I would make sure that every single character had a name that people could spell. This thread makes it clear that this was not a high enough priority.
Hey, Riker’s name is perfectly normal. It’s the people second-guessing the name and figuring he has a lame i/y substitution that call him Ryker. 
Yes, a lesson that George Lucas was doomed to repeat–trade federations and rogue capitalism are not badass.
Exactly. No diplomacy. No soap operas. Science, exploration, combat.
A lot of great suggestions in this thread!
Mine: every solution to a problem using advanced technology should have been plausibly established technology from a previous episode.
I’m all for the basic premise that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” but, please, let’s: 1) obey or at least acknowledge the laws of physics and 2) not create astounding new gizmos that were never seen before and are promptly forgotten.
I hate some fancy thing appearing as a Deus ex machina, which then is promptly forgotten in every episode after that.
- Troi’s job is to sit next to Picard and be naked - not to tell us what she feels.
- Remove all welding rods from instrument panels. That’s just trouble waiting to happen.
- Decide once and for all that the Prime Directive has too many loopholes to be useful. Rename it the “Prime Something to Keep in the Back of Your Mind”.
Argh.
Heh. For the first time I’m realizing how glad I am the fans weren’t in charge of TNG. Some of you’d have turned it into something suitable for first run on SpikeTV (is that even still around?). TNG wasn’t about hardcore sci-fi, grisly battles and nonstop testosterone. Bleh.
My changes would be:
In General:
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More story arcs; allow permanent changes to the status quo and lasting reprecussions of some of the traumatic events. Not to turn TNG into a soap, but edging it more into DS9 territory would allow the writers & actors to strut their stuff with a slightly darker, deeper flavor.
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Allow for more character flaws, disagreements and conflicts between characters. Sadly this wouldn’t have been possible while Roddenberry was alive, as he wanted that utopian “humanity has advanced beyond interpersonal conflicts” bullshit to reign supreme. But while I don’t need everyone to be at each other’s throat, or to see outright hatred between the crew members, it’d still be more realistic to see some quirks and snarkiness now and then.
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Keep the holodeck but reduce reliance on its breaking down for tension. Surely there were other ways to introduce danger than have the bloody thing work as poorly as my apartment building’s washing machines.
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I would’ve liked to see the Dominion threat from the perspective of the TNG crew. Wasn’t possible while Roddenberry was alive, but it’s too bad they only introduced the threat once TNG was a memory. Intriguing concepts such as the Maquis and the Cardassian/Bajoran clashes were spotlighted to kick off the DS9 and VOY series, and I wish they’d been introduced or emphasized earlier. Similarly, the few times we were allowed to see flaws within Starfleet and the Federation were some of the most tantalizing – the whole underplayed Conspiracy angle right in the first season, for example, and The Drumhead / Measure of a Man as well. Basically, make space a bit darker. The universe didn’t have to be constantly battling – that’s way too far from the ST:TNG concept – but allowing more danger to exist would have heightened the drama.
Character Changes:
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Reduce Wesley’s brilliant solutions to one per season; otherwise, keep him and tone down his nerdishness so he’s a bit more like a brighter Jake Sisko. I don’t have a problem with him otherwise. Oh wait, yes I do: junk that godawful rainbow-trimmed unitard he was forced to wear the first season. Poor kid.
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Get Troi into a regulation uniform (she was great once Jellico forced her into one after Chain of Command) and let her have a bigger role in diplomacy. Show her doing more real counseling. The writers had the right idea in toning down her over-empathizing with aliens – people still think of her as crying for those damn Encounter at Farpoint creatures, even though for the vast majority of the show’s run Troi wasn’t nearly as sappy. Basically, allow Troi to show her skills and intelligence. She doesn’t have to be perfect at command, though; I like that not everyone is ideally suited to run a ship.
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Reduce Data episodes. He’s one of my favorite characters, and clearly tremendously popular with good reason, but the show ended up focusing on him waaay too often in its later seasons. Work out better consistencies between when Soong created him and his brother, and also I recommend making Data a bit less powerful. I’d like to see him start with known vulnerabilities that were getting upgraded throughout the series. Maybe an ongoing theme as with all the upgrades, he’d ultimately have to decide whether he was gaining too much power.
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Let Worf show more Worfiness. I think they neutered him a bit too much. Similarly, let his lover (what was her name? K’ehylar? Hard to remember…) stick around more often – she kicked ass! – and only kill her off in the sixth season, when Alexander gets introduced.
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More O’Brien. What a wasted character and actor. Look how he blossomed once he moved to DS9!
