Star Trek - Space: The Final Frontier

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JamesFargo said:
Lucas wrote "treatments" for all of the movies and then took credit for everything. His appetite for money is pretty legendary.
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In this case though I'm inclined to believe this was in the script. Guinness seems like a cool dude but i don't think he gave enough of a fuck about Star Wars to take exception to a random lines about parsecs being confused with a measure of time rather than distance.
 
L50LasPak said:
In this case though I'm inclined to believe this was in the script. Guinness seems like a cool dude but i don't think he gave enough of a fuck about Star Wars to take exception to a random lines about parsecs being confused with a measure of time rather than distance.
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Guinness was a consummate professional. I don't know if he would have known what parsecs measured off the top of his head, but if he did you can safely assume that he'd drop the appropriate reaction on cue. (I remember one of his letters where he calls Star Wars "fairy tale nonsense," and gets Harrison Ford's name wrong. Apparently, he only took the job because he liked American Graffiti.)

Back to Star Trek, it's consistently amazed me how the series just can't move on from the TNG era. Mainline canon ends with Voy/DS9 wrapping up, and when they finally set a series after that it stars Captain Picard in his space-walker. Everything else is a prequel/midquel/spinoff or otherwise awkwardly slotted into the gaps in existing canon. Can they just... not write new stuff anymore?
 
TNG represents a classic issue with the scale of a setting where the technology has become too advanced to move beyond it without getting into weird leaps that would so utterly change how humans interact with technology (such as devices controlled by thought alone, perfect machine-human interfaces and single craft being able to yeet entire solar systems at the drop of a hat) that the series would become rather hard to relate to very fast.

The jump from TOS to TNG is a logical one. You go from solid button panels to the adaptive LCARs interface, from smaller vessels to larger ones, from phasers that have variable settings and can only fire from specific banks on one segment of the ship to phasers that can fire from just about anywhere on the ship and have literally thousands of settings, from being able to technobabble up an engineering solution once in awhile to techno babbling shit every single episode, etc.

Where do you go from TNG's technology? Holographical interfaces? Mental technology? Do you make all of the ships in the setting look like the Sovereign class? Perhaps go with even more weird and abstract designs like what some of Voyager's aliens of the week flirted with? What about scale, does Star Trek finally go full Warhammer 40k with kilometer long ships of the line and upwards?

What about Time Travel? Reliable time travel is already possible in the TOS era using any old star. We know that future Starfleet vessels will be equipped for casual time travel, to the point where one man vessels are equipped with time travel devices as early as the 26th Century. Do you make time travel a more regular plot? Now you're trying to drink Doctor Who's milkshake, are you sure that's the direction you want Star Trek to go?

Another issue is the technobabble overload. One of Voyager's most hated flaws was the way the crew would tektek their way out of every single situation, but given how ludicrously advanced Federation technology is by the time of Voyager and the fact that Voyager is a science vessel, not a warship, it actually made a frustrating amount of sense that Voyager could miracle work its way out of every single situation and adapt Starfleet tech to work with any alien technology they encountered. This would logically only get worse with more advanced tech.
 
L50LasPak said:
TNG represents a classic issue with the scale of a setting where the technology has become too advanced to move beyond it without getting into weird leaps that would so utterly change how humans interact with technology (such as devices controlled by thought alone, perfect machine-human interfaces and single craft being able to yeet entire solar systems at the drop of a hat) that the series would become rather hard to relate to very fast.

The jump from TOS to TNG is a logical one. You go from solid button panels to the adaptive LCARs interface, from smaller vessels to larger ones, from phasers that have variable settings and can only fire from specific banks on one segment of the ship to phasers that can fire from just about anywhere on the ship and have literally thousands of settings, from being able to technobabble up an engineering solution once in awhile to techno babbling shit every single episode, etc.

Where do you go from TNG's technology? Holographical interfaces? Mental technology? Do you make all of the ships in the setting look like the Sovereign class? Perhaps go with even more weird and abstract designs like what some of Voyager's aliens of the week flirted with? What about scale, does Star Trek finally go full Warhammer 40k with kilometer long ships of the line and upwards?

What about Time Travel? Reliable time travel is already possible in the TOS era using any old star. We know that future Starfleet vessels will be equipped for casual time travel, to the point where one man vessels are equipped with time travel devices as early as the 26th Century. Do you make time travel a more regular plot? Now you're trying to drink Doctor Who's milkshake, are you sure that's the direction you want Star Trek to go?

