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What if STO was a live-action TV series?
sumghai
Member Posts: 1,072 Arc User
In my spare time, I have been examining the possibility of STO being made into a live-action TV series, and as such, I devised some character and episode summaries:
List of Episodes and Summaries
Main and Recurring Characters, plus applicable tropes
As always, this is still very much a work in progress, and I'm not really expecting anything serious to come of this yet* - still, a man can dream, can't he?
Feedback, critique and offerings of bacon are appreciated. Death threats are tolerable.
*Please don't flay me alive, CBS and Cryptic.
List of Episodes and Summaries
Main and Recurring Characters, plus applicable tropes
As always, this is still very much a work in progress, and I'm not really expecting anything serious to come of this yet* - still, a man can dream, can't he?
Feedback, critique and offerings of bacon are appreciated. Death threats are tolerable.
*Please don't flay me alive, CBS and Cryptic.
Laws of thermodynamics as applied to life: 0 - You must play the game. 1 - You can't win. 2 - You can't break even. 3 - You can't quit.
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:cool:
I Was A Trekkie Before It Was Cool ... Sept. 8th, 1966 ... Not To Mention Before Most Folks Around Here Were Born!
Forever a STO Veteran-Minion
Heh.
Time to discover what the Undiscovered Country is really like...
"Good-Looking Federation Captain with a Phaser" - The Odyssey's CO isn't much of a looker, but he's not half bad with the phaser
"Busty Vulcan Science Officer" - Cmdr. T'Lora, the Brunel's XO. To be fair, her hair is much shorter and she actually never appears on-screen.
STOP READING MY IN GAME CHARACTER BIOGRAPHY AND OUT OF GAME FAN FICTIONS!
:mad:
-Leonard Nimoy, RIP
Like most, you're not really doing "if STO was a series" using the stock characters, but with your characters. Your captain, your XO, etc. Whereas clearly, if we were going by the ad copy, the first would be Handsome Phaser Guy (look up at the forum header), and so on.
It'd either be very expensive or we'd have to settle for SeaQuest-level CGI for a lot of it. The Voth war and the final mission on Kobali Prime could make up for Star Trek squandering its one big ground battle, but there's a major chance the Virisaurus Rex will end up looking less Jurassic Park and more Megatron from Beast Wars.
Unless it had Defiance's budget. That show has some pretty sweet CGI for a SyFy original. :eek:
-Leonard Nimoy, RIP
Agreed on most counts.
90~95% of the ship-to-ship engagements found in the game can be written out entirely with no negative impact on the plot. The rest would be reduced to a handful of ships, two or three separate waves of 4~5 ships at the very most.
Similarly, ground battles would be reduced to mostly sneaking around and subduing one or two sentries here and there.
Failing that, I could always settle for an adaptation into one of those newfangled Japanese animated series with English dubs, where VFX budget is less of a concern :P
Are you suggesting making a star trek anime? I don't think I could ever watch any star trek that was made like that.
*watches a bug-eyed anime captain kirk with spiky hair scream something while fireing a phaser* - nope.
On that note, nuBsG also seemed to demonstrate that more can be had for one's effects budget these days, than back when Star Trek was on the air.
Actually, come to think of it, was there a point when ENT and nuBsG ran concurrently?
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That would actually be kind of awesome. Even though I don't like anime.
Now imagine it but only with Picard.
I haven't watched Defiance, so I can't vouch for that. I do talk to Doug Drexler on Facebook sometimes*, and I know he did the VFX for Defiance.
*He left a nice comment on some STO-inspired uniform fanart I did a while back
ENT ran from 2001 to 2005, while nuBSG was 2004 to 2009. I know for a fact that the quality of CGI in TV has risen and the associated costs dropped over the years, but I'm not sure whether major ship engagements for a new Trek show would become more cost effective.
nuBSG style shaky cam POVs of ship battles might be neat, though.
To be clear, I made the anime comment in jest, since we all agree that a live action TV show is better.
With regards to anime art / pacing, not all anime is slapsticky girly humor like Lucky Star, Oreimo or Toradora! - Space Battleship Yamato 2199 (the 2012 remake of the 1970's classic) and Flag (2006 series about the UN's experimental mecha division) are examples of somewhat more serious storytelling / art styles.
My fanon is set in mid-2409, right in the STO timeline. I plan to stretch out the storyline over a number of years so that Surface Tension occurs by the end of 2412.
The Ent-F will indeed be the Odyssey-class, with Captain Shon and his crew making recurring appearances. There will be an in-universe explanation why the Odyssey name is/was used on multiple ships/projects/programs at the same time.
The Ent-E, unfortunately, won't be seen, and specifics of its fate will be left ambiguous just like in STO lore. All we would know is that its crew made it safely home and the ship was decommissioned.
I specifically wrote my fanon so that the stories revolve around multiple ship crews, with events connected to each other:
- The vast majority of stories will be based around the main cast's ship USS Odyssey, a newly-built but last-of-her-kind Intrepid-class vessel used as a testbed for new technologies to be implemented in Starfleet's "Odyssey" Project.
- The USS Brunel is a vintage Saber-class SCE support ship, whose crew's strong engineering expertise will become more important in the New Romulus / Solanae Dyson Sphere arcs.
- The USS Hinata is a refitted Rhode Island-class short-range science ship, who would often encounter/cause problems that the Odyssey has to fix.
- The IKS Somraw commanded by Zhang's rival, Captain Margon. There will be a two-parter where Zhang has to help Margon and his Klingon crew in "Bringing Down The House" and "The House Always Wins".
