We have a little bit more of Strange New Worlds, another season of Academy, then a break as the powers that be decide on what a reset is going to look like.
Predict.
A completely different timeline than any currently explored?
Where in whatever timeline? Before TOS to farther than Disco went are all possible?
Me, I always liked exploring the Gamma quadrant with little Federation support. Not a Voyager type story, more inclusive of the Dominion in the aftermath of DS9.
What would you like to see? What do you expect instead?
What I’d like to see - Star Trek: Stargazer. Start with young Lieutenant Picard having to take command after the senior officers are killed, then you have twenty years of his command to work with, exploring deep, uncharted space, on a ship that’s always on the verge of flying apart.
What I expect to see - a reboot of TOS with some of the SNW cast and sets.
Full reboot. Toss out all the existing canon and start over with the USS Enterprise embarking on its first five-year mission under the command of the newly promoted Captain James T. Kirk.
I also expect the TOS reboot and slight prequel.
Season 1, Sulu is in Science season 1.
Season 2, Bones join.
I think something else will be done with Lower Decks.
For the movies, I don’t have a feel. As I think TOS will happen on streaming, I think next Star Trek will be something new, with mainly new characters and maybe not even on a ship named Enterprise.
I don’t have good record for these sort of predictions.
I’m also wondering if they do a TOS reboot (which seems a popular guess) if they’ll go with the OG style of Episodic shows, or the modern big story arcs.
If episodic, I’d like to see more from the Enterprise era. When Starfleet is just finding it’s bearings, and learning and working with more established (and powerful) races. I understand the showrunners were planning on dealing with the Kzinti, which are a technically canon, but underdeveloped aspect of Star Trek.
So you can have a new(ish) villian, without having to work out nearly so many retcons or “XYZ doesn’t look like that!”. Exploring, getting a hint of a new race, more hints and first contact, and the culture shock plus the expansionist nature allowing for ever increasing stakes if you want something bigger should cover at least a few seasons!
Now, this is more what I want, rather than predict - but it avoids some of the absurd power scaling of the Voyager/DS9 era, steers away from the grimdark elements of reboot movies and Picard, and doesn’t require new canon alterations or a reboot.
What I want: More TOS, TNG, no DS9, no Enterprise, no Disco! more hope, less dark. Lower decks without the humor. The Orville without poo poo jokes.
What we’ll (you’ll, I never watch it) get: Darker, trump analog takes over the federation, section 31 runs black ops and sends dissenters to the space equivalent of Gitmo. And these are the good guys.
DS9 Legacy Series - Something set just beyond the “Picard” series time but structured more single location. Few legacy characters save for Kira, Garak and Bashir.
I don’t want to see any existing characters or ships, except incidentally. What I’d like to see is something more like Andor. Long form, slow burning, and rich. I think there’s a lot of themes they could explore, the grim realities of living in a post-scarcity society where signing up for Star Fleet is voluntary, risky, and fraught with bureaucracy.
What they will do, I dunno but I probably won’t watch.
Right now the LIKELY era is… nothing… They aren’t going to anything with Trek for a long while. There’s nothing in the pipeline except maybe a movie set in the Star Trek universe.
Picard was a TNG Legacy series that even if it wasn’t good, got a little attention. Nostalgia is a helluva drug.
A DS9 legacy series seems more likely than not.
A series focused in a member of the crew that is not what he seems. Maybe he is an unidentified augment/product of genetic engineering, and alien masquerading as human, or just a psychopathic nutjob that has evaded detection. But he has managed to learn to cope, to not act out, to do what is required to fit in. The first half of the episode is a conventional story, the second half tells it from his perspective. It has a narrative voice over of his inner thoughts. And nothing is the same, but he manages to get to the same conclusion. Think River Tam or Dexter in Starfleet. It’s like a two-person Rashomon. In his half of the story, he is the smartest one around. Nothing seems off to him. But you see how he has to temper his interactions to fit in. What’s his endgame? I leave that to the show runners.
That sounds about right as to what we’ll get. I’d like to see more of DS9. It would be set in the days just after the Dominion war, with Kira in command of the station. There wouldn’t be a grand story arc. The focus would instead be on an adventure of the week format with all the characters we already know and love (well, obviously minus Sisko). Obviously all the actors are older or deceased, so we would need a new cast, except for maybe Worf and Quark, assuming Michael Dorn and Armin Shimerman are still up for it.
You see, I don’t think it would be grim at all. Everybody has pretty much everything they want. Sure some people would be bored. They go off the college, Starfleet, whatever. But the 15 billion other people on earth? The live lives of quite simplicity. They have friends, they have holodeck adventures, they travel, they read. Or they sit at home 24/7 watching porn. But they don’t think their lives are bad. To them, they have everything they want.
Ah, but that’s the rub. I should have put post-scarcity society in scare quotes.
See, Picard has a family vineyard, right? And that’s how he spends his non-space-faring days. But there’s a limit to how much grape-suitable land exists in the universe. What if a billion people want to grow grapes and make wine? Can’t happen.
Does this mean land ownership confers power? Could Picard “rent” his land to some aspiring farmer for… personal favors? Do some farmers get to grow grapes in real dirt while others are relegated to holofarms? Does that imply a tiered society? What if someone wants to amass “wealth”? How many superyachts exist in the future? Are they privately owned?
Why would someone leave this life of luxury to join Star Fleet? Roddenberry would have us believe that they’re (mostly) die-hard do-gooders. But what else might attract someone to that life? If employment is basically non-existent, then how do power-hungry sociopaths get their fix? Maybe they join Star Fleet just to be able to control other people. How are these bad apples dealt with?
Is school mandatory? Why would anyone make an effort in school if their livelihood was guaranteed? Is the future of Wall-E inevitable, or does the Federation have a way of dealing with excessive sloth?
I’m not a reader of Star Trek novels or fan fiction, but surely some of these big questions have been grappled with. I think DS9 was an interesting attempt to put the Federation’s principles up to a mirror, but it doesn’t feel like they could make that show today.
I had a nugget of an idea for a series that I’ll share in a follow-up post.
The current trend, at least in super hero movies, is to go “multi verse”. I think the new, different Star Trek has to begin with the best ship in Star Fleet, the Enterprise of course, embarking on an experimental voyage with the brand new technology that will allow them to access the multi verse.