Another issue is the technobabble overload. One of Voyager's most hated flaws was the way the crew would tektek their way out of every single situation, but given how ludicrously advanced Federation technology is by the time of Voyager and the fact that Voyager is a science vessel, not a warship, it actually made a frustrating amount of sense that Voyager could miracle work its way out of every single situation and adapt Starfleet tech to work with any alien technology they encountered. This would logically only get worse with more advanced tech.
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You mentioned 40k, and something similar to that or Dune would work to reign in the tech. Post federation collapse, Pyrrhic victory against the Borg, something to reset or walk back some of the technology. If you went the 40k route, the tech still exists, but cannot be fixed, replicated, or easily understood. Discovery and use of it can be a plot point in and of itself. With Dune, tech is limited due overeliance causing past strife.
There could be a shift in the power balance between species, with the more barbaric Klingons or intellectual Vulcans and Romulans becoming ascendant. However, the utopian vision could still be kept, replacing the technocratic gay space communism with an overarching positive theme of rebirth or rebuilding.
 
Panama said:
You mentioned 40k, and something similar to that or Dune would work to reign in the tech. Post federation collapse, Pyrrhic victory against the Borg, something to reset or walk back some of the technology. If you went the 40k route, the tech still exists, but cannot be fixed, replicated, or easily understood. Discovery and use of it can be a plot point in and of itself. With Dune, tech is limited due overeliance causing past strife.
There could be a shift in the power balance between species, with the more barbaric Klingons or intellectual Vulcans and Romulans becoming ascendant. However, the utopian vision could still be kept, replacing the technocratic gay space communism with an overarching positive theme of rebirth or rebuilding.
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Such a thing would still drastically change Star Trek's identity though, and would shift the setting's focus from exploring strange new worlds to rebuilding what has been lost. I can see how the concept could be done well, but it would be a tall order to make it still feel like Star Trek.
 
Against all good advice I actually ended up watching 2 episodes of Picard because curiosity got the better of me. It has all the typical current year stuff from capeshit-esque garbage to pointless cursing and violence to offensively unattractive british people + "exotic is speaking with a british accent". Jesus christ, I don't know where to begin and I don't wanna bore the thread with something that probably was discussed to death. This just plain isn't Star Trek. Also it shows that Patrick Steward had no idea what his character was and that it basically existed through the writers. Also Spiners pudgy aged photoshopped face is hilarious. Unintentionally hilarious, that is.

The best thing is with some changes this could've existed in it's own, non-Star Trek universe and would've been perfectly fine with that probably but it's somehow illegal to create new franchises and we have to milk stuff from the 60s, forever. This also kinda is about the ongoing discussion in this thread now. If you cannot add to a franchise, it's okay to let it rest and do something new. I understand the economic marketability reasons why that doesn't happen but it will always be creatively bankrupt no matter how much lipstick you keep layering on that pig.
 
AmpleApricots said:
Patrick Steward had no idea what his character was and that it basically existed through the writers.
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There's a tonal shift in the movies where he becomes an imitation of himself.

Rocky III had Mr T. and Hogan. IV is an over-the-top movie which plays out like a comic book, with super boxers. The climax of Rocky V is a street brawl. (Sorry, but pass.) Stallone wrote the script for Rocky by hand. he had a firmer grasp on the character than anyone. But after the first two movies, he became a dumb lummox.
 
I just wanna bitch for a second. I'm watching DS9, "Return to Grace", the ep where Kira and Dukat team up to beat up some Klingons after the Klingons kill a bunch of Cardassian and Bajoran representatives.
The writing for Kira is really scattershot in this one. It pisses me off to no end that Dukat keeps trying to make nice, or talk to her (and flirt, which was a stupid idea to begin with, fuck the writers), and she just spits out venomous one-liners ("Why is it that whenever you smile, I wanna leave the room?") or says nothing. But she'll be perfectly kind to Tora. You'd THINK that Tora would eventually get pissed off with Kira treating her dad like shit and demand she act nicer, or leave them both alone. Why interact with someone when you know you'll never forgive them? It makes her come across as a selfish asshole. Also racist. She's nice to Tora solely because she's half-Bajoran, I'm sure of it.
 
tigergrinder said:
It pisses me off to no end that Dukat keeps trying to make nice, or talk to her (and flirt, which was a stupid idea to begin with, fuck the writers)
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Nana comes across as a bit of a diva. She tended to personalize the character.

Marc said he wanted Dukat to have an affair with Kira because he, the real person, had a crush on Nana. That doesn't seem kosher.

There seems to be tension between him and the writers. Ira wanted a straight Nazi allegory, but Marc wanted more nuance than that. I respect Ira as a writer and an inspiration; but it's similar to when fans fell in love with Spike. Joss hated how popular he was, and James bore the brunt of that.

Moral (I guess?): If you want two-dimensional characters, don't hire these actors.
 
