quote:Originally posted by The Mighty Monkey of Mim: So did you not like the original trilogy either?
I like Star Wars and I really like Empire. Jedi sucks. You can tell that Gary Kurtz had left by Jedi...because the tone changes a lot. Suddenly the script becomes a mess and the humor becomes more slapstick and muppets pop up everywhere. Ugh. I suspect Kurtz put the breaks on George's excesses in the first two films.
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Peregrinus, I don't think any of your points have anything to do with how good (or not so good) a TV show would be. They're all incidental. Your ideas about what the Federation was "really" like prior to TOS isn't any more worthy of consideration than any other. And yes, I have read Final Frontier. Minor irony: Guess who wrote the novelization of "Broken Bow?"
If the goal is to go easy on the nerdiest sensabilities, it seems to me a "pre-TOS" show would be doomed from the beginning. The people unhappiest with the look of Enterprise would be likely to have strokes when they saw a redesigned 1701 bridge.
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Granted. I think I find it hard to believe that we made so many advances in the first century after breaking the light barrier, and so little in the two since.
--Jonah
-------------------- "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
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One possible counter-argument might be: "What about 'Trials And Tribble-ations?' It looked great!" And it did. But, I'd counter, that was within a thoroughly self-aware context. I can't see seven years of retro-60s kitsch making for good sf drama.
(Though the reason I mention this is because I thought it worked well enough to make an Enterprise/TOS era crossover doable.)
Registered: Mar 1999
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Contrariwise, the 60s kitsch worked its way in on the series. The pilot was much more unformed. We saw a grand total of four rooms aboard the Enterprise, two of which were well-thought-out and full of visual excitement without being garish (the bridge and transporter room), and they remained much the same into the series. The other two were Pike's quaters and the briefing room, which were very sparse and bare and were thankfully never seen again. We didn't see any corridors, so the lighting wouldn't have to be "60s disco". There weren't any minidresses. The women wore pants. The landing party had jackets. And I don't think anyone would complain if those gawdawful proto-communicators got a facelift.
And since I hate people who just complain emptily without attempting to offer anything in place of what they're complaining about (let's face it, a 2240s Pre-TOS series may or may not be likely, but it isn't what they are currently in the third season of). I dusted off how I thought the basic series premise of Enterprise oughtto have been executed...
Knock it forward a couple more years from where it actually started. The push to develop faster ships and more subspace-based technology is getting tense because the centennial of Cochrane's first flight is coming up and we don't have that much to show for it. Vulcan warp technology is only a few centuries more advanced than ours, and being a more conservative race, they didn't develop it as quickly as we have in collaboration with them. They (and we) are starting to see the advantages of something more formal than mere diplomatic relations, but all thoughts of Federation-building get sidetracked when a series of pirate raids on a couple outlying Terran trade/supply routes starts up out of nowhere. A nearby task force is sent to investigate, but in the meantime, Earth sends out its newest prototype warp three ship, biggest and baddest in the neighbourhood, which isn't saying much by the standards we're used to, but...
And so we get a sort of Space Battleship Yamato story where the threat for the first season or so is sort of vague, and we get a lot of exploring and diplomacy done en route. There's no subspace radio yet, so even with signal boosters we're eventually cut off from Earth itself, and our only other contact with humans is on colony worlds. When we finally get out there, we find a couple pieces of wreckage, but no other trace of the task force. The attacks have stepped up, but there have as yet been no survivors to tell us anything about the attackers. And we go from there into the first Romulan War.
If all goes well, it'll be over within a year and a half, and we get some rebuilding, and some more exploration and diplomacy done. But then the Romulans come back in force and start attacking Terran colonies, and we get into the second Romulan War. This spreads to include other races in the area, and that come to help from closer to home, and is the final impetus to form the Federation after a treaty is reached. And thus we can end the series on a high note.
I think that would make a very topical backdrop for stories about terrorism and how to respond to it, and exploration and why to do it, even when you've got domestic concerns that some say should be tended to before "wasting" time and money on such frivolities as this, and the argument over jurisdiction -- military or civilian -- of Starfleet, which could very well become quite relevent in the coming decades as more nations get more stuff off Earth.
--Jonah
-------------------- "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
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