quote:Originally posted by TorgaDaxIV: they should just bring back ds9!!!!!
i would settle for a post-tng/ds9 series though.
Seconded.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
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Simon: But there is no story that requires itself to be set in the Trek universe. The only arguement that could be made would be if the story said "Captain Kirk does such-and-such" or "the Federation blah blah". But, just change the names, and it isn't Trek anymore.
Seriously, name a single plot that could not possibly take place outside Trek. Without using proper names.
Registered: Mar 1999
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Uh, the majority of all Star Trek episodes? Those plot elements you named are not just names. Things have meanings and histories and weight. If I tell a story about a German soldier in 1941 you've already got a whole mountain of information to draw from. And if I tell a story about a German soldier in 1941 who isn't fighting for the Nazis that implies a whole other set of information about my story. (Like, it's alternate history, or something else along those lines.)
Now, I will admit that there's a difference between doing this before a series starts and after its been going awhile, because much of this is dependant upon characters. But even if we disagree on the details you have to concede that there is something (or more likely, a diffuse cloud of somethings whose borders we cannot agree upon) that makes Star Trek Star Trek, as opposed to Friends, or ER, or Battlestar Galactica, or The X-Files, or any other show. Things have a nature, and my point is that doing another Star Trek show for the sole purpose of having one on the air, rather than because you have a story that needs to be Star Trek for some reason or set of reasons, is a terrible way to do things. We've already seen this criticism leveled at each new incarnation since TOS, and though I disagree that this has been the sole motive force behind any of the series so far, that doesn't mean it isn't a bad thing.
Registered: Mar 1999
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Cartman
just made by the Presbyterian Church
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So, in essence, you think a story should always be restricted to its own natural habitat (for lack of a better term), or, more categorically, that a show should only feature plots that can't be told on any other series?
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Registered: Nov 1999
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There ARE certain kinds of stories that work best in the Trek universe, and maybe should ONLY be in the Trek universe. THE CHASE, the most TOS-like of TNG with its conclusion, might seem laughable in any other universe, but after decades of face-slop humanoids in Trek, THE CHASE was a story that worked with and built on that hoary dollar-saving gimmick (and is a story that SHOULD have been the TNG feature film debut.)
But most of the time, good stories transcend their genre. SOME stories require a particular setting to work best, but the elements to tell a story right don't necessarily all have to be retained when reworking an idea.
I just remembered: Harlan Ellison did a very good annihilation of OUTLAND, showing how it failed utterly with the way it tried to take HIGH NOON and transplant it, by pointing out that the rough & ready types who would have been on IO would have included plenty of folks who WOULD have stood up to the bad boss, but the logic of the situation was ignored in the screenplay in favor of a slavish retelling of HIGH NOON, with Connery/Cooper standing nearly alone. It is in his volume AN EDGE IN MY VOICE if anybody's interested.
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capped
I WAS IN THE FUTURE, IT WAS TOO LATE TO RSVP
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'the chase' was fine as a non-trek story.. ~* an archaeologist has secret information about an ages old puzzle, several warring political powers have to cooperate, making a scientific discovery about the beginning of civilization *~
the Trek thing about it was that they were parodying their own propensity for humanoids by creating a common humanoid alien forebearer
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Registered: Sep 2001
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But as Simon said, any story can become any other story by changing a few details. Im sure you could transplant, say, "Rightful Heir" into the modern day, fiddle with some details, and end up with a story about a Catholic who loses faith, but then sees Jesus, except it isn't really Jesus, but someone just like him who believes that he is Jesus that the church has raised and nurtured to make people believe in Jesus again, and then there'd be wacky adventures. And so forth.
Er, anyway, it's not just a case of "can this story be told in another medium", but "does it work as well in another medium, does it work better as a Trek story", and so forth. "Arena" is a highly praised TOS show, even though the original story came from a non-Trek sorce. But by putting in in the Trek mold, having the humans be evolved, nice people who try and get along with everyone, is the story improved?
Also: Bullshit.
Also also: WNMHGB.
-------------------- Yes, you're despicable, and... and picable... and... and you're definitely, definitely despicable. How a person can get so despicable in one lifetime is beyond me. It isn't as though I haven't met a lot of people. Goodness knows it isn't that. It isn't just that... it isn't... it's... it's despicable.
Registered: Mar 1999
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quote:Originally posted by Capped in Mic: 'the chase' was fine as a non-trek story.. ~* an archaeologist has secret information about an ages old puzzle, several warring political powers have to cooperate, making a scientific discovery about the beginning of civilization *~
the Trek thing about it was that they were parodying their own propensity for humanoids by creating a common humanoid alien forebearer
It may have been 'fine' as a nontrek, but ... it had particular relevance as a trek story because of the common humanoid aspect. I don't think of it as parody in the slightest, it is more like an ultimate justification, one that DOES NOT (unlike most other ModernTrek) require them to piss all over what has gone before.
