If Star Trek had another series what would you like to see?

I’ve been watching a bit of Star Trek lately. I was a big fan of Trek before and I guess I still am. I don’t go around wearing a Trek uniform or anything, and i love to nitpick the various shows but I do like it. (well, Voyager was crappy. My wife and I have every series on DVD, and we only have Voyager because she insisted on “completing” the collection…I wasn’t going to get it).

Well, after watching a bit of every series (except Voyager…I really did not enjoy that show) and with the upcoming new movie I was wondering if this is part of a series reboot. If there ever is a new trek TV series what will it be? And if given the chance to come up with a rough concept what would you want it to be?

In my mind, even with the new movie it would be a hard sell to do a new series with Kirk, Spock and McCoy. Maybe thats just age talking…seeing new actors on a weekly basis in those roles wouldn’t have the same impact on me now…unless they had fantastic scripts.

I wouldn’t want a series made after TNG unless they toned down the super-science a bit. B the end of TNG and the last movie I was a bit tired of the practically magical things they could do. Not that its impossible to come up with believable stories in that setting, but I wasn’t really comfortable with that.

Just off the top of my head, I’d make a new series that begins right after ENTERPRISE ends. The formation of the federation. I wouldn’t set it on a a ship named enterprise, either. I’d focus on a team of starfleet operatives that go where they are needed because of the various threats and problems that will occur in that time period focusing on the romulan threat and the klingons. Obviously some trek canon may need to be rewritten and I haven’t given much thought to any of it besides my bare bones idea, but thats what I think.

You could move the idea up a few years so that the story arc of the series ends with the destruction of the Enterprise under command of Captain Rachel Garrett as seen in TNG’s “Yesterday’s Enterprise”.

The only other thing that comes to mind is to actually start the new series at the end of TNG’s run (including the movie “Insurrection”) with a series ranging story arc. No more miraculous treknobabble, time travel crap, or transporter cures. What ideas do you have?

Those are exactly the thoughts I’ve had for the last 5-10 years.

I thought the biggest problem with the Voyager/Enterprise Braga/Berman era was TOO FUCKING MUCH TIME TRAVEL. Frankly, while I welcome the reboot with some trepidation, I was deeply disappointed to find that it too includes more motherfucking time travel.

Star Trek has ceased to be about the exploration of space, or the exploration of human themes in scifi garb, and turned into one gigantic time travel jerkfest.

I’d say that I’d like to see a strong female captain, but Janeway was such a bipolar asshole that I fear what their idea of a strong female lead is. I’d say that I’d welcome some open homosexuality on the show, but I fear that instead of being presented as completely normal and nothing out of the usual, they’d do their usual (of the last 20 years) SHOVE IT IN YOUR FACE TO MAKE A POINT presentation.

Frankly, if they were ever to do another series, I’d insist on the following rules;

  1. No Time Travel. Period.
  2. No Holodeck.
  3. No “trapped/crashed in a shuttle” episodes.
  4. Some honest-to-Og non-humaniod Aliens.
  5. No huge ‘moral superiority’ sticks up the Federation’s ass.
  6. No Children.
  7. Surprise us. Sign some people for partial seasons or 2.3 seasons just to kill them off. Major characters should die on occasion.
    7a. Don’t make a big fucking deal about how you’re doing it and how brilliant and inovative it is.
  8. Enough with the “we pretend to tolerate Alien diversity, but Humans have evolved beyond all that silliness and now all believe the same things” nonsense.
  9. No Superscience. I’ll watch Venture Bros for that, thankyouverymuch.

Will you take over the Trek IP?

Please?

I’d like to have Captain Bakula wake up to find the whole Enterprise thing was a dream. Then start over with all the rules written by Chimera. Most importantly, the one about time travel. Also, they needed to rationally approach TOS tech. That means, they have to find an advantage to analogue dials.

My friend, you’ve said what I meant far better than i can. I salute you.

Ideally I’d like to see an anthology Trek series. There would be a mixture of multi-part and stand alone episodes set all over various parts of Trek history. For example you could have a 3 part episode set during Vulcan’s Time of Awakening and the war between the Surakists and the proto-Romulans, then a stand alone episode set in Kirk’s era (but not involving the Enterprise), then a two parter set during the Cardassian invasion of Bajor. Instead of concentrating on a single time period it would “fill in the gaps” of Trek history. I’d like to see alot of episodes set entirely about events in Klingon/Vulcan/Romulan/Ferengi/etc history that don’t involve the Federation or humans at all (or that do, but from the alien perspective) Not of this will ever happen.

Just to add one thing…if the new series were to take place post voyager I’d have a scene where they said that the Emergency Holographic Doctor proved to be ultimately too much of a power drain or something and discontinued.

Sentient holograms outside of *Red Dwarf *get on my nerves…and trek went to that well waaaay to much.

