Redo Star Trek: TNG so it makes sense (or at least is less stupid)

Cafe Society
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I can think of one "B’ plot that I thought was great: in “Brothers” (the episode in which Data meets his father, who gives him the emotion chip, and Lore steals it). The B plot was about two rugrats, one of whom was in sickbay and in desperate need of a Starbase medical facility because of something reckless his older brother did. This worked so well not merely because it was a thematic echo of the main plot, but also because it provided the urgency, the ticking time bomb, the main story needed.

A typically annoying B plot, on the other hand, was from the episode in which the traumatized little boy idolizes Data and decides to become a faux-android so he doesn’t have to feel grief and guilt. While the interesting character work was going on, there was the usual stupid spatial anomaly imperiling the ship, moving my friend Lily to scream, at one point, “Oh, screw this crap! No one cares about the goddamn spatial anomaly! Get back to the interesting stuff.!”

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This may be too much of change to meet the OP’s requirements, but…

1.) 1st officer and 2nd officer are more than just people who sit at spots on the bridge when the captain’s on deck. They actually take watches and are in command on a daily basis. In fact, there would be a 3rd officer (mate), in all likelihood, too. On a giant city-in-space like the Enterprise, I would see the captain as having almost no bridge time, while 1st, 2nd, and 3rd are the ones making basic decisions, only calling the captain in from his office for emergencies. (Actually controlling things like away teams from bridge.) Otherwise, he’s (as stated upthread) mayor of Enterprise-ville, enforcing the rules, ensuring training is done, adjudicating squabbles, etc. Counselor is his primary assistant in such matters. Away teams may be led by 1st - 3rd officers. Diplomatic teams will always be led by the Captain or, in rare-cases, 1st officer.

2.) Agreed that Tactical Officers, Chiefs of Security, and Marine Commanders are different roles. Yar stays on as a T.O.; Warf is a marine officer. Chief of Security would be more like Chief of the Boat; highest NCO. Which brings me to:

3.) Non-Commissioned Officers. With an infrastructure as large as is necessary on the Enterprise (let alone the rest of the fleet), you’re going to need more variations than O-1 through O-6. If you want to make things more futuristic, make warrant officers the junior officers, and have them do the actual manning. (helm, communications, weapons, engineering, shuttle-craft piloting, etc.) NCO’s from private to sergeant [yeah, I know I’m freely mixing ranks from different services] can be the, well, grunts. IOW, have a real command and rank structure, not just the one where everyone’s an officer for no good reason. Maybe make it so that everyone starts as a buck private for 2 years, and only then is eligible for Academy.

4.) No families on board. Period. Who in their right mind would want to bring their kid on a military vessel? If you want to show that the captain doesn’t like kids, there are plenty of other ways to do so. So, to show human involvement:

5.) More with the hobbies and life not in uniform. No-one is going to want to be cooped up for a five year mission on a ship (even with a holodek). Somebody’s gotta have leave at some point. Show family then. And have it be a mixed bag of real people. (Tactical officer goes home to a partner, has wild-and-crazy I missed you sex for a week straight, then they start getting into fights until leave is over.)

6.) No sports? In the holodek? Pull the other one, it’s got bells on it. The monthly game between divisions would be a huge event. Engineering versus Marines. Science vs. Tactical. Switch the games around. Invent new games. Bring in games from other cultures.

7.) Also agreed on trying to make aliens more alien. Yeah any human drama is ultimately going to be about humans, but don’t make it so blatantly obvious.

OK, so I guess I’ve completely ripped up the show. To put it back together again, you would have to follow a group of young-ish officers as they make their way through the ranks over the span of the seasons. Riker is a fresh faced 3rd officer who befriends a bunch of other junior officers (Warf [marine], Geordi [eng.], Yar [tactics], Data [science], etc.) Picard can stay on as Captain, but has to actually take leave once in a while. (Likewise Dr. Crusher.) Wesley is a warrant officer fresh out of Academy. Other senior officers come and go. The main crew actually learn things throughout the show, becoming more of the supermen and women that TNG wanted them to be. Barkeley could be someone Geordi gets promoted over.

Each year is a season. By the middle of the fourth season, all of the above have been promoted to their “classical” positions. At the end of fifth season, Riker commands a new ship and takes most of his cadre with him. He’s an ambitious sonuvaphaser. (Possibly, the crew move onto another ship after the Enterprise has been destroyed.) There is no way that he would turn down command of a ship. Make Picard the Admiral for the Exploratory Fleet, with Data as his 1st officer (basically running things, but always in Picard’s shadow) on the Command Ship. Riker has Yar as his 1st, Geordi as his C Eng O, Warf as Marine Commander, but on a smaller and more military ship. (A Protector in the Exploratory Fleet.)

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So if they’re englobed by 6 Romulan warbirds who suddenly decloak and all have weapons armed and are demanding his surrender, he should fight it out?

JustAnotherGeek, I like most of what you wrote, but this

is pretty much what the case was anyway. To my memory, most episodes begin with Picard entering the bridge from his ready room and relieving Riker when they were about to move from “flying through space to our destination” to “actually doing stuff.” Picard didn’t hang out on the bridge for routine flight.

If they’d ever shown the rotation schedule for the bridge, I expect it would be something like 0600-1499–Riker has the bridge; 1500 to 2199: rotates among Worf & another two or three bridge officers; 2200 to 0600: Data has the bridge. (Data obviously works two shifts most days; he doesn’t need to sleep.)

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He said he should be court martialed, he didn’t say he should be convicted.

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Don’t bother me with facts.

