New old concept for Sci Fi on TV (Star Trek related)

Cafe Society
1

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about why I strongly dislike a lot of the Star Trek that’s come out in the last 10 years or so, and why I still love the original Star Trek.

For me, a great deal of it has to do with what I call the Series-Long Over-arching Plotline or SLOP.

These days you can’t have a sci-fi show on TV without it being full of SLOP. Gone are the days where a writer could come up with a concept for an episode, fit it into the general universe and characters and away we go. Maybe it would suck, and maybe it would be great, but it was basically self-contained, and we could take it or leave it as we wished. So Spock’s Brain bites the big one? I can easily remove that episode from my memory and the universe stays the same. The events in any given episode generally don’t have an effect on the universe, so any episode’s importance is minimal. Good ones are good and bad ones are bad, and that is that.

Now however, look at pretty much all the series since The Next Generation. There is a SLOP that needs to be taken into consideration with each episode. Not only does the writer need to mold his or her story to the characters and the universe, but the story needs to involve and further the SLOP in some way. In fact, it seems like most of the time the SLOP is more important than the individual story. Instead of focusing on an episode, the focus is on the series as a whole. How does what happened this week fit in with the last three years? Just give me the salient points of this past episode; the quality or content doesn’t matter except so far as it furthers the SLOP.

(Another general issue though one I feel less strongly about is that an episodic series doesn’t hold you slave to the TV every week. If you missed an episode or two of the original series it wouldn’t prevent you from understanding what was happening when you finally did turn on the TV. Try to watch a DS9 episode from the later half of its run out of context. Ugh.)

So, my basic thought is that I would love to see a return of the episode-oriented sci-fi series. Let good writers write on their terms instead of attempting to mesh any amount of creativity they may have into formulaic, SLOP-driven segments where sticking with the SLOP is more important than innovation and creativity.

2

There are a few different levels of this. At the extreme end of what you’re proposing, you have something like The Twilight Zone. The episodes don’t even have the link of a common cast. You never need to worry about continuity errors between shows, because they’re explicitly in different continuities. This works well, I would say, although I don’t think there have been any shows like this for a few years now.

At the other end of the scale, you have shows where the SLOP, as you call it, is plotted out in advance, by the creative effort of one or a very few people, and the individual episode storylines fill the role of subplots. As Babylon Five showed us, this can also work well.

All of the Star Trek series fall somewhere in between these two extremes. Even in the original series, for instance, you always had Kirk, Spock, Scotty, and McCoy, with their well-defined characters. Klingons and Romulans were always enemies or potential enemies, and Vulcans were always allies, and acted by unemotional logic. There were ground rules that writers had to play by.

In Next Generation, there was a hint of an overarching storyline in the judgement of humanity by Q, but Q was only involved in what, a dozen episodes or so? It was still quite trivial for a writer to script an episode which had nothing at all to do with Q. The writers still, of course, had to abide by a basic framework similar to that in the original series.

And even in the later series, like Deep Space Nine and Voyager, where the overarching story was nearly always present, you still had too many people with creative input to make a cohesive whole, unlike B5. So you end up with things like Voyager firing the last of its 24 torpedoes, fifty times. And I agree that the series suffers from this, but it’s not because it moved in a direction that doesn’t work, but because it didn’t move far enough in that direction.

3

On the asusmption that torpedoes can be replicated if you had enough raw materials and energy, this wasn’t a huge plot hole. The real snag for me was how they started the series with ~152 crew members, had a few nameless backgrounders killed off every few episodes (say they averaged two deaths a month), and still ended with ~152 crew members.

4

Was it the DS 9 Dominion War arc that started this in Trek?

5

Pretty much. As Chronos said, the Next Generation had a few multi-episode stories, but they were never the driving force behind the series. For example, Q was out there, but he could just show up or leave at whim, and for the most part his being there or not didn’t change what had to happen in the next episode.

Chronos, you make some good points. If you have a story that takes seven years to tell, and you do it consistantly and well then by all means go ahead. But, as far as Trek goes, I feel like they take the stand-alone episode format and try to crush it into seven years (!!!) of story, which leaves us with many half-decent episodes that are vaguely important and yet vaguely meaningless.

6

Babylon 5 and Buffy the Vampire Slayer – two of the best SF/fantasy series on TV – used this to great effect. Star Trek is trying to follow.

Why? Because every dramatic show on television these days has story arcs. The days of “everything resolved in 50 minutes” is over. Things like Kirk’s one-episode love affairs look ridiculous these days.

Granted, many shows have shorter arcs, with individual shows between them, but story arcs are what’s expected of modern TV drama. I lost interest in the entire series during Voyager when I realized that they were firmly stuck in the 1960s as far as character and plot development was concerned.

While it takes a certain genius (Straczynsky, Whedon, or the producers of 24) to have a season-long story arc, the individual stand-alone episodes are a thing of the past. And that’s a good thing – it leads to better drama and characters who can learn and grow.

