I just noticed something

rykus83

I've recently be rewatching Andromeda with Kevin Sorbo and today well wacching t.v. I saw a commercial for the new season of Discovery and it looks like there just doing the Andromeda story. Which isnt all that strange both from Gene Roddenberry.

rattler2

Well... the major difference is that in Discovery there's still some remnant of the Federation intact, whereas in Andromeda they had to rebuild the Commonwealth from the ground up.

Also I think some of the stories in Andromeda were originally planned for Star Trek, but never made it over.

chipg7

This should prob be a Ten Forward thread, also could use a more descriptive title.

Gotta remember though that Trek is 54 years old. There's a lot of sci fi that's going to be seen as similar, especially because Trek created so many sci fi tropes that sometimes it feels like a parody of itself, or something that's been done before by Trek itself, lol.

Also, Andromeda and Discovery make sense to have the rebuilding themes. Good sci fi adds in allegory, usually social or political. Early 2000s and now, both times there've been major conversations about the health of American democracy, right? Disco's writers even said in one of their latest interviews that there'd be parallel's to American politics and the fall of the Federation.

phoenixc

There is another interesting similarity in that Andromeda used the same character setup as The Cage and Genisis II, though when TOS went to the second pilot Roddenberry switched to his alternate character setup.

The characters map like this (using the format The Cage > Genisis II > Andromeda):

Pike > Dillon Hunt #1 > Dillon Hunt #2 as the main viewpoint character who is out of their time or just a bit anachronistic
Number One > Lyra-a > Bekka Valentine as the pragmatic "devil on the shoulder" advisor with a dark past or heritage
Spock > Isiah > Trance Gemini as the moral, big hearted but somewhat alien seeming "angel on the shoulder" advisor

TOS itself used a different setup because while NBC was leery about Spock they had absolute hissyfits about Number One so Roddenberry scrapped the original character dynamic and brought in "good guy rogue" Kirk, rolled parts of the Cage Spock and Number One together to create the TOS Spock, and brought in the "curmudgeon lampshader" Bones.

Roddenberry used those two general lead character dynamics in several other productions before and after Star Trek (though the ones after never seemed to make it past the pilot stage until others took up the stories after his death, like it released them from the "curse" of not being Star Trek).