One weakness would be captains who wait until their shields are half down before even contemplating firing back…or warp cores that never eject…
Oh, you meant societial flaws?
Why “bletch”, Carnivorousplant? I don’t believe that time travel stories are inhently flawed; they simply usually aren’t written well. Very often, in my opinion, becuase writers use time travel as a gimick (Ooh, look! Time travel! Ooh, look! It’s a paradox!) rather than just trying to write good stories.
Also, I don’t understand your point about TNG vs. TOS. There are bigger bad guys. They can be damaged by natural events. Sure, they’re big and bad and technologically advanced, but so are their enemies. You might as well say that it makes for better storytelling to set everything in the past because in modern society people don’t routinely have to fight off wild animals.
Although I do think there is one place that technology creates storytelling problems and that’s medicine - one of the biggest problems I had with Trek continuity was the fact that they’d literally bring someone back to life one episode, then have Picard die on the operating table in another. And don’t get me started on the transporter as a medical device.
WTF?
Also, if we are doing the eleventy billionth “What Should the Next Trek Be?” discussion, I still say we need to do the anthology idea where each episode is a standalone explaining some little known aspect of Star Trek history.
Each show could open with Crewman Daniels giving a little monologue, explaining what we’re about to see, and then, over his shoulder, the camera zooms into The Guardian of Forever who shows us this week’s episode.
I think it’d rock.
No pun intended.
No, Picard on the bridge:
“People down there are killing and eating each other while the Prime Directive prevents us from doing anything except drinking tea and scratching ourselves. Activate the viewscreen. 1024 channels and there’s nothing on…”
The episode begins on the viewscreen.
To be fair, in TOS they were fully aware that they weren’t perfect. In Arena the aliens staging the fight tell Kirk that humans are promising, and Spock says something like he was beginning to wonder. In Balance of Terror we see a crewman bigoted against Vulcans. Then there is the beautiful scene in Errand of Mercy where Kirk finds himself arguing with the Klingons to the Organians about their right to have a big war.(Now that was good writing!) But in the early seasons of TNG they are a bunch of sanctimonious jerks.
Either that, or the people of the Federation would start evolving into beings of pure energy. (Which has happened to other species in the various series’.)
Kinda hard to write a show about a bunch of sentient energy packets grooving around in a state of Nirvana. (Much less one where one energy packet gets to “get it on” with a hot alien chick every week.) 
The Vulcans, Andorians, Tellarites, et al might evolve into beings of pure energy but as the Voyager episode, Threshold, shows, humans are destined to become giant lizards.
All I can say to that is “Star Trek: Mariner”. The series wasn’t made because Enterprise isn’t successful enough, but there were plans to set a series during or just after the breakdown of the Federation.
Cite? I’ve never heard anything about a sixth series.
Er. Seventh.
TOS, TAS, TNG, DS9, VGR, and ENT make six.
Nyeh. Do we really count TAS?
And spill with some story on Mariner!
As a series, yeah, but as anything official, no. Except for “Yesteryear”, of course.
Just once. In 1960. For about 20 minutes.
Sounds like some of that got recycled into Andromeda.
(What next, “Gene Roddenberry’s Idea Scribbled On Cocktail Napkin Just Before He Croaked”?)
Star Trek: Mariner.
The Mariner space probe collides with a Chicago Reader server. The resulting superiorly ignorant device thinks that Cecil is g-d, and attempts to exterminate all non perfect posters.
Only kn(*)ckers survives.
Which goes back to Roddenberry, who took a much more active role in the early seasons. Human perfectablity through technology seemed to be his belief and his influence definately showed.
Wasn’t that Earth, Final Conflict? *
*Apologies to any fans of the show. I actually know nothing about it and it might have been a decent show, but if I remember correctly it was, at best, very loosely based on a few of his notes. “Created by Gene Roddenberry” was mostly a marketing gimick.
It may not have gone past the “we’re thinking about this” stage. I can’t recall where I saw the note, but I think it was on scifi.com’s Wire page.
No idea how much influence Roddenberry had on it, but this really wasn’t a bad show, at least not initially. The basic plot, I thought, was pretty cool: Sometime after a fairly nasty (nuclear, I think, but apparently regional) war between India and China, an alien race reveals itself to humanity. Their technology eliminates famine, dramatically improves transportation and communication, etc., and generally improves quality of life for the average human. Some are suspicious of the “Companions’” motives, however. For the first couple of seasons, the show focuses primarily on the resistance movement’s attempts to discover the Taelons’ real reasons for coming to Earth. The implementation could’ve been a lot better, but the idea wasn’t bad.
It’s been a while since I watched the show, but I remember the technology shown being one of the cooler things about the show. There’s one technology in particular that interests me because it’s coming closer and closer to being realized. Seemingly everybody on the show carries a “global,” a sort of video phone/PDA/GPS. What I think is so neat about it is its shape. When closed, it’s around the size of a cellphone, but it can be opened to reveal a screen that’s either telescoping or rolls up like a scroll. If developments in flexible TFT screens continue, I think we’ll eventually see products with a design like this.
Anyway, I just realized that it’s 4:00 AM and I’m hijacking a Star Trek thread to babble about a sci-fi show that hardly anyone watched. This can only mean one thing: I need sleep.
With replicators and transporters, Mom & Pop could sell everything that Wal-Mart does, for the same prices, and with old-fashioned personal customer service like in the upscale boutiques.
:eek: The Federation is a giant Amway network! Run for your lives!