Equally important IMO, it demonstrated the kind of speculative thinking I associate with some really good Trek (the kind of thinking that is always in the minority, regardless of which series you talk about.)
One thing I remember Bennett or Winter saying about Trek 5 was that Star Trek is maybe the only franchise where you could say, 'tonight we go to see God' and at least some of the audience will think, 'okay this is trek, I'll stick for the ride.' It is because of the way Trek is (or was) thought of that Trek would have license to explore in certain areas and even push into stuff that would be beyond ludicrous on another show (half-white half-black, etc.)
As Little Enterprise waddles on (at least at the point when I gave up on the show, in fall 2002), they seemed to be telling stories that had no beyond-the-plot aspects, no resonances being struck, so the sticking power of the stories was about on par with something like MATLOCK ... they had no feel of Trek. That's why it is easy now to embrace FIREFLY or FARSCAPE, as those shows at least demonstrate some inventive thinking as well as craftsmanship in the storytelling.
If you're not going to be trek-like, why not at least be inventive and compelling and paint vivid characters? ModernTrek, outside of the odd TNG and a good hunk of DS9, doesn't deliver much that is special or compelling OR Treklike, so it is easy to see reasons for the viewer base to dwindle just on that basis alone.
-------------------- Achievement is its own reward; pride obscures it.
Registered: Jul 2003
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Another whole aspect (more on thread subject than my last rant) is that lots of stories can't be told in the Trek universe.
If you want to explore Heisenberg in a meaningful way, in terms of how observing a subject (even from hiding) affects said subject and taints the results of the study, then you can't tell that story on Trek, because Trek seems to honestly believe in this nonesense about non-interference. Yet on a quantum level, there is no such thing as non-interference if you've still got a scope aimed at race. Trek will lipservice real science by having a 'heisenberg compensator' in the technospeak, but will it allow a legit science idea to drive or modify the storytelling? Not often enough, and not always in an appropriate way, at least IMO.
The idea that you could actually enforce a hands-off directive when there are privateers and maybe even races of privateer-types (if you go to century 24 and put the Ferengi in there) means that any PrimeDiirective system would still get poached by folks, unless you had starships surrounding each system to stave off encroachment. Starfleet's fulltime job would be keeping poachers from exploiting pre-FC worlds. But you just have to blithely ignore reality-related issues like this, or if you want to explore them, you need to do so in another universe, one that has at least a passing resemblance to ours.
Half the stories I'd like to tell are paths not taken with Trek, but the other half involve seeing genuine consequences (i.e., fallout) from the kinds of stories that do get told incompletely on Trek.
Maybe that is what infuriates me about a lot of Trek ... from 87 on, they had the ideal platform for delivering entertainment that reached a lot of receptive folks, entertainment that could touch on some good real-world issues, but squandered that enormous advantage over other shows in favor of Berman's dubious sense of taste and decorum (read that as the path usually taken being in the middle-of-the-road, safe, with the camera almost never handheld and with everything way too well-exposed to communicate a sense of atmosphere or mood), flavored with occasional bursts of brilliance from others playing in his yard.
-------------------- Achievement is its own reward; pride obscures it.
Registered: Jul 2003
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And it's such a fun and popular yard to play in. Is it really any wonder so much fan-fic centers on the most popular science fiction series ever? The truth is that Star Trek can be used as a sort of test-bed for story ideas. Kind of like Lego, you know? These interlocking bits of characters, settings and ships let a writer focus on a story and all they've got to do is assemble it out of these pre-made parts.
I'm speaking from experience as it's taken me literally years to develop the language, science, peoples and politics of my own show. And the frustrating thing is that so few people know this background that half the time I wind up comparing it to Trek anyway. I mean if I tell you a story wherein Worf and Data sneak over the ridge to kill 30+ Romulan sentries so that the away team can make it back to the shuttle, and Riker is still in some kind of coma because he touched that artifact, and now Worf is bleeding out pretty bad but won't let the doc touch him, and Geordi knows more about that thing in the big black case than he's telling, you all have a fairly decent picture in your heads about what's happening there. You understand those characters, you can fill in the blanks. It's certainly a far more vivid and more fleshed out one than you would if I'd simply subtituted my characters names and said that it isn't Romulans but local guerrillas and it's a Unity Marine Dropship not a shuttle. So it's easier to prototype a story that way. Star Trek provides a means, with built-in technologies, vehicles, technobabble and characters for you to focus on telling a good story. It's just a shame so few of those actually writing for Enterprise take advantage of this fact.
I for one would be very curious to hear some of the ideas you pitched kmart. Even though you have a very silly name, it sounds as though you understand (as do many of posters on this board) the various ways in which Star Trek has fallen short. What is more dramatic is that it sounds as though you've taken direct action to stop this dull slide into mediocrity the enterprise (sorry) has taken.