RomanesEuntDomus said:
Admittedly, the makeup is pretty fucking baller and the whole cronenberg style body horror is the best part of the entire episode.

Thing is, the concept of warp 10, how it's described by Tom ("being everyhwere at once" or something) is stupid and I think it would have made more sense to have him be exposed to some techno-babble radiation from their experimental drive without passing the warp barrier. Overall, the whole episode could be pretty ok with small tweaks and a completely different climax.

The main offense of the end is that something majorly fucked up happens (ie: Tom and Janeway mutating into lizards and creating weird offspring) but it gets sweeped under the rug immediately and without any consequences (the offspring is discarded and both people are turned back to normal without even the smallest hint of a lasting effect on their relationship). That makes the whole episode fall flat on its face. The only thing worse would have been an end where it cuts to Tom waking up in his bunk to reveal it was all just a dream all along.

Seriously, walking in on a co-worker letting rip a major fart in an elevator creates more lasting effects and interpersonal drama than Tom turning into a mutant, abducting Janeway to turn her into a mutant and them both having axolotly sexy time on some godforsaken planet.


If the concept of a double negative turning into a positive held true, they'd turn Janeway into a great and consistent character... but alas, this is CURRENT YEAR Hollywood, so we know they just pile shit upon shit upon shit...
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I know how to make it worse.

Discovery makes it so the lizard mutan babies evolved into a sentient warp-capable race and show up on the show. Bonus if they make some kind of “Paris was an evil rapist and Janeway is seen as a god-figure” storyline to it.

They’re still in the far future or whatever, right?
 
L50LasPak said:
TNG represents a classic issue with the scale of a setting where the technology has become too advanced to move beyond it without getting into weird leaps that would so utterly change how humans interact with technology (such as devices controlled by thought alone, perfect machine-human interfaces and single craft being able to yeet entire solar systems at the drop of a hat) that the series would become rather hard to relate to very fast.

The jump from TOS to TNG is a logical one. You go from solid button panels to the adaptive LCARs interface, from smaller vessels to larger ones, from phasers that have variable settings and can only fire from specific banks on one segment of the ship to phasers that can fire from just about anywhere on the ship and have literally thousands of settings, from being able to technobabble up an engineering solution once in awhile to techno babbling shit every single episode, etc.

Where do you go from TNG's technology? Holographical interfaces? Mental technology? Do you make all of the ships in the setting look like the Sovereign class? Perhaps go with even more weird and abstract designs like what some of Voyager's aliens of the week flirted with? What about scale, does Star Trek finally go full Warhammer 40k with kilometer long ships of the line and upwards?

What about Time Travel? Reliable time travel is already possible in the TOS era using any old star. We know that future Starfleet vessels will be equipped for casual time travel, to the point where one man vessels are equipped with time travel devices as early as the 26th Century. Do you make time travel a more regular plot? Now you're trying to drink Doctor Who's milkshake, are you sure that's the direction you want Star Trek to go?

Another issue is the technobabble overload. One of Voyager's most hated flaws was the way the crew would tektek their way out of every single situation, but given how ludicrously advanced Federation technology is by the time of Voyager and the fact that Voyager is a science vessel, not a warship, it actually made a frustrating amount of sense that Voyager could miracle work its way out of every single situation and adapt Starfleet tech to work with any alien technology they encountered. This would logically only get worse with more advanced tech.
Click to expand...
I was just thinking a bit, one could potentially add a limit to technology out of caution. Consider a Star Trek series set, dunno, 100 or 200 years after Voyager. Technology would have evolved a LOT until then. Maybe at some point technology and AI evolved to a degree that the Singularity happened, or was about to happen. Maybe during the course of that the entire Federation and all its members adopted new interface technology and so on, and suddenly realized they were getting close to what happened to the Borg, causing them to rapidly roll back this development with all the negative side effects a sudden drop in technology would entail. That could potentially form the backdrop for an interestingly splintered political landscape, as well as impose artificial limitations on technology, and ethical and ideological tensions over those limits.
Might even provide a few interesting backdrops for episodes. Member planets that were lost to the Singularity, failed singularities, Q getting pissed because the Romulans are being sneaky knife-eared schemers and trying to deify themselves to mess with the Q...
Of course, this kind of stuff isn't necessarily aligned with the classic techno-optimistic style of Star Trek.

Or you could just have the Borg or someone else ignite a whole bunch of Omega particles, restricting space travel heavily, and limiting technology and everything that way.
 
