Good Ideas for Star Trek Series That Don't Suck

Cafe Society
1

I never found Voyager very interesting, though I thought the last episode was clever. I find Enterprise to usually be unwatchable, mostly because of the butchering of ST canon history and the lame rehashed plots from TOS and TNG. So, once Enterprise spews out seven seasons of crap even worse than Voyager, the Star Trek franchise will need to redeem itself. I thought of some good ideas for series that would be totally unlike anything ST has done before.

  1. Star Trek: Section 31
    This series would be all about the Section 31 dudes. Section 31 does the Federation’s dirty work. Covert missions, assassinations, intelligence, etc. Most people in Starfleet don’t even know they exist, and they have technology that’s more advanced than what the rest of Starfleet has. The show could focus on a group of Section 31 personell, who go on various missions for Starfleet. There wouldn’t be any particular ship; they’d hitch rides with various people and travel with falsified officer’s credtentials on Federation ships if necessary. There would also be lots of political intrigue.

  2. Star Trek: Special Forces
    A series about the elite military ground forces in Starfleet. These badasses beam into enemy territory en masse and kick ass. There would be lots of violence.

  3. A miniseries telling the story of the origin of the Borg. The great thing about this series is there would be no humans or Federation in it at all, it would be entirely about an alien culture. I’ve always imagined the Borg as starting out as humanoids similar to humans many tens of thousdands of years ago, and gradually integrating with their technology so much that they turn into the Big Evil Collective. The series could start by introducing a grand civilization at its scientific, artistic and cultural peak, and then tell the story of how individualism was eliminated and biomechanical implants were developed. There’s lots of potential for drama by creating things like a resistance movement (which would be interesting since you know that their failure would be inevitable.)

2

Geez I completely forgot about Section 31!

Ideas 1 and 2 are interesting, but I’m thinking that for them not to be lame, they’d need a really high budget and good actors, and less studio filming. In other words, something completely different from the other series.

As for idea 3, I must say, the Borg have become quite un-mysterious and non-threatening now. Too many run ins with Voyager methinks. They just don’t seem so scary and threatening anymore, and the whole awe at their technology, their hive mind and their capabilities have been thrown out the window.

If they’ve been assimiliating species for who knows how long, they’d be much more technologically advanced. Besides, I think First Contact dealt with the Borg enough without making too much known.

3

Continue to post your ideas in this thread (I am not hijacking), but look here for a pretty detailed discussion. There have been others, too.

Hey, any Trek thread is a good thread.

4

Star Trek: Forbidden Planet (or whatever)

I thought this would have been a great “first series” instead of Enterprise. The Movie Forbidden Planet was very much like TOS. The protagonist the Captain, FO and Doctor sent in a saucer shaped ship to rescue the survivors of a colony who don’t want to leave.

Ignore the robot

5

"assassinations, intelligence, etc. "
“badasses beam into enemy territory en masse and kick ass.”

Roddenberry must be spinning in his grave

I wouldn’t mind some more of them old-school-out-of-fashion-honorable-klingon kind of episodes, though… :smiley:

6

I really liked the “dark ages” idea for a post-federation society. I even designed a ship (the USS Erfindel…enough enterprises already!) and theme music http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/170/17073.html …Fin_Theme.
By the way, where do they get all that antimatter anyway?

7

I agree!! there’s enough of that stuff on NON trek shows…why flood trek with it? bleh

8

Star Fleet Academy 90210

7 handsome young people (mail and female)(alien female MUST have large you-know-whats) go through the rigors and drama of find love and happiness while enduring the rigors of the Academy.

I’m thinking Casper van Dien for the male lead.

Who’s with me here?

9

Stop making them.

Fagjunk Theology: Not just for sodomite propagandists anymore.

10

They could make a series about a merchant ship, travelling from planet to planet, picking up and delivering cargo. They could have a retired Starfleet officer as the captain, an ex-security guard as his first officer, a retired mercenary for the muscle, and a doctor who’s on the run for having broken his sister out of a Section 31 psych ward where they operated on her brain to awaken her latent psychic abilities.

11

:slight_smile:

Like I said in the other thread, finding a way to get rid of the replicators would acomplish this quite nicely, since everyone would have to get off their lazy asses and work for a living again. Of course, there would be quite a few people who wouldn’t have any marketable job skills, which would lead to povery, and crime, and social unrest, and all sorts of other problems that could make for good script material.

I invision Riker ('cause I like him) and the USS Titan being the major ship involved. Picard and the Enterprise might show up from time to time, but they’d be secondary characters.

12

Ears? :smiley:

Gotta love them Vulcan babes.

I really like friedo’s first two ideas and don’t see why they couldn’t be combined. I always knew there had to be something like Section 31 in Star Fleet and thought it was great when they finally did a show about it. I wouldn’t mind seeing Bashir getting recruited into the organization and having his morals and ethics challenged every other episode as he weighs doing the right thing against doing the right thing, especially when both choices seem like the wrong thing. It would be all the better because he couldn’t talk about his ethical dilemmas and would have to hide his stress behind a smile. Add in some sneaky aliens, hot space chicks, Star Trek techno-babble, and groovy spy gadgets, and you could have a really neat show . . . especially if the missions took place in different settings all the time. Yeah, it could be cool.

BTW–slight hijack, here, sorry–has anybody read the Section 31 books, and if you have, what did you think? Are they worth the money or not? No spoilers on the books, please.

I would like to see more of the Federations men-in-black, the officers from Temporal Affairs. They popped up once or twice on DS9 to investigate some of the tinkering Sisko and friends did with time. This series would need a really kickass physics guy as an advisor or it would get screwed up really badly really quickly.

