Might be cool if the Deferi rejected their Balance hat later down the line for a Pragmatism hat.
Sudden complete reversals like that rarely work out well, it tends to give the story an arbitrary, fairy tale feel that viewers/readers/players/etc. don't really go for outside of children's stories.
The problem with the Deferi isn't that they live by a philosophy of balance, it is the fact that the philosophy is done as an unnuanced absolute which makes the race come off as a shallow, dull, one trick pony. All it takes is reading a few lines of dialog and there is nothing more to discover about them.
Vulcans and their logic is a great example of a people driven by a single philosophy but with the nuances that make them come alive for the viewers.
So the Deferi are just going to sit there and continue with trying to find balance after it failed them in their time of need aka the time when the Breen invaded their home planet and kill a bunch of their population over an artifact, IDK about you but if another species did that to my planet and my people I would do everything in my power to seek revenge.
Of course you would, but to misquote a Lectroid: "Not your damn planet, monkey-boy!"
You're from the planet of the apes, and we kill whatever gets in our way. Violence is our hammer, not balance.
Might be cool if the Deferi rejected their Balance hat later down the line for a Pragmatism hat.
Sudden complete reversals like that rarely work out well, it tends to give the story an arbitrary, fairy tale feel that viewers/readers/players/etc. don't really go for outside of children's stories.
The problem with the Deferi isn't that they live by a philosophy of balance, it is the fact that the philosophy is done as an unnuanced absolute which makes the race come off as a shallow, dull, one trick pony. All it takes is reading a few lines of dialog and there is nothing more to discover about them.
Vulcans and their logic is a great example of a people driven by a single philosophy but with the nuances that make them come alive for the viewers.
Lets be honest though - the Deferi are just another example of the 'Planet of Hats' trope. A trope that Trek has become very well known for and has maintained in each and every series. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/PlanetOfHats/StarTrek
True, the Deferi so far are a "planet of hats" trope, that is what happens without nuance. The trope is common in almost all "travelling" type stories where there is very little time to develop the people they meet onscreen and probably will never be seen again. For that matter it can be generalized to the planets themselves in many cases so we get desert worlds, jungle worlds, water worlds, ice worlds, etc. instead of the full range environments that a real planet like Earth has.
It is a matter of getting the reader/viewer/audience up to speed quickly so the plot can continue without undue delay (streaming serials had a lot of trouble with that and other pacing issues in the beginning, and still haven't gotten it completely worked out yet).
The key is that the writer has to deeply understand the culture they are writing about or at least the elements that go into it so they can juggle it (and its shades of exception) on the fly into something believable, to go a lot deeper in their head than what they put on the page or it comes out as trite and shallow. And it only gets more difficult the more the culture differs from the familiar.
I guess its possible that 'Strange New Worlds' might break this trend but I agree that Trek has rarely actually been about exploration.
I think it makes some sense Star Trek would be this way.
The writers for TNG have admitted that, by the show's 7th season, they were running out of ideas for new episodes because TNG had pretty much done every plot that made sense to do... often times twice. This is what led to the infamous drop in quality in TNG's 7th season. DS9 was very much a reaction to this. Its laser focus on already known species, and fleshing them out, was reactionary to the dearth of ideas on how one could continue Trek in a more traditional format.
Now DS9 had kickback from the fanbase for being so different, which led to Voyager trying to adopt a more TOS/TNG approach. But Voyager in many ways showed why this wouldn't work anymore. TOS and TNG had already done most everything, so Voyager's episodes tended to come across as mere rehashes of already existing TOS/TNG plots, just with different colored aliens.
ENT backtracked to the most DS9 approach. Though they did add one major race group with the Xindi, they used them in a very DS9 way, as part of a season long story arc, rather then the more TOS/TNG approach of a one off. And we have seen this more DS9-like trend continue with the Kelvin movies, Discovery, Picard, Lower Decks, etc.
The problem with trying to come up with something new for Star Trek is that Star Trek, as an IP, is already so stupidly expansive that if there is an idea that actually make sense, and even if it doesn't make sense, its almost certainly found its way into one of the 800+ episodes, or 13 movies. Be it some kind of alien species, ancient alien artifact, or spatial anomaly, its probably somewhere in Trek canon. And when you can redo that same idea again, just with a different color alien, or calling the anomaly something different, or take the already existent thing an expand upon it, the latter is preferable as that adds depth to the franchise, whereas adding something new adds width. And Star Trek already has more width then it knows what to do with, but the vast majority of that width was so underused in the TV shows that it has the depth of a puddle.
