What Star Trek needs......

jake477

With all the talk about Discovery, Picard and alternate timelines of the franchise it seems like a gigantic mess. Personally as a long time Star Trek fan since I was 4 years old, I think we need a completely brand new crew in the Paramount style Trek, not CBS All Access. Paramount has shown it can do a quality product such as TNG, DS9, VOY, and ENT depending on which flavor you prefer. However a lot of people are turned off of Discovery in general, as gamers we may think its cool but as a show compared to the original five its kind of lacking in basic areas Trek excelled at. The Orville hits all the right cues which is extremely sad when a new franchise does something better then the original. Battlestar Galactica was that for Star Wars in some ways.

We need a clean slate, a completely brand new crew set after Voyager, no connections to anyone else. There has been some talk about making the Odyssey Class Canon and well, I think its a a great idea. Its a worth successor to the Sovereign Class we see in the movies, plus it just oozes Galaxy Class charm. You don't even need to design a new uniform....everyone loves the TNGM/DS9 Uniforms as they are. Then you hire writers who know past Trek inside and out including get some director talents like LeVar Burton or Roxanne Dawson etc. Once Rick Berman gets back in the picture we have a winning formula. Then you put it on ACTUAL TV, no pay walls. Get some no name actors to be the crew, after all most of our previous crews were made up of at the time....kind of B listers, with some notable exceptions.

Trek fans have been craving this for YEARS and its way past due. When the Orville does a better job then you, you have serious problems. We had a winning formula people that lasted 25 years on TV. However that takes something more then 2 Dimensional thinking and Hollywood has demonstrated its far beyond its capabilities.

Let me know your thoughts below.

starkaos

It is extremely doubtful that we will ever see another Star Trek series on TV since streaming seems to be the future of TV, movie, and possibly games.

rattler2

Here's the problem...

EVERY new Trek has been attacked by fans for being different from what came before. Even TNG. Its just not been as visible as it is now thanks to the Internet. Its usually after a few seasons or even after its stopped airing that people tend to actually look past the differences and more at the story that was told. These days you don't see the hate for Enterprise that you did when it first aired. Same with the Kelvin Timeline. Its all been shifted to Discovery, and if you pay attention... almost ALL of the complaints against Discovery were recycled from the Kelvin Timeline, which in turn were recycled from Enterprise. Almost WORD FOR WORD.

With a show like Discovery, you still have to honor what came "after" the time period it was set in, so certain things were already locked down. And we know for a FACT that Starfleet has had multiple uniforms in service at a time. Just look at the time period where TNG and DS9 overlapped. Two different uniforms in service at the same time.

Another complaint has been about how advanced it looks vs what we know. Well... duh. Kinda hard to dumb down to 60s level visuals while keeping it looking like something that should exist in the 23rd Century using what we've learned about tech since the 60s. A modern audience won't appreciate the same asthetics we saw in TOS because it looks cheep and less advanced than the PCs we have today. Balancing the look with what came before is a challenge that you face with a show that actively shows technological progression. You can get away with it in Star Wars to a degree because not much has changed and it isn't supposed to be OUR future. Star Trek... you have to consider what we have now as well as what came before. You can design something with the same lines, but you also have to make it believable that that will run a starship. Compare the TOS Bridge with the Discovery era bridge on the Enterprise. Looks the same, but actually has more stuff like active displays. Basically a lot more than just a square of jellybean buttons on a console. Honestly there was a LOT of unused space on the TOS bridge consoles. Yea apparently there was supposed to be some kind of displays or something in those spaces but due to budget and the fact the tech at the time made that impossible they couldn't do it. But if you replace those controls with Discovery style controls while maintaining the feel... boom you have a much more believable setup. You can actually see how they imput coordinates for navigation, target enemy ships, ect.

In short... doesn't matter who's running it or where. Anything new is instantly hated until people actually stop with the attacks and let it stand on its own rather than expect it to be exactly the same as what came before.

starkaos

With the extensive amount of time travel in Enterprise, it could be argued that Discovery exists in an alternate timeline to TOS. We know that Enterprise happened after First Contact with the Regeneration episode, but was their records of the Xindi Incident on TOS Enterprise? Every time someone travels to the past and changes something means that the present is in an alternate timeline. There is not one fixed CBS timeline in Star Trek.

khan5000

Isn’t the Orville behind a paywall now?

jonsills

jake477 wrote: »

With all the talk about Discovery, Picard and alternate timelines of the franchise it seems like a gigantic mess. Personally as a long time Star Trek fan since I was 4 years old, I think we need a completely brand new crew in the Paramount style Trek, not CBS All Access. Paramount has shown it can do a quality product such as TNG, DS9, VOY, and ENT depending on which flavor you prefer. However a lot of people are turned off of Discovery in general, as gamers we may think its cool but as a show compared to the original five its kind of lacking in basic areas Trek excelled at. The Orville hits all the right cues which is extremely sad when a new franchise does something better then the original. Battlestar Galactica was that for Star Wars in some ways.

