Star Trek (IMNSHO) has always been about the exploration of human nature.
In this extrapolated future, Humanity hasn’t blown itself to bits even after the Eugenics Wars and WW3 and has actually created a functioning society that is apparently able to synthesize food and shelter from sheer energy.
This was a genuine dream to those of us who grew up expecting to be nuclear toast at any moment.
Star Trek kept me from killing myself.
Well… maybe not that, but it kept me from REALLY feeling bad about the early 60s.
You could restart the franchise…if you based it on the newest Star Trek movie. Somewhat the same characters going off in new directions, with a little guidance here and there from the original Spock. All the “if they only did this instead of that, it would have worked out much better!” ideas we’ve all had over the years could be tested this way.
Ugh. God, yes. For the most part, I enjoyed the new movie, but I’m so goddamn tired of writers using the destiny trope as a crutch. Why do all the hard work of organically developing a relationship between your lead characters when you can force them into it for quasi-mystical reasons - and destroy their agency in the process!
It’s been a while since I read it, but I don’t recall Kirk being prepared to sacrifice his crew.
The homeless guy McCoy interacts with has a larger role in Ellison’s first script.
And it’s one of the major flaws, I figure. Roddenberry wanted it both ways - an organization with military ranks, military weaponry, a military role… but not actually a military. All of Starfleet’s terminology is military - even in the touchy-feely NextGen era, characters who screwed up were subject to “court martial”, not “employee review”.
Oh, I dunno. Babylon V and the new Battlestar Galactica (and further back, the early seasons of SeaQuest DSV) featured nonmilitary characters in major roles and even conflicts between the military characters and the diplomats/politicians/scientists. It can be done, and I don’t think contemporary Americans have brains quite so limited as you imply. Heck, how common is it, even among fairly right-wing Americans, to be calling for military control of the government, i.e. calls for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs to kick the President and Congress out of Washington and take over to run the country “properly”? A mix of military and civilian power is common enough in life, I don’t see why it would be a problem in fiction.
Heck, I’m okay with that, and I’d be okay with the future characters dispensing with what has become modern prudery because their society has morphed into something with different priorities. Want to casually call someone a “nigger”? That gets as most a shrug, because 300 years from now the word doesn’t have (or has very little) racial connotation to it, and what racial element it has doesn’t carry much weight because nobody really cares about race any more. A racial comment carries no more significance than criticizing someone’s choice of socks. THAT would be bold, risky television, I figure - suggesting the major social conflicts of today weren’t “solved” by humanity getting nicer - it’s that humanity would develop other priorities, and in the future the most persecuted members of society will be, let’s say, the suntanned - people who voluntarily go outside the safe confines of climate-controlled spaceships and buildings. “Redneck” could return as an insult with its original meaning. Sure, the prejudice is stupid and arbitrary. So are ours. Humans will always have stupid arbitrary prejudices.
Heck, I’d like to seen alien cultures that were not mere mockeries of some human trait gone berserk, but who have workable systems and no desire to change them. Here’s a culture where children are commodities to be bought and sold - children are routinely given genetic and aptitude tests to determine their innate talents and approximate skill level at those talents, and then sold at auction to clan-corporations who will develop those talents. Sure you can keep your kid, if you want, out of some kind of icky vestigial parental instinct, but if he or she doesn’t appear to be an asset to your clan-corp’s structure, you’ll be routinely considered a fool, doing a disservice to the clan-corp and the child. Where’s your loyalty - to those whose abilities and interests match yours, or to those who just happen to share some genetic material with you? Then the Starfleet guys can show up, act all horrified and, instead of “fixing” the culture, they’re told to get lost - that their help isn’t needed or wanted and would actually hurt the culture significantly by introducing inefficiencies in the name of some touchy-feely demand that parents keep their own children, or some such caveman crap. Science-corp parents raising a child with artistic-corp tendencies? That’s just crazy talk!
Anyway, that’s my dream-idea for a Trek series - don’t just model or parody some perceived social “wrong” - take a perceived social “right” and subvert it. Hey, here’s a culture where knowledge of and participation in religious rituals is strictly forbidden to anyone under the age of 20, on the assumption that religion is something an adult must choose to observe, not something a child is taught through rote. Is that better or worse than what modern Western society does? Who knows?