I’m glad to hear that ST is moving into the 21st century, at least.

7

I quit B5 with the Boxing episode and when the security guy was shown to be a drunk, although I’m sure both those episodes contributed to the arc.

I only saw a few minutes of Buffy, when my stepdaughter watched the musical.
I tried not to laugh in front of her. :slight_smile:

8

Even Star Trek:TOS wasn’t completely without megaplots. There was an episode where the Enterprise crew and a Klingon crew were on the planet “Organia”, and both crews tried to win the Organians over. Of course, it turned out the Organians were really a superadvanced species of superbeings, and, at the end of the episode, they forced the Federation and the Klingons to sign a peace treaty.

In episodes after that, when the Klingons were involved, the Enterprise couldn’t just blow them up, because of the Organian peace treaty.

9

Standalone TV shows really suck. I can’t watch TNG or TOS anymore because I hate all that ‘fly to a planet, do some stuff, fly away and never deal with any of it again’ crap. Voyasuck suffered hard from this, too, as does Enterprise, at least until I stopped watching that horrid show about 1/4 way through its second season.

The best drama, as has been said before, comes from really pushing things forward with a continuing arc. Buffy does this very well, and did a good job balancing the Monster of the Week shows with the Big Bad of the Season Shows. It helped that Buffy was basically the best written show to grace TV screens in the last 20 years.

Angel does even better – last year’s Angel was a great example of how good TV can be. Every episode from episode eight forward ended in a cliff hanger that led right into the next episode. Perfectly serialized, and utterly addictive – even better than the best seasons of B5.

Sure, if you miss more than one episode in a row, you’re lost. But that’s the price you pay for having quality programming on television.

10

An effective method which has not yet been mentioned is the segregation of SLOP into specifcally designated episodes, as with The X-Files. The non-SLOP episodes can continue to be standalone stories. Of course, the X-Files story got completely nonsensical after a while, so it helps to work from some general plan or framework.

You missed the best parts of the series!

11

I thinnk the X-Files is a bad example because of the way it fell apart after the movie came out. It was also quite clear that their “continuity” episodes had no real direction. Unlike those of Buffy and Angel, which follow a specific formula and are season-contained, for example, the X-Files mythology episodes were just sorta strung along, and never had a goal in sight.

The X-Files’ mythology episodes could have been as good as Buffy, Angel or B5, if they’d been planned out to a logical end in advance, and progressed with some regularity towards that end each season. A real shame.

12

Y’know, considering the examples cited in this thread so far, it seems that SLOPs that are pretty much made up as they go along suck; while ones that were meticulously plotted out from the beginning (i.e. Babylon 5.) do pretty well.

And then, perhaps worse than SLOPs, you have the loose, overreaching goals ("LOG"s) that hang over an entire series. Like “Getting back to the Alpha Quadrant” on VOY, or “Getting off the Island” in Gilligan’s Island. You have a big motivation for the series at whole, or for individual episodes…but at the same time, you’re setting yourself up to fail. Because you can’t let the castaways escape (or whathaveyou), because the story of the series would end. So the viewer knows that whatever the heroes do will fail, and everything will go back to the way it was by the end of the episode. We know that the LOG won’t be achieved until the very end of the series’ run…and, unless the show has a predetermined run (Like B5’s Five years, or Trek’s Seven), we know that that could be stretched out indefinitely. (Or the show might get canceled, and we’ll never find out how the end would have come.)

LOGs have been getting a little better in recent years, though. The Heroes can now make incrimental progress to their goal. Voyager can get closer to home, or they can finally reestablish contact with the Federation. It’s a start, at least.

13

Most of Angel Season 4 was made up as it went along, and it worked beautifully. Most of the seasons of Buffy weren’t planned out in advance, but they were formulaic (either the Big Bad or the Little Bad would show up about 1/3 of the way in, the other comes in between 1/2 and 2/3 of the way into the season, and the Big Bad will dominate the last three episodes, etc), which is sort of a means of planning ahead.

I think when you get down to it, the reason X-Files flopped (as being the other made-up-on-the-fly series) is that the writers weren’t as talented.

And you’re right about Gilligan’s Island syndrome. It totally ruins shows like Voyager (which my friends and I called “Gilligan’s Quadrant.”)

14

I am wholeheartedly on the side of everyone defending SLOPs. Episodic series just don’t do it for me for the most part and I like knowing that there is some sort of continuity between each individual segment of the story. When an issue is continuously discovered and then resolved in only fifty minutes, it gets a little grating

15

I disagree with the implication here (or maybe it’s not an implication and you’re saying it outright). There’s nothing inherently better about long story arcs, and having individual episodes with limited continuity isn’t a thing of the past. They’re just different formats, and a good storyteller can do well with either format. What you call “a certain genius,” I just call talent and good writing.