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Chronically underutilized characters like Geordi and Crusher need to be pushed into the spotlight, and not just relating to their love lives. That said, let Picard and Beverly get it on! Dayum people.
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Will was my favorite character. Keep him as-is. I can’t fathom why people don’t like him–unlike almost everyone else, he had a sense of humor and didn’t take things so flippin’ seriously. Like everyone else, though, he had almost no ongoing character arcs, and I miss that. Perhaps oddly, while some of my favorite moments are Troi/Riker, I’d keep the romantic tension unfulfilled until the last couple of seasons. Not sure whether I’d maintain the Worf/Troi relationship. It was interesting, I suppose.
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Let Picard go apeshit more often. I love his rational, intelligent, repressed side, but if you’ve got a guy like Patrick Stewart with major acting chops, let him off the leash! Allowing him to have longer reprecussions from the BoBW and CoC arcs would let him seem more of a caged animal, more dangerous. Obviously I don’t want him as explosive as Sisko would get, and certainly not Kathryn “torture’s a-OK with me!” Janeway, but it would have been nice to see Picard’s impassioned side earlier and more often.
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Let’s learn a little bit more about Guinan (not including that awful Time’s Arrow two-parter). Whoopi Goldberg was terrific in this role, and she and Stewart interacted well with one another. I don’t want to unearth all of Guinan’s secrets – there’s no fun in a solved mystery – but letting us see some more of her darker side (for example, why Q considers her so dangerous) would’ve been fun.
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Keep Q rare. I think they used him just as much as they should have. Same with the Borg. These are two instances where the producers/writers knew how to utilize a good thing without draining it dry of all its mystery. Take that, Voyager.
As you see I’m not so much about the SCIENCE FICTION as I am about the characters. ST has never been all that sci-fi and more about analogies to contemporary society/politics.
To be honest, I loved TNG and still do. Its optimism, its likeable characters…even its early season hokeyness and crap costumes/sets/effects, all of it. So I don’t think of it as ‘stupid’ or in need of a complete overhaul. I just think the writers weren’t allowed enough freedom to heighten the stakes. The later seasons and DS9 showed us just what they and the ST universe were capable of when they were finally let loose. I’d like to have seen TNG with Ron Moore and Robert H. Wolfe in charge from the start. That’s the TNG I wish I could’ve seen. But even so, it’s fun and my choice for a lighter, more optimistic look at the future.
Its the abort/retry/fail of the the 25th century
Uh, what? People were shown going TO the holodeck in costume all the time. I just assumed that said costumes were replicated.
Only when he spells Riker’s name right. (As for some of the rest of his ideas, like the Klingon “lobster head,” as he put it, originating with TNG, or that it wasn’t the original vision all along had it not been for '60’s technology, I dunno. I understand the impulse not to create all the fanwankery that goes with the change, but c’mon, then you wouldn’t have had that line in DS9’s “Trials and Tribble-ations”!)
GAH! ZE GOGGLES, ZEY DO NOTHINK!
Oh, you meant Beverly. Um, never mind.
Back in TOS, the Organians step in to prevent a Federation/ Klingon war, and even predict that one day they will be allies. In TNG, we see why: the Borg invade the Alpha Quadrant, and it is only a Federation/ Klingon alliance, with the technology and adaptability of the Federation working with the sheer brutal ruthlessness of the Klingon Empire, that just barely defeats the Borg (for now!). In that context, K’Worf could join the crew as the Klingon liason officer: barely trusted and actively disliked by many. The Klingons should remain TOS selves, rather than having Cardassians serve as their stand-ins.
I like Fenris’s idea of basically establishing a Grand Unified Theory of Superbeings in the ST universe. In keeping with the arc outlined above, their chief motive would be to try to prevent the Borg from reducing all other life in the galaxy to automatons- which they have predicted is the overwhelmingly most likely outcome if nothing is done. But they can’t or won’t smash the Borg directly, because for better or worse the younger races have to stand on their own.
As said upthread, the holodeck could be kept provided it wasn’t overused, and most of all it was clearly established that the holodeck isn’t friggin’ magic. It’s not a self-contained reality, it can’t generate artificial intelligence. It’s a 24th century game console, and should have the limitations of such.
Some stuff I agree with, some not so much said already.
But the thing I desparetly want to change is the goddamn exploding control consoles.
Yes, I get it that to display casualties on the screen you want some (usually nameless) redshirt to cop it on the bridge so that the viewer sees it. But surely there’s a way to achieve that other than having command consoles blow up.
It always annoyed the hell out of me.