There is nothing at all imaginative or progressive about this is in the Star Trek sense. Battlestar Galactica, for example, is basically nothing more in character, organization, presumptions, etc., than the U.S. military.
And by offering examples of programs in which explicitly military entities are shown as interacting with civilian entities, I think you’re missing part of the big point.
The point is not to mirror current society in which the same military/civilian dichotomies exist as in our actual society with the same dynamics, but rather to pose a Starfleet that takes on military functions, but because of a different societal attitude towards militarism operates with different values.
In other words, while Starfleet performs the functions of what we assign to our militaries, it’s not the same kind of organization. It doesn’t have the U.S. Army’s policies regarding assignment or promotion or other things. And that’s the way I like it. Starfleet is supposed to be the successor to NASA, not the U.S. Air Force.
The last thing I want to see is the transmogrification of Starfleet into nothing more than an anologue to our current military.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a problem in fiction. But in this particular bit of fiction, part of the premise is that Starfleet is not an exact analogue of the U.S. armed forces, and I don’t want that premise to be abandoned.
Simply recreating the same civilian-military dynamic that we are familiar with is something that other shows have done, like Battlestar Galactica. What is different about Star Trek, and what requires a stretch of the imagination, is working with a situation in which that dynamic is not the same.
The remainder of your suggestions seem like fine subjects for science fiction to explore and I don’t have any problem with seeing them explored in Star Trek.
What I don’t want to see is the abandonment of the premise that Starfleet is not primarily a military organization, because that’s an aspect of the Star Trek universe that makes it unique and more challenging to write about. Often the series writers do fail to live up to this idael, but I think it’s important that they be required to continue to make the effort.
I would like to see Trek go dark, but in a different way. We’ve had here and there attempts by evil powers inside and out to casually take over the Federation. it’s apparently so centralized that they could simply grab power and rule. I’d like to see a series where the overarching plot was that a cabal of idealistic but utterly heartless men actually succeed.
This wouldn’t happen instantly. It would cover ideally two seasons for the takeover, then seasons 3-4 (maybe 5) can be the Enterprise finding ways to escape the tyranny, rally and rebuild, and then finally defeat them. The Federation as it was wouldn’t be restored but half-replaced. Ideally, you’d have the best parts of TNG (moral dilemas), DS9 (the trouble of actual politics), and Voyager (which had but completely ignored the concept of running low on goodies).
The problem is, it’s forced to be both. Now, you could do a show about pure exploration (Enterprise was this, albeit badly done). But from the start, Starfleet was a fleet of military warships who also went out and explored stuff. That you don’t like it doesn’t mean it’s not true. Roddenberry also didn’t like it, but he was none too sharp and tended not to see the blindly obvious whenever he didn’t feel like it. I’ve noted that almost all the best episodes and movies in Star Trek were so despite his influence.
The fact is that you can’t make the galaxy dangerous without Starfleet being military, and when military needs appear, they take priority. You can’t have stellar empires and battle without lots and lots of guns. That’s a fact with which people must deal. And though you may not like it, the very best episodes of Star Trek showed them acting as military officers, not as scientists with a extremely mobile and generous grant foundation.
Likewise, the show never (not once) actually sold the idea that mankind was “evolved” or improved. What we ended up with was Picard spouting self-important speeches about how great the Federation was, without once showing us any reason to believe it - and constantly contradicting their claims with actual events. You might not like the fact that DS9 was much more cynical, but it was also far more believable.
I minor example was the Enterprise episode where an alien species required a third sex. They were regarded more as a household pet than an intelligent person.
The one Trip tried to convert to Earth values killed itself.
I like the idea of the Federation being “broken.” At the end of TNG and DS9, the Federation is the undisputed King of the Galaxy. They are at the top of the mountain, both technology-wise and militarily. (Yes, Starfleet is the military. Sorry, Gene, but let’s just flush that ridiculous bit of nonsense down the toilet and get on with our lives.) In order for any interesting conflicts to happen in the future, we need to posit a scenario in which some other, even-more powerful civilization (perhaps from the Beta Quadrant?) has come in, kicked the Federation’s ass in a major war, and forced them to weaken Starfleet so it’s now little more than a police force. (Basically, what the Allies did to Germany and Japan after WW2.)