-------------------- "Nah. The 9th chevron is for changing the ringtone from "grindy-grindy chonk-chonk" to the theme tune to dallas." -Reverend42
Registered: Sep 2000
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Well, the username is just a condensed version of my actual name. When I was in retail mgmnt in the 80s, I had to sign a lot of documents. My actual sig got shorter and shorter till I found I was signing KMART -- which was funny cuz that company had just bought up the chain (WaldenBooks) I was managing for at the time.
So the sig means nothing (maybe I should re-register everywhere as Trevanian to plug my favorite novelist, or do something more personal with it?), it is just easy to remember.
The notion you mention of using Trek as a kind of test-bed for ideas is interesting ... but the thing is, once you deviate significantly from it, some folks (the ones who haven't read sf and lots of the ones for whom Trek and SW are their only tie-ins to the genre) get a blank or confused expression. These are oftentimes the folks who see the future in speculative fiction as two narrow paths: one is BladeRunner/RoadWarrior and the other is Trek: dystopia or utopia.
I've had people jump my case just over the 'ridiculing the PD issue' because they somehow think that the prime directive is real ... probably the same folks who reject a movie with a violent robot because they think Asimov's laws of robotics should be in force in the real world.
I really enjoyed FIREFLY in spite of some science issues just because I completely bought into the people ... I found more of a sense of humanity in ONE dining room scene (and there were several on that short-lived show) on that series than in the fifty or sixty hours of VOYAGER I sat down to watch and the couple dozen Little Enterprises I tried.
And while lots of folks nailed FF on the science, more seemed to reject it on the WESTERN basis, because it seemed, I guess, retrograde, to them. They see a space show and figure, 'EVERYTHING has to advance,' and I sure don't see evidence of that, certainly not a linear, 'if this goes on' advance.
Go back to the 50s and 60s and everybody KNEW we'd have robots doing the laundry by 2001 ... no, instead we have personal computers, but MerryMaids is prospering.
It is much easier for me to buy into a future that isn't some NASA like projection, but instead one that includes elements of that along with ones that seem pulled in from another era, because stuff doesn't just all advance at the same rate. The one thing I had in my CRITICAL ORBIT (antiTrek) universe that points this up is that they have hyperdrive, but they don't have much in the way of orthodontics ... you have to put 15 years of military service in to qualify for getting your teeth fixed, or be independently wealthy, because it was just something where various slowboat colonizing ships in previous centuries didn't carry enough of these guys and it became a lost skill in large part across several systems. (Wasn't ever gonna explain it in that detail, but figured it would be a great way to cast 'real' looking people rather than actors.)
Another idea, one that wasn't as thought out, was that the longer you stayed in hyperdrive, the COLDER it would get. Instead of heat build-up, the energy gets leached into otherspace or whatever you call it. Wouldnt' be an issue on Republic ships, but on a privateer that didn't have enough heat sinks, it could get problemantic. Main idea for this was that it would give an excuse (paltry, but hey!) for folks to have to get into pea jackets at times, and visually you could justify the 'bundled up on the bridge of an old destroyer at night' feel ... while anachronistic, it would give some of that BEDFORD INCIDENT kind of feel to some ship scenes.
None of this is worldshaking stuff, but it is also stuff that will NEVER appear on Trek. Maybe at some point around 90 or so I decided on a subconscious level to take the trek perspective and invert it automatically, figuring any different approach might be more interesting ... to me anyway!
That's probably why I think the future of Trek should have been the E-B ... I think redeeming Capt. Harriman and the good name of the Enterprise-B (which I postulate would have had its lettering and numeric designation burned off in disgrace after the GEN prologue) in an era I found inherently more interesting than century 24 (end of frontier Kirk era is like a sf equivalent to westerns like WILD BUNCH and BITE THE BULLET that are set early in the 20th century, so you have the inherent conflict between old era and new, which is good storytelling IMO.)
I even sent a letter to Nimoy at the beginning of 1995 suggesting if he wanted to 'save' trek, he should go to Paramount and offer to do a limited series apart from Berman, something along these lines that was set in the last years of 23rd Century. Never got a reply or acknowledgement so I don't know if he got it, but I felt good about trying (and I still think it is the right era ... for sweeps weeks, you could bring in surviving TOS members for guest appearances, and occasionally 'cross over' to other ships like EXCELSIOR.)
Registered: Jul 2003
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I agree the turn-of-the-century series idea is a good one. We've gone from pushing back the boundaries of knowledge, and now we're empire-building. Lot of potential for the ethical conflict of manifest destiny vs. laissez-faire in starship captains and Federation officials. The Klingons have been staggered and are no longer an immediate threat. The Romulans are fairly buddy-buddy with us (before the Tomed Incident). We can show first contact with the Cardassians...