There’s nothing anachronistic about it, either – “X-Files” is a great example of this. My favorite episodes of that series were the ones that were self-contained and stood partly out of continuity. “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space,” for example, was just brilliant as a “meta-episode” that parodied the series itself, its fans, and conspiracy theorists in general. “Dod Kalm” was an earlier episode that dealt with aging and death and was in fact hobbled by its being shoehorned into continuity – I would’ve been happier with it if it had just ended with Scully & Mulder growing old and dying, then showing up next week with no explanation of what had happened.

Those were great examples of innovative, modern storytelling, and they didn’t need a ridiculously complex storyline for them to work. There was exactly one episode of “X-Files” where the greater storyline really worked well, IMO – it started off exactly like a self-contained “monster of the week” episode, about a town with a no-meat-eating cult, but towards the end of the episode Mulder & Scully eventually discovered that the incident was part of the Grand Unified Conspiracy Theory. That was really cool, because it gave the whole thing a lot more impact.

I don’t think anybody here is saying we should go back to “Bonanza” type stories, where every time one of the Cartwrights fell in love with a woman she had to die by the end of the episode. I just see it as more of a challenge: you’ve got a little less than an hour to tell a story, so tell a whole story. Don’t just further a different story along a little bit; make it able to stand on its own. Then, and only then, you can add in your over-arcing storyline.

“Buffy” did a really good job of this, at least for the first few seasons. Not only did each season have a beginning, middle, and end; each episode had a beginning, middle, and end. Thinking about it now, the point that a good many of my favorite series started going downhill (“Buffy” and “X-Files” at least) was when they got too wrapped up in their overarcing storylines – when you could no longer tell one episode from the next, and it was all just variations on Spike screwing Buffy or Scully droning on about her cancer and her crisis of faith.

16

I’m a fan of SLOPs. When I sit down to watch an episode of these series, I find I have no clue about what is going on, which means I give up in disgust, turn off the TV, and do something useful.

They’re not for art, people, they are designed to hook you. The anthology series, like TZ, are rare for this very reason - people want characters they recognize.

17

I take it none of you clamoring for more SLOPs are Law & Order fans. :slight_smile:

Seriously, if you want to know why L&O has become arguably the most-watched drama on television (tallying up both first-run episodes and voluminous repeats on TNT), look no further than its perfectly compartmentalized nature: you don’t need to know dick about the previous episode to hit the ground running once the new episode starts.

I think a lot of you are shortchanging the tried-and-true episode format. It takes a lot of talent and discipline to do that well (as in, say, Next Generation or Law & Order’s first five or so seasons), and more importantly, the SLOP format has its own potential for abuse. The X-Files’ SLOP basically ruined the series, as others have pointed out; Chris Carter, like David Lynch, is great at obfuscation and mystery but lousy at resolution. And let’s face it: as brilliant as it was, Buffy, like the X-Files, contained its share of running-in-place episodes that ended up restating the SLOP more than they advanced it. In fact, I always thought the Big Bads were consistently the show’s weakest element, at least once the gang left high school. That paramilitary outfit and their quilt monster; Glory and her endless, redundant prattle; and the shape-changing First, which constituted the worst arc of all until Nathan Fillion showed up. Where Buffy’s SLOP was strongest was in the way it allowed the characters to grow and mature, but that kind of development doesn’t require a SLOP, and threatens to divert the discussion here from genre adventure entirely into the realm of straight drama. (Does NYPD Blue have a SLOP?)

BTW, I want to say that SLOP is the best acronym I’ve seen coined in a long time, and that it deserves to enter common geek parlance.

18

Heh. Funny you should mention Law and Order. I just moved in with my grandparents, who like to watch Law and Order. I’m not much into TV these days, but since the computer is relatively near the TV I end up ‘watching’ with them, and I agree with your analysis.

Also, thanks for the props for SLOP. :slight_smile:

19

I’m not a big fan of SLOPs (interesting acronym) – there’s no reason you can’t do a show in the alotted time slot, or expand it to two episodes if needed.

My choice for why I liked the original Star Trek – look at the writers. TOS used a lot of established or just-being established SF writers, or adapted works by them — Robert Bloch, Norman Spinrad, Harlan Ellison, Jerome Bixby, Fredric Brown, Theodore Sturgeon, David Gerrold (a stretch, but how many writers do you kbnow from the other series that went o to be established sf writers?)

Even the animated series that followed used a lot of sf writers, and so did the never-produced series that was to be circa 1979 (but got hijacked by the first movie).

Then along came the new series in 1987 and I don’t recognize and names among the writers. People complain that Roddenbery was too much of a control freak, grinding up and homogenizing the work of his writers to keep his consistent universe, but I think the folks who have taken over from him have been even greater control freaks. There’s a lot less of the wildness and creativity that marked TOS and the first movies. I haven’t yet seen an episode of any of the other Star Trek franchises that I really wanted to see again.

20

Part of that is Berman and Braga, true, but another part is that the old TV producers aen’t around. I’m not talkng about Roddenberry: I’m talking about the guys who told him to make it spicier, period, and that was final. But Star Trek has become too big for that now. Yeah, B&B are control freaks.