Well, I’d reboot it for sure. There is far too much silly backstory to tell a successful story without some fanboy whining that they should have done what <random character> did in <random episode> to solve <random problem> by reversing <random polarity>.

Then take most all the previous suggestions, and format the series the same way that Enterprise’s last season was designed – several small story arcs of two to no more than five episodes, where one situation is dealt with.

And after, when they move on to new situations, the aftereffects of the prior situations must still have relevance. Heck, a season-long overarching story arc wouldn’t be amiss.

DS9: TNG. The integration of Bajor into the Federation with an embarassed and embittered Dominion biding its time until it’s ready to strike again.

Four words:

*Star Trek: Terran Empire*

Screw the feel-good moralizing and social commentary…I want to see some damned prejudicial terraforming!

Like the lady said;

'Though that may not go far enough. Perhaps “putting the S.M. Stirling”—or the Keith Laumer, or Nietzsche, or the other more appropriate and clever literary allusions that I’m too sleepy to think of—back in Trek might be called for, in this case.

Best of all—hey, depending on the time period, we can reuse favorite old characters. Even minor one-shot ones, or dead ones.

And, as the example of Berman/Braga established, this is pretty much the only way they’d let any non-heterosexual characters into the property. :rolleyes:

Basically, I’d like to see it more about exploration and charting new ground, and see it kick a lot more ass.

Asses should occasionally get kicked on Star Trek. There should be some out-and-out spaceship battles against massive odds, where people die, and shit blows up, and the Captain pulls off a brilliant maneuver (and not some “relay the phasers through the main reflector dish to realign their pi-omicron sub-muons” horseshit) that saves the crew, and fucking KILLS THE BAD GUY.

There’s a time and a place for the Star Trek Moral Lesson, but sometimes, asses need to get kicked.

This. DS9 was, in my opinion, the darkest and most innovative of the Trek series - for one thing, it was the only one that let its characters make truly wrenching moral choices with genuinely monstrous outcomes. (Consider how Sisko brought the Romulans into the Dominion War, for example.)

What would be really cool, perhaps, would be to follow a Defiant-class ship surveying the former Dominion on a journey of exploration, but with a very strong emphasis on preventing the resurgence of that regime. This would involve hearts-and-minds stuff, but also plenty of morally ambiguous ass-kicking.

Remember, the Dominion was scary - we should see the Federation treating it at least somewhat poorly now.

How about Star Trek:MACOs…for want of better title. (As in the marine shoot em up guys in Enterprise).

I’m not a warmonger type of guy at heart, but I am in the military and I tend to look at a lot of Trek situations that could be solcved easily the Kirk way. Kick some freakin’ ass.

I think any new trek seriew will need an overall series arc. the old episodeby episode sort of show seems to be less attractibe nowadays.

Enterprise Season 5. (Last episode never happened. Nope, big nasty dream.)

My idea for Star Trek takes place on a really big ship, much larger than the Ent-D. More of a mobile starbase really. It also includes a group of support ships that travel with it, like a modern day aircraft carrier. This gives a variety of locations to work with and lots of good stories to tell.

In my Star Trek universe, I would:

I would kill off almost every “forehead” race out there. That is to say, all undeveloped cultures that consist of humans with plastic pieces glued on their noses and foreheads. I’m tired of races in Star Trek that only have a single aspect that defines their culture (Klingons = honor bound warriors, Romulans = sneaky militaristic bastards, Ferengi = greedy capitalists). How about we see some new races that are actually diverse? As in not everyone on Romulus has the same goddamn haircut! The Bajorans can stay because they are a fairly diverse culture. But the three different species of Terrellians? All dead, preferably at the hands of some huge force that wrecks shit episode after episode and is not stopped by a speech or a stream of technobabble.

I agree time travel has to be toned down. We already know there’s a Dept. of Temporal Investigations and according to Voyager there are time cops in the future too. So let’s have it so that whenever the ship gets too close to an anomaly that was about to suck them into Alternate Future from Hell, a Temporal agent in a futuristic uniform pops onto the bridge and says “Ah ah… you were about to fuck with the timeline. Back away from the anomaly. Back away from it now.”

No more Borg Queen. I’d explain her away as some giant insect the Borg assimilated and her brain power is so intense that she overtook the whole collective. Have the Borg recruit our crew to destroy this giant bug and then have the Borg say “Nice knowing you but every bit of technology we have is already superior to your and since we already have bazillions of drones we don’t need any more.”

Ships that maneuver in three dimensions would be nice. Space dogfights like we’ve never seen on Trek to date would be the norm in my universe.

I’d also put guidance on the torpedoes so they don’t just get fired off into space for nothing. Every single one that was fired would hit something.

I’d actually show some good medical technology by having crewmembers sustain horrible trauma. No more last minute escapes. People are going home hurt. But it will be okay because sickbay kicks ass. However, I would have plenty of crewmembers sustaining entirely unsurvivable trauma as well.