I’d also like to see a series where the humans are really the minority, and not just with a race of aliens who are really just humans with pointy ears or french fried nasal bones. I mean like a Federation officer doing a military exchange tour with a Klingon military unit, or something like that. Better yet, a couple humans living with some non-humanoid creatures for one reason or another.

You know what else I would like to see more of? Those screwball geniuses who showed up on DS9. You know, the ones who resulted from illegal genetic engineering and ended up getting a job advising the Star Fleet version of the Training and Doctrine Command after they wargamed the Federation into defeat that time? I think they could at least get a mini-series out them, and they could be recurring characters in any of the other programs I’m coming up with here.

A series that focused on non-military people could be interesting, too. Does the Federation have a peace corps? Or a press corps? Or cops? Or pirates? Or religious missionaries? Or interplanetary businessmen and women? Since I’m pretty sure the answer to all these questions is yes. Let’s see some more Federation civilians.

I also wouldn’t mind watching a group of people colonizing a planet, preferably a dangerous one with interesting semi-humanoid residents, over the course of a few years.

Mix and match ideas as you wish.

13

I don’t think there can be another good Star Trek series.

Think of it from the perspective of the writers. They have to deal with the accumulated detrius of several decades’ worth of series. That adds up to a canon so extensive that no-one can familiarize themselves with it and still have time to write anything. Any violation of the canon causes a negative reaction among fans.

Now, if this was taking place as a series of novels, this would be balanced out by the richness of the background. Stories of the consequences of previous actions would abound; characters would recur, planets would be revisited, old stories would be re-examined. But in the context of a television show, all of those add up to significant expenses. Finding and hiring the same actors/actresses to reprise old characters and recreating sets can be difficult, costly, and sometimes impossible.

Which means the writers have all the disadvantages of working in an established world, with few of the advantages.

Add in the idea that a lot of the technology, as has been mentioned in this thread, is just too powerful. For example, teleporters were wonderful for the initial show; they kept the costs down. No expensive landing sequences; just show a cheap effect, and your characters are in the next scene. But over decades, they’ve evolved pattern buffers, biofilters, the ability to teleport while at warp… Add in the deflector dish, the multi-setting phasers, the replicators, and time travel, and you’ve got a solution at your fingertips for almost any problem.

Which for a writer really sucks, because writing is all about characters overcoming problems. Give your characters good enough tools, and they can solve problems without conflict, which makes for lousy drama. So the writers are stuck in the trap of having to explain why things can’t be used to solve problems. The characters can’t beam out, because there’s atmospheric interference. The deflector dish is offline. It makes for awkward writing, that’s gone from being gadget-oriented to gadget-impaired.

Enterprise, in my opinion, tried to remedy this particular situation by removing some of the deus ex machina technology, and setting the show before the canon was set in stone. Unfortunately, they didn’t take into account the extent that canon affects the past; there are certain things which, if the Star Trek universe is to happen as we know it, simply cannot take place. So, the writers found themselves struggling with another, entirely new set of limitations. Which they got around by advancing the deus ex machina technology. And around we go.

I just don’t think that the Star Trek world was designed from the start to be a decades-spanning story, and attempts to retrofit it to be that are doomed to get more and more awkward and bizarre. At this point, making a quality series would involve ditching canon to one degree or another, and revamping the tech so that it’s less intrusive to the stories, and as we’ve seen with Enterprise, that’s a difficult proposition.

Meanwhile, the Star Trek franchise is seen as the only way to get science fiction series to make a profit on television, and so a Trek series is easier to sell than a new, original series, even if that series has a much better shot at being good drama.

So, in conclusion, in the words of gatopescado, stop making them.

14

Jeez, I don’t care, just stop acting like you don’t give a shit what you’re doing - put some thought into the damn show, make it intelligent, avoid cop-outs (a la “it was only a dream… Or was it?”), and stop treating the audience like the biggest morons ever.

Or else more panda.
:wink:

15

I agree with the stop-it-already sentiment. The warp core is way past its design specs, shut it down before it breaches.

16

Captain Sulu of the Excelsior

It’s been ten years since the Khitomer disaster sent the Klingon Empire into disarray and smaller powers that had once been held in check by the bipolar politics of the Feds v. Klingons are starting to act up. The Federation could just obliterate them, but politics often interfere.

First episode: a group of Orion terrorists stike unexpectedly at Earth, destroying a major city. Captain Sulu is immediately ordered to the Orion homeworld for reprisals, but his mission is ultimately unclear…

17

I described exactly this (with a different title) in my post to the thread linked by NoClueBoy. I think it would be excellent, and would neatly dodge a lot (but not all) of the problems described so cogently by MrVisible, simply because the “behind-the-scenes” nature of the stories would give us a whole new world to learn about.

18

Section 31…bleh

I say let’s have a show about Starfleet officers trying to get a Section 8 discharge, ala Klinger in MASH. Staring William Shatner, of course!

19

I always found the super beings the most interesting. Like the Qs and the Organians and the others that are just maginitudes of power above the normal humanoid with prosthetic face enemies.

I’ve had this idea for a while about a series where a guy or small group get recruited/forced to be undercover agents in a war between two super-being groups. The groups don’t want to be actively at war, so they use lesser races as pawns, and get a group of federation people to do their dirty work. They are supplied with advanced technology, and some psionic, telekenetic type powers. And when they are not summoned to a mission, they are free to act as they want.

Damn, That description sounds cheesy and cliched as hell. I’m not explaning it well as what it seems in my head. It should be more Mission Impossible/ french undergroundish, and less fantastic four/Comicish than I made it sound

20

Also, I deffinately am not talking about the whole Sisko and the Prophets type thing, cause that sucked. More gritty secret-ops, and less mystical crapyness, Oh forget it I can’t explain it well at all.