Starfleet Security: San Francisco - Cops have to deal with all the difficulties with aliens coming to Earth.
“Sir, you should not have angered a horrible gelatinous blob. He has diplomatic immunity. The best thing to do now is wait until his body naturally expels you in a week or two, then grab a towel. It’s exfoliates the skin. You’ll come out looking great.”
“No ma’am. He is not from an alien race that ages backwards. It’s just a horny teen looking to get lucky and score some booze. Don’t believe every crazy thing someone tells you.”
Apparently they didn’t want to pay royalties for the character, so they came up with a new one exactly the same.
There have been lots of episodes set on earth. In TOS they all had time travel, I believe, but the earth appears in the films, it appears in several TNG episodes, DS9 episodes with changelings and Sisko’s parents and there’s even a Voyager episode where Kim gets thrown into an alternate reality where he never went to the Delta Quadrant. A whole series would be horribly tedious.
DS9 spent a fair amount of time on Earth, limited to Grampa Sisko’s restaurant and Star Fleet HQ in San Francisco. There was a glimmer of something interesting when Star Fleet was going around drawing blood from everyone to make sure they weren’t shapeshifters, and otherwise acting like jack-booted thugs, but they (probably correctly) decided to leave Earth before too many questions arose.
Questions like, In a post-scarcity society without money, who volunteers to work in Grampa’s restaurant? How are necessary jobs allocated? ARE necessary jobs allocated, or are there 1 billion florists and 1 poor schmuck from Star Fleet whose job it is to transport everyone around? How are people motivated without money? Where are all the porno holosuites?
I don’t think Roddenberry’s vision of the future stands up to scrutiny. On a star ship or a space station, that works out fine, but I don’t think they could make show starring a bunch of Earth civilians and not have to answer questions that they don’t have good answers for.
Starfleet Academy in San Francisco doesn’t count; it’s all just Starfleet, albeit with a few mischievous cadets thrown in. Anyway, the original concept was to have the Academy on a giant space station.
Most of the conflict in Enterprise came from the alien races (Andorans, Tellarites) who hated each other until (and after) they were finessed by the Terrans into forming the UFP. I was glad to see the fourth season episodes set in the alternate universe where Earth had its own evil empire (“Through a Mirror, Darkly”).
Wait a second, are you guys telling me that they retconned the TNG guy into Tom Paris when Voyager started? So officially, its no longer “Nicolas Locarno” in TNG that caused the death, but Tom Paris??
Which is why it was pitched as “Wagon Train to the Stars.” The idea was to regularly show different civilizations and use the parallels to comment obliquely on what was happening in 1960s America, without pissing too many people off. It couldn’t have been set on 23rd-century Earth because there would be no conflict by that time.
Genesis II employed the same concept, except that Earth society had become fragmented and contentious, and the underground tube system served the same purpose as the Enterprise.
[del]Dr. Smith[/del] Jonathan Harris played the head of the academy in Space Academy. [del]Scotty[/del] James Doohan replaced him in the first season of Jason of Star Command. Then [del]Marshal Troop[/del] John Russell replaced him in the second season.
Pamelyn Ferdin (one of the space brats in “And the Children Shall Lead”) was a regular in Space Academy. The producers were Norm Prescott and Lou Scheimer, who produced the animated version of ST: TOS.
Put it this way, Paris is supposed to be Lacarno, but the show didn’t want to have to pay royalties to the TNG writer who wrote the episode, so they changed it to Paris.
It’s one of those situation where, officially (to save money), they say one thing, but it’s really supposed to be the other.
That being said, though, there are differences. For one, Paris made it to Starfleet before getting in trouble with the law. Lacarno was expelled from the academy and never made it to Starfleet.
At one point in the planning stages DS9 was going to be set on Bajor itself instead of a space station.
The Borg were originally conceived of as an non-humanoid race of insects, and connected somehow to the brain parasites. Then Roddenberry et al realized that would’ve been impossible to pull of with their budget so when they finally showed up they were humanoid cyborgs. The hive mind is a relic of original insectiod concept.
That’s the same reason why Enterprise had T’Pol as a major character instead of T’Pau (though the latter did eventually show up as guest character).