Could Cryptic make up something "new" for some storyline? Sure. Would it actually be "new" as an idea in Star Trek? Probably not. And in that case why not just use the thing that already exists? In a licensed product its always better to build on the already existing aspects of the license, rather then make up something new. The things that already exist are what people want to see.
Running out of ideas just means they have boxed themselves with habitual thinking and need to look outside of the box for a fresh angle. Science fiction was so far out of the Hollywood writer's wheelhouse in the 1960s that Star Trek writers were struggling to even finish the second season and it was plain that they would completely run out of ideas by the end of third if they did not do something about it.
So they decided to change the focus for the fourth season (at that point they did not know there would not be a fourth season yet) and instead of going for breadth so much they would switch to depth and planned for approximately half the episodes being a deep dive into the Federation-Klingon cold war in the Organian Neutral Zone.
And the Federation would not just curb stomp carboard Klingons all the time either. They intended for a lot of those stories to be the kind where both sides come out with a sort of partial victory in a complex situation, and even for the Klingons to have a clear win now and then too (I imagine that last one was a particularly hard sell).
There were even plans to build a permanent Klingon bridge (which of course never happened since the show was cancelled, they hadn't even come up with a solid design by that point) and share the corridors and whatnot using different lighting and quickly switchable dressings in the rest of the Enterprise set for Koloth's ship.
Anyway, the point is that running out of ideas is entirely relative since all stories can be boiled down to 36 basic plot elements and 8 basic "shapes", everything is just different combinations and treatments of those elements (not everyone agrees exactly on the 36, but Vonnegut was right about the shapes, they can be plotted and analyzed by computer and after millions of stories fed it comes to a solid 8). Since story "shape" is not a well known concept outside of writing circles here is a short video explaining it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP3c1h8v2ZQ
Not all of the shapes are used a lot in TV of course, since some of them are tragedies, so the effective pool is even smaller than eight for shows like Star Trek. It is not about how many options there are, it is how you use them.
Comments
Of course you would, but to misquote a Lectroid: "Not your damn planet, monkey-boy!"
You're from the planet of the apes, and we kill whatever gets in our way. Violence is our hammer, not balance.
(See also: Moties, Pierson's puppeteers, Telfi (classification VTXM), Jophur, Hoka)
True, the Deferi so far are a "planet of hats" trope, that is what happens without nuance. The trope is common in almost all "travelling" type stories where there is very little time to develop the people they meet onscreen and probably will never be seen again. For that matter it can be generalized to the planets themselves in many cases so we get desert worlds, jungle worlds, water worlds, ice worlds, etc. instead of the full range environments that a real planet like Earth has.
It is a matter of getting the reader/viewer/audience up to speed quickly so the plot can continue without undue delay (streaming serials had a lot of trouble with that and other pacing issues in the beginning, and still haven't gotten it completely worked out yet).
The key is that the writer has to deeply understand the culture they are writing about or at least the elements that go into it so they can juggle it (and its shades of exception) on the fly into something believable, to go a lot deeper in their head than what they put on the page or it comes out as trite and shallow. And it only gets more difficult the more the culture differs from the familiar.
Running out of ideas just means they have boxed themselves with habitual thinking and need to look outside of the box for a fresh angle. Science fiction was so far out of the Hollywood writer's wheelhouse in the 1960s that Star Trek writers were struggling to even finish the second season and it was plain that they would completely run out of ideas by the end of third if they did not do something about it.
So they decided to change the focus for the fourth season (at that point they did not know there would not be a fourth season yet) and instead of going for breadth so much they would switch to depth and planned for approximately half the episodes being a deep dive into the Federation-Klingon cold war in the Organian Neutral Zone.
And the Federation would not just curb stomp carboard Klingons all the time either. They intended for a lot of those stories to be the kind where both sides come out with a sort of partial victory in a complex situation, and even for the Klingons to have a clear win now and then too (I imagine that last one was a particularly hard sell).
There were even plans to build a permanent Klingon bridge (which of course never happened since the show was cancelled, they hadn't even come up with a solid design by that point) and share the corridors and whatnot using different lighting and quickly switchable dressings in the rest of the Enterprise set for Koloth's ship.
Anyway, the point is that running out of ideas is entirely relative since all stories can be boiled down to 36 basic plot elements and 8 basic "shapes", everything is just different combinations and treatments of those elements (not everyone agrees exactly on the 36, but Vonnegut was right about the shapes, they can be plotted and analyzed by computer and after millions of stories fed it comes to a solid 8). Since story "shape" is not a well known concept outside of writing circles here is a short video explaining it:
Not all of the shapes are used a lot in TV of course, since some of them are tragedies, so the effective pool is even smaller than eight for shows like Star Trek. It is not about how many options there are, it is how you use them.