What *I'd* like to see from the new Star Trek series.

Rather than a “Federation has been conquered/band of freedom fighters” scenario…which I’ve proposed and has been savaged before as just another gritty reboot…

How about the opposite approach? The Federation is doing better than ever. Fantastic even. It’s enemies have either been absorbed or defeated.

Start the series off with out good guys exploring and spreading the good word, but…SLOWLY…over time we see that Garaks vision of the Federation (Bullying, absorbing) has run amuck.

Then eventually we see the Feds are a stand-in for the USA. But make it slow. Let the mystery linger. HOW bad is it? Is it bad? What’s the alternative? So some liberties get curtailed…etc…etc…

This isn’t a statement on the US. Let’s not make it so in this thread please. I just thought it would be interesting to make the Feds too powerful for their own damn good. And for the audience and the characters to realize that very slowly.

A badder attitude from the captain, more chances to go full phaser banks and multiple photon torpedo launches, more cities destroyed from above.

How about a different POV? There must be more enlisted personnel in Star Fleet than just expendable, unnamed, security personnel.

Star Trek: Star Fleet Academy

Star Trek: Merchant Kings: Tell the stories of people like Harry Mudd and The Outrageous Okona (only, you know, good stories).

I just don’t see the Federation ever being portrayed as anything but benevolent overall. Sure, there have been people who disagreed, and times when the Federation played realpolitik, but overall, a major part of the premise of the whole “Star Trek” phenomenon is that via the mechanism of the Federation, Earth and other like-minded peoples have created a more or less utopian future.

And the characters tend to have to be space-opera style heroic as well… not sure what we’ll get in this new Trek, but I’d almost guarantee that the good guys will be GOOD, and the Federation will be good, and more or less utopian.

I thought the Maquis were an interesting idea, but Sisko was written so batshit insane over the issue that we couldn’t even get the Maquis viewpoint…Eddington couldn’t even get a word in edgewise before Brooks ate up every piece of scenery on the stage.

This is an excellent counterfactual proposition, and we should totally explore the idea that the Federation should own everything, but inevitably they will have to face a faction of people, possibly laborers or some other exploited class, who will insist that the whole galactic empire is in fact a giant bucket of dicks in which everyone should be compelled to either partake or collude in the whole thing. I want to emphasize that this is an economic not a philosophical position, and if anyone wants, we can trace this deal right back to the original charter of the Star Trek series. I’m not advocating, just pointing it out. Cheers.

I could argue the Federation is more like my OP, but due to the actions of our heroes…that is either deflected, mitigated or outright defeated.

See: Star Trek 6…Section 31 and Admiral whassisnames involvement…the Changeling virus…The Admiral on Earth who was trying to militarize Earth or a coup…or whatever he was trying. I notice almost all this was on DS9.

I guess in its own way its already been done (see my examples) it just wasn’t the theme or given much lip service but by Quark and Garak.

Because that’s really what our film/TV science fiction has lacked more thsn anything, is cool space battles and shit getting blowed up.

Not all, just Star Trek. There has to be some better use for a starship’s weapons besides shorting a bad guy’s energy source.

But seriously i would like to see our heroes be heroes instead of nearly 30 years of tepid music and our heroes getting their asses kicked.

Culminating of course with the movies and Kirk always running and yelling. Getting his ass handed to him and his ship being useless in a fight.

Kirk was a superior hand to hand combatant and ship handler. That’s what i want to see. A Kirk or Sisko.

Didn’t Voyager end with the ship returning to Earth while decked out with technology from several decades in their future? Have Federation eggheads reverse-engineer it and upgrade the whole fleet. With a sudden military advantage, Starfleet gives the Borg a good thrashing. Then they they decide that they don’t care to put up with the Romulans’ bullshit any longer. And so on. Fast forward to the start of the new series, and the scenario is much like how the OP described.

Hot Orion babe as helmsperson.

I had kind of a similar idea, back when Voyager was on TV. The Voyager never finds a short cut back to Federation space, and it takes them a couple centuries to get there. The next series is their return - with a whole new crew, except maybe Tuvok, descendants of the originals. They’ve successfully passed on the values of the Federation, but when they get “home,” they find that the actual Federation has become corrupt and oppressive. They end up going underground, fighting for the ideals of the original Federation while being hunted by agents of the new regime.

The first season finale would involve the Voyager being destroyed. The second season premiere, they find the last Enterprise, a pinnacle of Federation engineering before the decline started, hijacked decades ago by Admiral Data, who saw the inevitable direction the Federation was headed, and decided to deprive them of their most powerful warship. He wired his positronic brain directly into the ship’s computer, and abandoned his humanoid body, and he’s been waiting all this time for the right crew…

Wouldn’t the Federation eventually come to a limit to just how much territory of space they could control or influence based just on distance alone? I mean what good is it if a new colony takes 20 years at Warp 9 to reach?

I like the way you think!

Sisko walks into a bar and orders a Klingon coffee. Bartender asks how he’s paying. Sisko says he can’t pay because the federation has abandoned currency based economics in favor of a philosophy of self improvement. Sisko walks out thirsty.

Cities?? Harumph! The Federation doesn’t bother with mere cities. Whole planets, or better yet, whole solar systems should be wiped out if the captain gets a hangnail in their vicinity.

I think it would be amusing for the next generation of starships to look EXACTLY like the Death Star, except much bigger. Then they can target the local sun and take out the whole system.

More underboob.

I believe they already made that series. It was called Babylon 5.