I agree with the call for special forces soldiers. Chain of Command was a great episode with a stupid premise. Picard is the only person who has seen these special waves that that Cardassian weapon makes. Thus Picard is the only person who can go on a grenade-chucking mission to destroy the damn thing.

I’d also like to see a Starfleet ship really wrecking some shit. Take the old Star Trek cliche where the ship wanders into a fight between warring factions. Turn it on its head by having the ship pick a side and then proceed to kick the snot out of the other side. Explore the ramifications of doing this.

Do away with the goddamn Prime Directive. No one follows it anyway.

Have the writers set out specifically beforehand exactly what the ship can and cannot do. No more technobabble solutions that consist of reversing the polarity of a stream of random made up particles and then re-routing it through the deflector dish. If the question is “how do we move the stuck ship?” there should be a standard set of answers that make sense. We can generate a soliton wave (forgotten tech from TNG). We can use the impulse engines to make a subspace field. We can use shuttles and tractor beams. We can vent stuff out of various openings in the ship. We can get guys in EVA suits and rocket boots to go out there and push. Et cetera, as long as it’s a practical solution that doesn’t sound like someone just wrote <TECH> in the script.

SEX! My Star Trek characters would have active sex lives and they’d be proud of it. I’d show that women in the future could have all the sex they want without any negative connotation being attached. Maybe even have a character from the past passing judgment on the crew for their loose morals only to be told “So what?”

I’d also have marijuana explained as legal in the Star Trek universe because it was one of the only things that would grow after WWIII and it was useful for a bunch of stuff. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t propose a crew of stoners at all. If anything, they’d find it quirky that there are still people out there who dry and smoke the buds of a plant when they could much more easily replicate fun harmless substances that alter consciousness without the need to inhale harsh smoke. If Chakotay can have a little electronic bong, why can’t everyone else?

I’d have a crew that couldn’t wait to take their uniforms off after the end of their duty shift. The audience isn’t stupid. We’ll still recognize them in civilian clothes.

I’d also put leather back on the side of the good guys. Whenever there’s a bad guy around they seem to be clad in leather. Or whenever the good guys are doing something bad, they break out the leather jackets (Insurrection for example). But normal people wear leather all the time for a variety of reasons.

I’d give the good guys parents again too. Every other character in Star Trek has a shitty relationship with their parents. I’d have characters who sometimes got along with their parents, some who really loved and cared for their parents and some whose parents had died of natural causes a long time ago. But no more evil parents coming to the ship and messing a crew member’s life up.

I’d also have the characters use the holodeck for more than just getting their rocks off. I’d have them use it for training, creative interrogations (make a Romulan spy think he’s been rescued by a Warbird for example), extra storage space for uninvited guests, food production facilities for emergencies, et cetera. You have a device that can literally do anything you tell it to do, including things it isn’t programmed for (Moriarty, Barclay’s super warp drive thing, etc). Use it! Have people dedicated to figuring out new ways to make the holodeck worth all the energy it must burn.

There’s probably plenty more but that’s where I’d start.

I’d like to see a Star Trek series with Tim Allen and Sigourney Weaver as the lead actors.

A lot of these suggestions sound just like Battlestar Galactica, a show I will sorely miss after this season. I’d welcome a Star Trek series that was cut from the same cloth as BSG.

I can’t improve on the suggestions already given, but could the cast of the exisiting Star Trek motion picture be “transported” to continue the original series?

I realize they’re supposed to be younger, but damn, they all look pretty close to their adult counterparts.

Toughts?

Q

I think I’ve said this before, but I’d like to see a Trek based on the crews from the bottom of the barrel - a Captain that BARELY got through the Academy, crew members who have gotten their assignment due to being a major fuck-up, a doctor from the future’s equivalent of a ‘Caribbean Medical School’ - then have a five year mission going around, fucking stuff up, so that the Kirks and Picards have to go back in and clean up the mess later (you know, like leaving behind a book about Chicago during the Capone years (“A Piece of the Action”), or extolling the virtues of Nazi Germany (Patterns of Force), while ignoring all the bad stuff). We know these crews/characters already exist just from some TOS stories.

If memory serves, Voyager ended up bringing home some seriously advanced technology from about thirty years in their future. I say that the Federation’s powers-that-be should refit their entire fleet with those fancy doodads and turn an eye toward their easily conquerable neighbors. That would be an interesting jumping-off point for a new series. Suddenly the Federation is more willing to fight than negotiate, and slides into fascism. Maybe some Starfleet crews can’t abide this and rebel, plunging the Federation into civil war.

Oh, and phaser pistols should be more useful than contemporary guns. Or at least more lethal than shoving someone real hard. Next time your target takes cover behind some barrels, disintegrate the barrels then disintegrate him.