*sigh*
I've also always been fascinated with the transition from the Old West to the "civilised" West -- from dirt streets and free range and marginal legal presence to cities and rules and boundaries... That kind of social and moral transition provides an undercurrent of friction that makes for good drama, which is why TV Westerns have so often been such good shows. Conceiving Star Trek as a Western in space was the perfect move for a sci-fi series, for that very reason. Taking risks in that clearing is the other essential factor, and one that Berman doesn't do.
The reason Voyager fell flat -- more than any other -- is that we spent the first couple years whining about getting home, and getting treated to week after week of Gilligan's Island-inspired "we found a way home -- oops, didn't work" cow flaps. The crew should have taken a deep breath, squared their shoulders and then set out to see what there was to see in this trackless (for the Federation) expanse of space. Isn't there some Western equivalent to describe this? I suppose we can go further back and liken it to Cortez burning his boats to encourage his men to not think about going back home...
Try sending a letter to Majel and Rod. And maybe another to Nimoy... And possibly one to Patrick Stewart's production company. Find the people who care about what Trek should be about and encourage them to stand up to Paramount. Take the time to write physical letters. Show 'em it's important to you, too.
--Jonah
P.S. My own post-DS9/VOY story idea I describe as "Have Gun Will Travel" in space.
-------------------- "That's what I like about these high school girls, I keep getting older, they stay the same age."
--David "Woody" Wooderson, Dazed and Confused
Registered: Feb 2001
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Interestingly, when I pitched (and did some spec scripts) for TNG back in 1989-90 I sorta went the direction of some of these suggestions. I was interested in trying to: a) get some real science into the stories and make it dramatic, not just a technobabble way of solving a problem b) deal with the ethical dilemmas that would crop up from our philosophies c) deal with the ethical issues of being allies with a barbaric culture like the Klingons, who you just know have planets enslaved (and what happens when all those subjected races rebel) d) deal with the long-term repercussions of what happens when of non interference directive gets violated (let's visit Gamma Trianguli a century after Kirk did and see what happened when he knocked down their entire way of life) e) come up with strong ethical and personal dilemmas for the characters that are the core of missions related to the above
I came up with 13 stories and wrote 3 as scripts. I did get some interest from TNG on a couple of the ideas, but they weren't the ones I was keenest about.
I also recall a note I got back from Eric Stillwell telling me, amongst other things, that I shouldn't use Andorians becaase "one of our producers doesn't like aliens with antennae"...wow, that's constructive, and shows you how silly the thinking could be there sometimes.
-------------------- "Well, I mean, it's generally understood that, of all of the people in the world, Mike Nelson is the best." -- ULTRA MAGNUS, steadfast in curmudgeon
Registered: Feb 2001
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quote:Originally posted by Capped in Mic: 'the chase' was fine as a non-trek story.. ~* an archaeologist has secret information about an ages old puzzle, several warring political powers have to cooperate, making a scientific discovery about the beginning of civilization *~
the Trek thing about it was that they were parodying their own propensity for humanoids by creating a common humanoid alien forebearer
And yet....The Chase was one of the worst episodes of TNG for drama. It was so poorly written as to be laughable and at no point do you feel for any of the characters. It was Trek meets Cannonball Run but nobody was funny.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
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The Andorian thing still slays me ... the quote I remember reading somewhere was, "we don't DO antennae" (at least until we can do it tastefully, with RC controllers, on ENT)
There are lots of aspects of life in trek future that hadn't been delved into ... one that I thought was obvious was THE NEWS. I figured these evolved folk probably didn't censor their news very much, but you could still have issues with security-related matters.
One of my pitches was SPECIAL REPORT, which had a reporter aboard at the request of Starfleet, which wanted to create some goodwill amongst the public and justify the energy requirements for rebuilding the fleet after the borg incursion of BOBW ("The Federation's first up-close look at life about a Galaxy-class starship!".)
Of course we had to have the reporter stumble onto something and do the wrestling with 'freedom of the press' and matters of conscience, but the thing that I thought would be fun was seeing how these TNG crewmembers broke character when a camera was aimed at them. I had Worf pretty close to PREENING whenever the camera went his way, and I thought seeing Riker doing his come-on bit while Frakes played directly to the camera would be fun as well (I also suggested they shoot the NEWSREPORT POV stuff in 3D and get 7-11 to co-sponsor the episode while providing throwaway 3d glasses, which busted up the whole room as a financially ludicrous notion.)
I thought there were other 'issue' type stories that needed doing, such as 'space garbage' cluttering up orbital space and the kind of thing TNG would often flirt with but not go full-out on, like 'prime directive vs hippocratic oath' ... gonna give some of these a re-reading, I'm getting jazzed thinking about some of the old treatments!
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