- The RRW Shalyar is a Rom Rep warbird featured most prominently in the Reman Resistance / New Romulus storylines.
- The USS Enterprise-F will play a minor supporting role with infrequent appearances, since the flagship is usually off doing more important "diplomatic" stuff.
- I quite like the idea of swirling particles of light that suggest people being "picked up" and "dropped off". To retain some connection with TNG/DS9/VOY, the effect would be bluish rather than nuTrek's gold.
- The entering/exiting warp effects are pretty neat too, especially the distortion of the POV. I'd imagine that the pilot episode of the Odyssey heading out from the Utopia Planitia Fleet Yards would have a scene where the view from the bridge will appear to stretch.
- The at-warp effect was apparently based on real consultation with scientists who conjectured what space would really look like from the perspective of a vessel travelling at warp. Obviously, if the Odyssey needs to do its occasional QSD sprint, some other VFX will be needed to top that.
On the other hand:
- I think I prefer the classic orange phaser beams and beefy blue quantum torpedoes, thank you very much :P
It would have to be a really, really bad sitcom that refuses to go away. Kind of like Seinfeld, but with less substance.
If STO was relegated to a sitcom, I'd prefer something sans canned laughter, like Modern Family:
(Barber and Shran are sitting in the mess hall when Captain Zhang swings over.)
Zhang: Chocolate milk?
Barber: Mirra accidentally replicated it. Since she's Andorian and can't have chocolate, she gave it to me.
Zhang: Is it nice?
Barber: Not bad.
Zhang: Tell you what- (grabs salt shaker)
Barber: Wait, what are you doin-
Zhang: -it's an old trick from home. It'll make it taste better.
Barber: Dude! Not cool! You don't just go in and randomly put salt in people's food!
Shran: What's the harm in trying?
(Barber sitting alone as if recounting the earlier situation.)
Barber: Okay, I'll admit, it actually tasted really good after he added the salt. But he's a dork, and I'm supposed to oppose him on principle!
To clarify - this fanon I'm doing isn't a word-for-word transcription of STO hook, line and sinker. Sure, the overall story might be the same, but that's about it - I'm trying to devise additional stories more closer to classic Trek e.g. Ziggurat, Hollow Memories, while keeping the STO backdrop in mind.
Knowing Sir Patrick Stewart's weird sense of humor he'd probably go right along with it, too.
"THERE... ARE... FOUR... WAAAAUUUGGHHH!!!" (hulk-rages out and destroys Gul Madred and his damn lights)
...Oh, baby, you know, I've really got to leave you / Oh, I can hear it callin 'me / I said don't you hear it callin' me the way it used to do?...
- Anne Bredon
YES!!! YES!!! YYYYYEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
It would be even more awesome than that lobster costume selfie he posted on Halloween!
Lol, you have a point.
That would be The Needs of the Many. It's not a novel so much as a series of interviews by Jake Sisko with important figures of the era.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
THEY ARE BLUE
GET IT RIGHT
With that out of the way. Absolutely not an Intrepid-class. Fifty-year-old starships shouldn't even be in regular service, not on the front lines of multiple wars. Bellerophon class? Maybe. But honestly, I'm thinking an escort-type would be best. Maybe a Prometheus (read: Cerberus, because Cerberus AE is best AE) refit?
Go with story arcs. STO's story is one of its strong points, when it's not being smothered by the format. Use it.
Have each season be an in-game episode series, maybe? So the Klingon War arc gets one season, the whole True Way debacle gets another...Then maybe a season with all the featured arcs, so the 2800, Devidians, etc.?
Heh.
I guess I was meant to say TNG "classic" orange phasers, as opposed to TOS "classic" blue phasers. Then again, I was also attempting to make a distinction between those and the nuTrek red bolts.
Definitely NOT a warship or an escort.
I specifically and intentionally chose the Intrepid (as stated in the premise, a new one built at the end of the class's production run with the latest technology) to symbolize that the Federation isn't taking the war as seriously as they claim to be.
Also, prior to the start of the series, Zhang probably pulled a stunt as the acting captain of another vessel, and so the Admiralty decided to relegate him to a outdated class in an attempt to keep him out of the way - Zhang is by no means a renegade, but merely an "everyman" leading other ordinary Starfleet officers facing extraordinary challenges.
The ship will often confront opponents with far superior firepower, such that the crew would have to devise solution other than simple, brute force pew-pewing that a dedicated warship or escort can provide by default.
It's also meant to be a representation of the myth arc's biggest question: "In a time of war, are the Federation's ideals of diplomacy and exploration still relevant?"
I assume you've actually, you know, viewed the links I put up?
They're currently WIPs, but if you open up each category, there will be text in italic denoting which story arcs would go into which seasons.
The whole point of this exercise is to also rewrite/reorder each of the in-game missions in a format suitable for a TV series.
Sorry about my original post, incidentally. Probably came across as a bit rude.
My intention is that most of the episodes should be from STO - I do agree that, as demonstrated by many non-Trek scifi and even non-scifi shows, story arcs tend to be more interesting than standalone episodes.
I tossed in a few unique stories mainly to allow for character development, exploration and social commentary on real-life issues, something that older Trek TV shows do quite welll*.
*For instance, there's a story I'm working on about Federation member worlds rejecting Romulan refugees - it's meant to be a commentary on the contemporary boat people / asylum seekers issue here in Australia.