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That episode was where I first heard the joke, “Doc, it hurts when I do this!” “Then don’t do that!” :smiley:

However, my favorite “kid” episode was “Imaginary Friend”, mainly because the little girl who played Clara gave one the the best, most convincing, completely natural child-actor performances I’ve ever seen. She showed up again later in an episode of Voyager (the one where an entire colony had been wiped out, and the lone survivor, gone a bit loopy, had used holograms to repopulate the town). I’d be curious to find out if she’s gone on to do anything else, because she showed some real talent. I’d say she was as good as or better than Dakota Fanning, but I’d have to see more to make a real comparison.

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Was it? Maybe I just got that impression from watching as a kid and not knowing how ships run. I always thought that Picard was on the bridge (or right next to it), Riker was assisting and Data was piloting or scanning.

Now that you mention it, I do remember more about night shifts. But they were a seldom thing. For sure, I can remember Data running night shifts, and, once she went through command training, Deanna. Wasn’t there something about Dr. Crusher being a “command officer” once? Some comment between her and Deanna? But I don’t remember anything about Geordi or Worf ever having the bridge on a regular basis.

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And the somewhat bitchy imaginary friend herself grew up to be the somewhat bitchy (and altogether doable) girlfriend of Tommy on 3rd Rock.

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Correction: It was an episode of DS9. The actress’s name was Noley Thornton. According to imdb.com, she hasn’t acted since 1998, but since 2005 she has worked as a director, second assistant director, a location manager, and a production coordinator.

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In the Trekverse, officers don’t proceed beyond Lieutenant Commander without talking the test in question, which is basically saying, “I want to maybe command a ship some day.” In one alternate history, Crusher goes on to do just that–a hospital ship, of course.

I recall Data relieving Worf at least once, and Riker relieving Data at least twice.

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It probably just wasn’t clear that they did operate in shifts because few scripts were written about mundane day-to-day stuff. When there’s conflict happening, or Something Serious going down, they want all officers present.

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I expect him to do what Kirk would do: Stall while he came up with a cunning plan to whip all their asses.

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They’re expected to be like the Boy Scouts In Space and Be Prepared. Picard actually did once find himself englobulated by Romulan Warbirds (only two, but with Romulan Warbirds it really only takes two.) Picard’s solution? Bring along some cloaked Klingons to counter-englobulate the Romulans.

But yeah, from what I understand, it’s tradition that whenever a commander loses his ship for whatever reason, he faces court martial. If he did wrong, then he is punished for his actions; if it instead turns out that the bad guys just jumped his one ship with eight of theirs and he took out seven of them, the last two using only a broken cutlass and a half-empty cup of Earl Grey, then they officially clear his name so he can move on with his career.

I’d like them to make the battles a little more brutal, like they did in Star Trek II (STII also had exploding consoles, but they also had collapsing bulkheads, gouts of flame (including at least one dude running around on fire and screaming), and clouds of smoke, all of which would probably make things far more confusing and testing of character for the crews of the ships than a Russian Roulette game of exploding consoles.)

Of course, it’s hard to destroy the set of your show on anything close to a regular basis when you’re doing a weekly TV show.

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IIRC, there was one episode in which Beverly Crusher beat/outsmarted the Borg.

That episode should never have been written, much less shot.

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How much Brien is in this series anyway?
Seriously, this isn’t a great thread for me, because I just could never get into the series. It doesn’t help that I’m a bit too young to have caught episodes of TNG other than in 4 pm syndication before the 5 pm news. (For one of my problems with Star Trek in general, check out http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=367547&highlight=nerf+borg .) I’m more of an early Stargate guy. Actual arcs probably would have helped a lot, though I might be saying that having watched lots of series that, while they may have episodic episodes, still advance the arc overall. I know I liked DS9 a lot more when they got into the whole Dominion thing.

Why not more problems with actual forces of nature? Make it more of a logic puzzle.

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Er. Right.

Except that moral dilemma would already have been addressed and answered by the time of TOS. That would have been decided before it was implemented as the society-wide use seen then. Hell, they make mention of early transporters that were less reliable and the repurcussions thereof (people materializing inverted).

Plus, what really is the distinction? They’re being converted into energy to be relocated, then reassembled. Does it really make a difference if the matter is the same matter or completely different matter?

Sure, there’s a lot of ground there for moral dilemmas and the nature of humanity and the existence of some non-tangible, non-deterministic essence. But those issues would have to have been addressed before most people would agree to use them.

And that’s one of the flaws of Enterprise. It’s supposed to be early, they get the brand new transporter that’s supposed to be questionable, but they never have problems with it when they need it. Nobody died from it, even though it was supposed to be new.

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Bring back aliens we’d seen before. I found it odd not that that Worf being the first Klingon was such a big deal, but that he was the only alien on the ship, apparently (except Mr. Mot.)

And make more use of followups from TOS episodes. Dark Mirror was a good book-bring back the Imperial Enterprise!

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He wasn’t the only alien, not by a long shot (Troi was half Betazoid, there were Vulcans too). I think one thing that TNG (and in fact DS9 too) didn’t do very well was make the Federation seem anything more than a civilisation of humans with the occasional alien thrown in. The Federation is supposed to consist of 150 different civilisations, so humans should be something like 1/150th of the population, or if not then at least not in the majority.

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Harry Mudd, Jr.!

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And worse yet, pretty much every Human was from a Western society (aka, the US or Britain). We only got vague, passing references of ships with non-western names. Where was the King Wen (or Chinese name equivalent), captained by Chang Wu? Or the Indian Culture named mainline ships? Or anyone else???