SelfishGene- More than half of TNG’s run was before the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Overarching stuff like that is frosting. The cake is good scripts. You need good ideas for hour long dramas which you then put into space. TNG had a handful, DS9 had a handful, Voyager had none, and I didn’t watch Enterprise, but apparently it was a bit light.
Also, DS9 was pretty much TNG+money. So we already had that one.
Also, wow, you went kooky there in your last two paragraphs.
wtf
I hope you meant after Roddenberry died, because I wasn’t aware Bradbury had anything to do with the show.
Yea that one. Burry something :).
I think they need to go in a new direction entirely, but keep the universe intact. Hence, they should do a show about Starfleet Academy. The hijinks and adventures that young cadets get into, etc. Then you can put them in all kinds of situations as training, like starship battles and ground combat and emergencies of all sorts. The only real problem here is that the kids will go on training missions which GO BAD AND ONLY THEY CAN SAVE THE DAY, instead of things like them outwitting the instructors. A good writing team could avoid the “Space Camp” style cliches.
That Kobiyashi Maru book (or whatever, the only good trek book out of 4 that I read), was kind of like that.
A sort of “Ender’s Game” approach to Star Trek, if you will.
Honestly every gut instinct I have about what will save this show disagrees with you. I think this would be a disaster, and would BE a teen focused soap opera with crappy sets and rehashed cliches.
Star Trek’s main weakness is that, as conceived, you only know the universe from the military point of view. Except for the occasional (poorly handled) foray into the life of some relative or other, we have no clue about the lives of the ordinary citizens of the federation unless they’re in some backwater outpost being threatened by aliens.
While it’s cool to imagine the training and excitement of the academy you can’t really tell stories about people who, in all actuality, come from a world that we know nothing about, and can’t really be defined.
IMHO the civ life of anyone in the federation would be pretty damn boring. DS9 gave us the closest look at it though.
Average citizen in the Federation is much like the average citizen here, it seems. You work, you take vacations, you have kids, sometimes war threatens, so you hunker down and wait for it to be over.
You dont work for money though.
maybe we can reimagine the romulans. in ds9, section 31 was making the prediction that the only two alpha quadrant superpowers left after the dominion war would be the federation and romulans (cardassia in ruins with 8 billion dead, the klingon empire retreats back to their borders and spends the next 10 years recovering)
and nemesis has their leadership wiped out. so we can make them whatever we want. commies II, cloak and dagger, break them into 20 separate sects. there’s even room to bring back section 31.
After 7 years of never even thinking about money, suddenly the universe had a currency that everyone used. Starfleet types were gambling and eating and using the facilities at Quark’s every episode, which implies that they get paid. There are all sorts of trading ships and smugglers and merchants and whatnot.
Didn’t Enterprise narrowly beat out a Starfleet Academy concept?
yes ben I understand that but they did say many times they did not use money any more.
But who cares about the Federation? Average, casual Trek fans don’t care about the Federation, the Klingons, or even the Enterprise; they care about the characters. That’s why the franchise needs to revisit its beginnings, get back to basics by either bringing back Kirk or remaking the original series with new actors. Either concept would get a lot of PR, and draw a lot of casual viewers. You wouldn’t draw anything but the core diehards with a concept show about the Federation collapsing, or the Federation in the 27th century, or kids at Starfleet Academy or whatever.
I always thought a great idea would be to bring Kirk back from the Nexus in the middle of some galactic crisis in the TNG era and have him take over the Enterprise during the collapse of the Federation. The series could then be about this one ship trying to rally the worlds and reunite the Federation. Or, you could just bring Kirk back, make a big splash with the start of the new series, and then move him to the admiralty, so he can make regular guest appearances.
Really, though, I think anything like the above is a longshot. We’ll more likely be looking at a remake of the original series within five or six years. It’s the safest bet to restart the series. End the other universe and reboot the whole thing, sort of like Marvel’s Ultimate universe.
i assumed gold pressed latinum was ferengi currency that was used by everyone else. like how us dollars are good even in backwater countries.
as for getting paid, jake explained to his confused ferengi friend about how the federation doesn’t use money in that funny episode where he tries to scrape up enough money to buy a mickey mantle baseball card for his father before getting into trouble with the dominion and dr. geiger and his cure for celluar boredom.
I always thought a great idea would be to bring Kirk back from the Nexus in the middle of some galactic crisis in the TNG era and have him take over the Enterprise during the collapse of the Federation
Isn’t that basically the premise of Andromeda?
That is a good episode, Russell. Very MASH-like. But yeah, the currency Quark wants is some sort of Ferengi trade standard, though I assume the Orions and similar races use it. These races aren’t really members of the Federation. And DS9 only uses currency because the original station seems to lack a full replicator system. Otherwise, why would people buy food and drink they could just replicate themselves?
Don’t they lament from time to time that replicated food never quite matches the flavor of the real thing? I remember Worf saying something about that in TNG.
Coming Soon: Tim Burton’s Star Trek!
Aieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeehhhh!! :roll:
Gold pressed latinum is used because it can’t be replicated for whatever reason.
Where do all the Starfleet dudes who gamble at Quark’s get their money?
In an attempt to more fully flesh out the Star Trek universe the DS9 guys ran into the problems of how squeaky clean Roddenberry set everything up as. Starfleet being full of saints leaves little room for interpersonal drama.