As intriguing as the Deanna/Beverly relationship might be (post #2), I think the show would have been seriously enhanced by a little more “open secret” sexual tension between Picard and Beverly. Let’s get them hooking up during their “private senior officer’s conferences.” Let’s see some eye-rolling from Riker when Picard comes out of the “Ready Room” tugging his shirt back into position. Let’s get Deanna seducing Wesley to get back at Jean Luc (or Beverly, or both…)
Actually, the only trouble I have with the original TNG concept was how they completely screwed up the concept of Troi and Wesley.
Troi should have either been the ship counselor (which would have made her role more like Chief Exposition Officer) or an amazing empath with an ability to see right through bullshit and artifice – actually, more like her mother.
Wesley, as noted upthread, should have been older. Let’s say a brilliant young ensign, graduated first in his Academy class, tagged for big things but in need of maturity and wisdom. He’d still be Picard’s protegee, but he could be a member of away teams (where he’d make a few inexperienced mistakes) and not be allowed to be so insufferably perfect.
I also agree that Riker should have taken a Captain’s assignment after the Borg battle, and there be a new TFirst Officer. Perhaps Riker could take a now somewhat more mature Wesley with him as Science Officer. Riker and Picard could then team up when extra expertise, firepower or whatever was needed.
A few thoughts:
In the real-life military, Troi would probably be analogous to a Chaplain, which of course we don’t see in Trek because humans don’t have religion (I guess that’s kind of to be expected in the long run when they keep running into god-like beings like Trelane and Q and what have you). If you’re gonna make her the Counselor, keep her off the bridge.
Of course, the ultimate problem with Troi was that her job was essentially served by Guinan, the Bartender (the other role in the military roughly analogous to a Counselor)
Another vote for making Wesley an inexperienced junior officer (or, even better, one of several, like we saw in that one episode). Have a revolving door of recurring junior officers. Maybe explain it with a throwaway line about how Crusher traded with Paris for the Graveyard shift after his rough breakup with Lefler. Or something like that.
I remember on Babylon 5 how in the early seasons they’d make throwaway references to officers and staff who worked the other shift on Babylon 5 (since there’s no way they’d only have the two or three senior officers running things all the time). We never saw these other officers, and eventually their existence was just ignored into oblivion, Hogfather style.
Worf was never supposed to be All The Way Klingon. Sure, he was born a Klingon, but spent most of his life being raised by humans on Earth, IIRC. His whole thing is that in his efforts to become more Klingon, you end up with a sort of mix of Klingon and Human characteristics. Of course, the Klingons as a culture seemed to be a lot more obsessed with ritual and ceremony than they used to be by TNG. I would make a point of showing him being more badass and try to avoid un-needed sillyness like him pulling a phaser on the viewscreen. You can still use him for comic relief for certain things, like any time someone mixed Worf with the concept of romance or dating.
I would also lose the families and kids on the ship. At least DS9 made a point of having a Federation starship (the USS Odyssey) evacuate their noncombatants before going into something certain to be a battle (though at least one tragic case where a starship, the USS Saratoga, did not)
And another vote to having something more akin to Marines on the ship. They can act as security and maybe minor damage control/first aid support/gophers aboard the ship depending on the situation (a battle rages, the intercom system is down, Barclay is busy trying to re-raise the sheilds, Lefler is helping fight a fire. Who do you send to pass word to the Captain that you’ve patched the coolant systems and he can have full power to weapons to smite his uncivilized and poorly-read foes? How about that Klingon from Lieutenant Yar’s detachment who has just finished carrying wounded engineers away from what used to be one of the plasma coolant conduits?
One thing I’d keep: Big ships are slow and clumsy, but very powerful. Smaller ships are fast, agile, hard to hit, but relatively weak once you knock their sheilds down. Avoid nigh-invincible small ships like the Rotaran and the Defiant, or fast, agile, dogfighting battleships like the Enterprise E and the Scimitar. Maybe also have fights that escalate with nearby ships from either side leaping into the fray (best to save these for season finales, since it’s hard to justify a major battle every three episodes)
I liked Picard just the way he is. He could win a fight when it came down to it, but he could also convince his enemies that it was a very good not to find out for sure. Riker similarly I had no troubles with.
For a Frenchman, Picard sure enjoyed his Earl Grey, quoting Shakespeare on every frigging occasion and talking in a English accent. They should have made him British and have a French parent or grand parent to explain his name.
And in any case, it’s really difficult to come across as fierce and barbaric when your head looks like a giant four-cheeked ass with ears.
The problem with your logic is that it does not lead to Sirtis & McFadden running around in their underwear. Besides, they could have changed clothes INSIDE the holodeck–say they were in a rafting program and got dumped into the river.
I just assumed that sometime between now and then, the Hundred Years War had started up again.