I got to thinking about something recently. There are a few Star Trek episodes where the crew visits Earth, but those usually involve time travel. We don’t get to see much of Earth during the main timeline.
For all the series and movies, there are still large chunks of the Star Trek universe that we know little or nothing about.
I wonder what the average citizen on Earth thinks of Starfleet. Is it highly respected? Or does the average “upstanding citizen” tend to look down on it? How hard it is to get into the Academy?
A whole series would be too much, I think, but a single movie focusing on life on Earth, and how Starfleet interacts with the general populace, would be interesting.
I know the subject has been covered (and it probably wouldn’t make a good movie), but I’m intrigued by the thought of what happens the day after the Vulcans land–there are a lot of people whose raison d’être for getting up in the morning is our Divine uniqueness; global religious wars of all stripes might ensue?
I totally disagree. Such a movie would be a complete yawn. How does NASA and the military interact with today’s populace? 95% of the people 90% of the time don’t even think of either during the course of a day. Booooring!
I thought I heard that they were thinking at one point about a television series set at Starfleet Academy. That could cover some of the territory you mentioned, such as showing someone coming from elsewhere on Earth and joining the academy. And of course there would be various alien species among the students, faculty and staff of the school. Perhaps one of the students has never met an alien previously?
There was a two part DS9 episode about a potential Dominion attack on Earth which was set almost entirely on Earth and which covered some of this. I got the feeling that most of Earth was in denial about any possible problems, and that the Borg attack was not mentioned in polite company.
But a lot of that was the DS9 disdain for the Roddenberry concept of utopia.
Was that the one where Sisko’s kid was hanging out with his grandfather, who ran a restaurant or something? That’s what I was thinking of when I started reading the thread.
Like with “monster” species in various shows (such as Buffy) I think about what weird non-human characters do in their day-to-day life when they aren’t interacting negatively with humans. Like the Sheliak. What do the Sheliak do in their free time when they are hanging around on their home world? Do they watch Shelia’s Got Talent with Shimon Showel?
***TOS ***consciously ruled out any visit to Earth because it would be too risky to show how the present-day economic and political system turned out, from standpoints of both prognostication and censorship. Also, it would have been a diversion from the whole point of the series, which was to explore strange new worlds.
How would they go about depicting a civilization that had to be rebuilt after a devastating Third World War, anyway? I don’t think their budget could have stood the strain.
Earth is where they come from, not where they go to. It would be like taking Moby Dick and saying, “The stuff with the whale was pretty good, but how about we take the crew and go back to New Bedford?”
If you want to do an interesting TV series, you base it on SFA cadets and have occasional scene shot in Terran SFA, but most of the show would involve field training, where cadets are taken to other planets and through space navigation practice to gain hands-on experience. I can imagine all kinds of fun that could be had with that.
It’s deeply ironic: considering that DS9, which Dopers for some utterly inexplicable reason consider the best series, is deliberately and explicitly the opposite of the whole “exploring” ethos. DS9 is nothing more than “Let’s throw a frontier garrison into outer space.”