It would be more like TOS in its feel: the Enterprise is usually not the toughest ship around, and any battles would raise the very real possibility of losing the ship.
Yes, and how they choose to balance their values while being both is what makes it unique.
I don’t know what this is supposed to mean. Starfleet has military functions. That doesn’t mean that it must have the same set of values with the exact same ranking of priorities that our own military has. That’s the point.
The problem is that you take a simple tautology like this and use it to pile on assumptions about exactly how Starfleet should operate and how people in Starfleet must relate to each other and to people outside it.
This, ignoring the fact that even in real life not every military that has ever existed or does exist in human society doesn’t operate exactly like the U.S. military. But every time, here comes the critique that amounts to little more than “That’s not how things work in the U.S. military!” The U.S. military is not the only kind of military that has ever existed, does exist, or might possibly exist. So that’s a fact with which people must deal.
I don’t know when you started reading my mind. I never said that I believed that humans were or should be “improved” in Star Trek. What I do think is that it posits a social (and political) system that has made some improvements over our current one.
And that is a perfectly good premise for science fiction to be based on. I don’t buy that for Star Trek to depict human drama realistically that it must exactly copy the details of our personal social and political system.
Is it common knowledge that the sequel to the reboot has been shitcanned? I’ve not heard anything of the sort. IMDB still shows in pre-production for a 2013 release. Or must the franchise of the OP be a television one?
I’m currently (re)watching TOS, and one of the things that strikes me is that the roles of scientist/explorer/diplomat/soldier are all played by the one entity; The Enterprise. It is kind of refreshing in 2012 to see a vision that isn’t locked into the military-civilian conflict into which most contemporary “dark” sci-fi stories seem to trap themselves.
I think TNG does a horrible job of creating that vision, by being consistently and regularly hypocritical about the ‘mission’ of The Federation; claiming to be a society beyond violence, need, and greed while still carrying out military actions. On a weekly basis.
While TOS can be patronizing and simplistic, one does not get the sense that the Enterprise is essentially a non-violent ship tragically forced to use its phasor banks on occasion. Sure they are the ‘military,’ just a military that has changed and expanded its mission (or, if you like, a NASA that has inherited some of the responsibilities of our military).
I didn’t know the second movie was still on, but this makes a new television series an even better idea. Keep the N.O.(New Originals) in the movies, and make the series a new set of characters in this revamped franchise. With the CGI we have now, a more diversely alien crew would be possible.
The original script was published in an anthology of SF plays in the '70s or '80s. I have it, I’ll look it up when I get home. However, while the original script is good, it wasn’t ST, so I agree with Gene.
In fact, I agree with his focus on optimism. When TOS came out we were in the middle of the Vietnam War and other problems of the '60s, and some optimism was much appreciated. Writers wishing to change the tone can start their own damn show - I doubt it will last as long as ST has. Before the first movie Harlan came on Tom Snyder and told a really funny story about how he and Gene went to a studio exec to pitch the movie. The exec loved the idea, but decided it would be much better if they put some Mayans in.
Changing the tone seems a lot more artistic than Mayans, but in some sense it is the same damn thing.
Well, I’ve no problem with the moments TOS had where McCoy tell Kirk something like “Remember, in addition to being a captain, you’re also a diplomat,” pointing out to Kirk that more thoughtful less violent solutions were possible, but Kirk never forgot that he was a captain, with the attendant responsibilities. Picard seemed to hold that role is disdain, and the corresponding sentiment was Worf proposing some violent solution (in effect, telling Picard "in addition to being a diplomat, you’re also a captain) and being overruled every single time.
Compared to TNG, which was patronizing, simplistic and preachy? In fact, I have the strong impression (though I’d have to go through all the episodes to be sure) that TNG’s batting average of pulling contrived happy endings out of its ass was way higher. What’s the TNG equivalent of TOS’s “A Private Little War” (Hill people v. Village people, where the “solution” was a violent status quo), for example? If anything, TOS strikes me as the more mature series with far fewer moments of condescension toward its audience.
