist organization can do some good in an emergency, like the boy scouts. There is no government or real military because in times of emergency the volunteers take up the slack.
Were the Bajorans being punked by Sisko and company, then? Because the majority-Starfleet crew of Terok Nor…er, Deep Space 9, were accepted by the Bajoran government as representatives of the Federation.
Wait, back to reviving Star Trek.
Suppose Evil Captor wanted to create a series about intersteller traders. That could be a good show. But what’s the point in setting this show in the Star Trek universe? Do we really need to see more Klingons and Ferengi and Romulans and Cardassians? And if we’re going to stay away from the thoroughly explored and tired canonical Star Trek aliens and civilizations, why bother to tie the new series to the Star Trek series anyway?
The advantage of the Star Trek setting is that lots of things are worked out already…you don’t have to explain warp drive or sheilds or transporters or photon torpedoes. And you can see this problem in Firefly, where even the writers aren’t quite clear about how exactly things work…is there interstellar travel or not? At least with Star Trek the writers know the limits of the setting and technology.
But the problem is that you’ve got all this accumulated dreck that won’t fit in with your Tramp Steamer in Spaaaaaaace show. You’ve got time travel and temporal anomalies and literally dozens of godlike species. How do you fit your tramp steamer into this setting? Why not ditch the creaking wheezing Star Trek backstory and start fresh?