We need a clean slate, a completely brand new crew set after Voyager, no connections to anyone else. There has been some talk about making the Odyssey Class Canon and well, I think its a a great idea. Its a worth successor to the Sovereign Class we see in the movies, plus it just oozes Galaxy Class charm. You don't even need to design a new uniform....everyone loves the TNGM/DS9 Uniforms as they are. Then you hire writers who know past Trek inside and out including get some director talents like LeVar Burton or Roxanne Dawson etc. Once Rick Berman gets back in the picture we have a winning formula. Then you put it on ACTUAL TV, no pay walls. Get some no name actors to be the crew, after all most of our previous crews were made up of at the time....kind of B listers, with some notable exceptions.

Trek fans have been craving this for YEARS and its way past due. When the Orville does a better job then you, you have serious problems. We had a winning formula people that lasted 25 years on TV. However that takes something more then 2 Dimensional thinking and Hollywood has demonstrated its far beyond its capabilities.

Let me know your thoughts below.

As my father used to say in situations like that, "What you mean 'we', paleface?"

I'm quite fond of DSC, and found Orville sufficiently boring that I don't think I made it to the end of the first season. "Frat boys in space" just doesn't amuse me, I fear. And it certainly didn't "do a better job" of being Trek - it was a pleasant homage to TNG done sitcom style, but that's about it.

As for Battlestar Galactica, nBSG didn't do Star Wars better than the original, because it didn't do Star Wars at all. The original tried to ape SW, to the point that Glen Larson was able to slide a lot of Mormon theology into the show because all the network paid attention to was the pretty lights, but it certainly didn't "outdo" the original.

khan5000

> @coldnapalm said:
> (Quote)
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> Yeah it's under Hulu now. What is up with TV stations giving up gold mines to these streaming services? The Expanse, Lucifer and now the Orville. Hey, you know the shows that everyone who watches them likes? Yeah. Well let's get rid of them so somebody else can grab them. WTF?!?

The issue is that those shows are expensive to make. SyFy wanted to keep The Expanse but it wasn’t bringing in the $$$ to keep it on the air. Compare that to Game of Thrones which I believe was the most expensive show ever and the revenue and viewers justified spending that much on the show.

I don’t think you are gonna see science fiction on network television anymore. Special effects have gotten more elaborate and very close to what we see in movies. That cost money and that type of money is all in streaming.

starkaos

coldnapalm wrote: »

starkaos wrote: »

With the extensive amount of time travel in Enterprise, it could be argued that Discovery exists in an alternate timeline to TOS. We know that Enterprise happened after First Contact with the Regeneration episode, but was their records of the Xindi Incident on TOS Enterprise? Every time someone travels to the past and changes something means that the present is in an alternate timeline. There is not one fixed CBS timeline in Star Trek.

That is ALL head canon. You do whatever head canon you want. That is not what the IP holder has said.

Actually, it is logic not head canon. Changing the past changes the present. Bones goes back in time and saves a woman which results in the Federation never existing until Kirk and Spock go back in time to prevent the woman from being saved. The Borg goes back in time and assimilates Earth until the Enterprise-E goes back in time and stops the Borg. If the Enterprise is unable to change history back to the status quo, then there is no more Federation. Most of the changes caused by protecting the status quo is minor enough that there are not noticeable changes to the timeline as far as the series is concerned. Voyager was mostly about future versions of themselves interfering with their past. So there is the alternate timeline where Voyager crashed into a planet and an alternate timeline where it took another 23 years for Voyager to get home. So as far as we know, future Harry Kim and future Katherine Janeway destroyed their present timeline.

However, Enterprise is full of instances where the Enterprise doesn't fix temporal incidents like the Xindi Incident or the Suliban. Future Guy gave technology to the Suliban and genetically modified them. In the previous timeline, there was no point in Archer confronting the Xindi about their attack. So millions of people on Earth were not killed during the Xindi Incident and the Federation would have encountered the Xindi at a later point in time. So the main issue is "was their records of the Xindi Incident on TOS Enterprise?" Either the events of Enterprise and Discovery already happened in TOS or it is an alternate timeline.

jonsills

No, it's headcanon. Trek time travel works the way the particular episode needs - sometimes the entire universe is changed, and what was no longer exists (TOS:"The City On the Edge of Forever"); sometimes changes spark multiple quantum realities, timelines leading off from the original (TNG:"Parallels", ST09); sometimes it turns out the past is the way it is precisely because of the time-travelers (DS9:"Trials and Tribble-ations"); sometimes history just grabs the nearest equivalent person and shoves them into the roles needed (DS9:"Past Tense"). There's really no consistent theory of time travel, particularly when we find that where it's malleable, it's often being toyed with by various forces from a distant future in which temporal shifting is done routinely (the "Temporal Cold War" from ENT).