Meriasek said:
I was just thinking a bit, one could potentially add a limit to technology out of caution. Consider a Star Trek series set, dunno, 100 or 200 years after Voyager. Technology would have evolved a LOT until then. Maybe at some point technology and AI evolved to a degree that the Singularity happened, or was about to happen. Maybe during the course of that the entire Federation and all its members adopted new interface technology and so on, and suddenly realized they were getting close to what happened to the Borg, causing them to rapidly roll back this development with all the negative side effects a sudden drop in technology would entail. That could potentially form the backdrop for an interestingly splintered political landscape, as well as impose artificial limitations on technology, and ethical and ideological tensions over those limits.
Might even provide a few interesting backdrops for episodes. Member planets that were lost to the Singularity, failed singularities, Q getting pissed because the Romulans are being sneaky knife-eared schemers and trying to deify themselves to mess with the Q...
Of course, this kind of stuff isn't necessarily aligned with the classic techno-optimistic style of Star Trek.

Or you could just have the Borg or someone else ignite a whole bunch of Omega particles, restricting space travel heavily, and limiting technology and everything that way.
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Time Travel was invented to artificially keep society from advancing? Cause that seems like what people were doing in the 29th century by correcting the timeline.
 
Drag-on Knight 91873 said:
Time Travel was invented to artificially keep society from advancing?
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Meriasek said:
Consider a Star Trek series set, dunno, 100 or 200 years after Voyager. Technology would have evolved a LOT until then.
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They were always teasing at ships that don't appear again. VOY was particularly bad with this. I'll gladly take the Prometheus, Relativity, or Dauntless over that brushed grey color scheme.

Prometheus_class_bridge.jpg
 
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Meriasek said:
I was just thinking a bit, one could potentially add a limit to technology out of caution. Consider a Star Trek series set, dunno, 100 or 200 years after Voyager. Technology would have evolved a LOT until then. Maybe at some point technology and AI evolved to a degree that the Singularity happened, or was about to happen. Maybe during the course of that the entire Federation and all its members adopted new interface technology and so on, and suddenly realized they were getting close to what happened to the Borg, causing them to rapidly roll back this development with all the negative side effects a sudden drop in technology would entail. That could potentially form the backdrop for an interestingly splintered political landscape, as well as impose artificial limitations on technology, and ethical and ideological tensions over those limits.
Might even provide a few interesting backdrops for episodes. Member planets that were lost to the Singularity, failed singularities, Q getting pissed because the Romulans are being sneaky knife-eared schemers and trying to deify themselves to mess with the Q...
Of course, this kind of stuff isn't necessarily aligned with the classic techno-optimistic style of Star Trek.

Or you could just have the Borg or someone else ignite a whole bunch of Omega particles, restricting space travel heavily, and limiting technology and everything that way.
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Wasn't all that like the latest season of Discovery?
 
tigergrinder said:
I just wanna bitch for a second. I'm watching DS9, "Return to Grace", the ep where Kira and Dukat team up to beat up some Klingons after the Klingons kill a bunch of Cardassian and Bajoran representatives.
The writing for Kira is really scattershot in this one. It pisses me off to no end that Dukat keeps trying to make nice, or talk to her (and flirt, which was a stupid idea to begin with, fuck the writers), and she just spits out venomous one-liners ("Why is it that whenever you smile, I wanna leave the room?") or says nothing. But she'll be perfectly kind to Tora. You'd THINK that Tora would eventually get pissed off with Kira treating her dad like shit and demand she act nicer, or leave them both alone. Why interact with someone when you know you'll never forgive them? It makes her come across as a selfish asshole. Also racist. She's nice to Tora solely because she's half-Bajoran, I'm sure of it.
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Just yesterday I saw the episode with the desert shipwreck that introduced Dukat's daughter ("Inconvenienced" I think? I don't remember the title). I'm rather neutral on it but some things stuck out:
Ignore how contrived it is to force Space Hitler and Space Jew together, and that killing Dukat would lead to a diplomatic crisis for a second. To break into the mini-labor camp they use the ol' "steal the guards uniforms" trick - but I thought no one knew what the Breen looked like beneath their suits, that was their shtick wasn't it?
 
The Empirical Bogey said:
Just yesterday I saw the episode with the desert shipwreck that introduced Dukat's daughter ("Inconvenienced" I think? I don't remember the title). I'm rather neutral on it but some things stuck out:
Ignore how contrived it is to force Space Hitler and Space Jew together, and that killing Dukat would lead to a diplomatic crisis for a second. To break into the mini-labor camp they use the ol' "steal the guards uniforms" trick - but I thought no one knew what the Breen looked like beneath their suits, that was their shtick wasn't it?
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I've always assumed the Breen armor has some kind of system that acidifies the body on death or something, it seems extremely unlikely that no one would be able to get their hands on one to examine if that wasn't the case.
 
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