So anything you say about it that isn't actually stated in an episode is headcanon. And the episodes aren't required to agree with one another, either.

As for "logic" (which your post, by ignoring available data, is not), we have Niven's Law of Time Travel: In a plenum that permits both time travel and alterations of history, time travel will never be invented. The reasoning goes like this - once people are able to alter history, other people will be trying to "set it right". Eventually, everything will become so convoluted that someone will figure out the easiest way to fix it - make sure time travel is never invented (ref VOY:"The Year of Hell", which also uses the first of the above theories of time travel).

rattler2

starkaos wrote: »

So the main issue is "was their records of the Xindi Incident on TOS Enterprise?" Either the events of Enterprise and Discovery already happened in TOS or it is an alternate timeline.

Short Answer: Yes it happened.
Long Answer: TOS takes place in the 2260s. Discovery takes place 10 years before that, and Enterprise is 100 years before that. Ifso Facto... records exist. But just like Spock not revealing he had a half-brother until ST5, it wasn't relevant to the story at hand so we never saw it (in universe wise).
Out of universe, we never heard of it because TOS was filmed in the 1960s, whereas Enterprise and Discovery were filmed decades later. So naturally events from a show in the future would not be referenced in the original show from decades earlier.

If Enterprise got another season we WOULD have seen an event referenced in TOS, the Earth-Romulan War. Also... in the Kelvin Timeline there are records of the Xindi Conflict. Before anyone points out the divergent timeline, remember that the branching point was in 2233, so anything before 2233 would have progressed exactly the same in both timelines.

Which also brings up an interesting question in the Prime Timeline: Is Altamid still unexplored and is Edison still plotting revenge against the Federation for supposedly abandoning him and his crew? Without a Starbase Yorktown to contact its possible that the Franklin is still on that planet.

legendarylycan

going by the actual movie, altamid is very far removed from federation space, given it was stated as 'being outside federation jurisdiction' - apparently they went exploring in a radically different direction than they did in prime

going by simon pegg, altamid is in the southern spiral arm of THE FLUFFING ANDROMEDA GALAXY, which the federation can somehow reach in less than 300 years in the KT...yeah, this is why we don't let BTS stuff influence lore

either way...it hasn't been discovered in prime yet, so yes, both the franklin and krall are still there - and in fact, krall is an even BIGGER threat in prime because he's had 150+ extra years to build up​​

starkaos

rattler2 wrote: »

starkaos wrote: »

So the main issue is "was their records of the Xindi Incident on TOS Enterprise?" Either the events of Enterprise and Discovery already happened in TOS or it is an alternate timeline.

Short Answer: Yes it happened.
Long Answer: TOS takes place in the 2260s. Discovery takes place 10 years before that, and Enterprise is 100 years before that. Ifso Facto... records exist. But just like Spock not revealing he had a half-brother until ST5, it wasn't relevant to the story at hand so we never saw it (in universe wise).
Out of universe, we never heard of it because TOS was filmed in the 1960s, whereas Enterprise and Discovery were filmed decades later. So naturally events from a show in the future would not be referenced in the original show from decades earlier.

However, there is no evidence of that. Daniels mentioned that the Xindi Incident and other temporal events never happened in his original timeline. So we don't know if the events of TOS exist in a previous timeline or happened after Enterprise with all of the Temporal Cold War nonsense.

jonsills wrote: »

sometimes changes spark multiple quantum realities, timelines leading off from the original (TNG:"Parallels", ST09); .

Parallels had nothing to do with time travel, but quantum realities.

DATA: I believe the quantum fissure we discovered is a fixed point across the space time continuum. A keyhole which intersects many other quantum realities.
TROI: What do you mean, quantum realities?
DATA: For any event, there is an infinite number of possible outcomes. Our choices determine which outcomes will follow. But there is a theory in quantum physics that all possibilities that can happen, do happen in alternate quantum realities.
WORF: And somehow I have been shifting from one reality to another.
DATA: That is correct.

Star Trek likes to gloss over the changes caused by the protagonists restoring their past since it is not part of the episode. Certain Star Trek writers like to use the aftermath of time travel as their inspiration for their novels like what happened to certain characters that were affected by the protagonists' time travel.

jonsills

shadowfang240 wrote: »

going by simon pegg, altamid is in the southern spiral arm of THE FLUFFING ANDROMEDA GALAXY, which the federation can somehow reach in less than 300 years in the KT...​​

Even worse, in astronomical parlance Galactic North is perpendicular to the plane of the galactic ecliptic. Galactic North of us would be due "up", as it were. The "southern spiral arm" would require some sort of bizarre alternative form of galaxy, perhaps a pair of spirals that are still in the process of colliding.

The Andromeda galaxy, a naked-eye object from Earth (and growing imperceptibly brighter every day, as it rushes to our meeting in 2-3 billion years!), is easily seen through a good telescope as a classical spiral galaxy, slightly larger than our Milky Way. It has no "southern spiral arm".

Simon Pegg may be a Trekkie, he may be a good filmmaker, but he's not even an amateur astronomer. Nor, clearly, did he consult with any.

Jon's Post, supplemental: And of course shortly after posting this, I learned of Mayall's Object, a pair of spiral galaxies colliding at almost right angles off in the rough direction of Ursa Major. So, for a while at least, that one actually does have a southern spiral arm!

jonsills

Double post.

centersolace

> @coldnapalm said:
> (Quote)
>
> That is ALL head canon. You do whatever head canon you want. That is not what the IP holder has said.

IP holders have been wrong before.

Just look at Disney and Star Wars. :P

artan42

You mean 'what you want' not 'what Trek needs'. Just be honest with your premise.

centersolace wrote: »

> @coldnapalm said:
> (Quote)
>
> That is ALL head canon. You do whatever head canon you want. That is not what the IP holder has said.

IP holders have been wrong before.

Just look at Disney and Star Wars. :P

So you've given an example of an IP holder who is doing fantastic things with their IP.

Fox and Firefly would have been a better example than the company printing money with the critical successes of the SW franchise.

starkaos

artan42 wrote: »

You mean 'what you want' not 'what Trek needs'. Just be honest with your premise.

centersolace wrote: »

> @coldnapalm said:
> (Quote)
>
> That is ALL head canon. You do whatever head canon you want. That is not what the IP holder has said.

IP holders have been wrong before.

Just look at Disney and Star Wars. :P

So you've given an example of an IP holder who is doing fantastic things with their IP.

Fox and Firefly would have been a better example than the company printing money with the critical successes of the SW franchise.

Not as fantastic as some people would believe since Disney cancelled standalone movies due to the failure of Solo. Solo was setting itself up for a sequel with the introduction of Darth Maul at the end. However, I think the failure of Solo is due to people's reaction to The Last Jedi since Solo is far better than The Last Jedi. Maybe Star Wars will focus on series like The Mandalorian since series are able to provide a better story than a movie.

fred26291

I was quite disappointed to find out it was being put behind a paywall. Cable is expensive enough, I will not be paying for streaming services on top of cable.

khan5000

> @starkaos said:
> (Quote)
>
> Not as fantastic as some people would believe since Disney cancelled standalone movies due to the failure of Solo. Solo was setting itself up for a sequel with the introduction of Darth Maul at the end. However, I think the failure of Solo is due to people's reaction to The Last Jedi since Solo is far better than The Last Jedi. Maybe Star Wars will focus on series like The Mandalorian since series are able to provide a better story than a movie.

The example of Disney and Star Wars was faulty. The point was/is that CBS sets what is and isn’t canon. Not the fans. It doesn’t matter if you liked The Last Jedi or not or Rise of Skywalker or not...the companies set what is canon

starkaos

khan5000 wrote: »

> starkaos said:
> (Quote)
>
> Not as fantastic as some people would believe since Disney cancelled standalone movies due to the failure of Solo. Solo was setting itself up for a sequel with the introduction of Darth Maul at the end. However, I think the failure of Solo is due to people's reaction to The Last Jedi since Solo is far better than The Last Jedi. Maybe Star Wars will focus on series like The Mandalorian since series are able to provide a better story than a movie.

The example of Disney and Star Wars was faulty. The point was/is that CBS sets what is and isn’t canon. Not the fans. It doesn’t matter if you liked The Last Jedi or not or Rise of Skywalker or not...the companies set what is canon

And today, a bunch of "canon" from the 2009 Countdown comics was wiped out of existence. What CBS sets as canon is fluid while limiting Canon to only what is shown in the official TV shows and movies is permanent. As far as Star Trek Online or the novels go, they are only canon to themselves.

khan5000

> @starkaos said:
> (Quote)
>
> And today, a bunch of "canon" from the 2009 Countdown comics was wiped out of existence. What CBS sets as canon is fluid while limiting Canon to only what is shown in the official TV shows and movies is permanent. As far as Star Trek Online or the novels go, they are only canon to themselves.

The IP owner sets what’s canon. Only the IP owner can canonize things and decanonize things.