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Why do the plots of some episodes become the basis for entire expansions? Kobali, Vaadwaur, etc.
kayajay
Member Posts: 1,990 Arc User
Why do some episodes get expanded upon and not others?
The Kobali appeared in one episode of Voyager and an entire warzone was created, along with a number of episodes.
The same with the Vaadwaur...one episode of Voyager and multiple episodes of STO.
The Voth...again, one episode of Voyager. The Elachi did appear in Enterprise as well as The Next Generation, so there was more of them. The Tzenkethi were only ever mentioned in a single episode of DS9 (although I think it would have been terrific if instead of the Klingons, we saw the Tzenkethi war with the Federation instead).
Who makes the decision to build upon the plots of just one episode? Or is it decided by the rights? I know the reason that Tom Paris was created, was because they would have had to pay the creator of Nicholas Locarno rights.
The Vidians were a much larger part of Voyager with multiple episodes (and they're pretty terrifying stealing organs). I know that people knock it, but I do think Captain Proton offered a lot of fun things to do...a Satan's Robot kit module, like a Nomad Drone, Arachnia costume, Ray Gun weapons, etc.
The Kobali appeared in one episode of Voyager and an entire warzone was created, along with a number of episodes.
The same with the Vaadwaur...one episode of Voyager and multiple episodes of STO.
The Voth...again, one episode of Voyager. The Elachi did appear in Enterprise as well as The Next Generation, so there was more of them. The Tzenkethi were only ever mentioned in a single episode of DS9 (although I think it would have been terrific if instead of the Klingons, we saw the Tzenkethi war with the Federation instead).
Who makes the decision to build upon the plots of just one episode? Or is it decided by the rights? I know the reason that Tom Paris was created, was because they would have had to pay the creator of Nicholas Locarno rights.
The Vidians were a much larger part of Voyager with multiple episodes (and they're pretty terrifying stealing organs). I know that people knock it, but I do think Captain Proton offered a lot of fun things to do...a Satan's Robot kit module, like a Nomad Drone, Arachnia costume, Ray Gun weapons, etc.
Post edited by baddmoonrizin on
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Captain Proton for example is something they sometimes mentioned, but pointed out that it would require creating a lot of new assets - for a one-off, it's probably just not a good investment of dev resources. (This isn't some pure bean counting thing, by the way - it's also often in the interest of the player - if they have the choice of making 3 episodes or 1 episode with similar play length and the same budget, the 3 episodes are likely the better pick because it gives the players more to do.) And could you really make more than a one-off mission from Captain Proton? How deeply are people interested in basically having a fake advenure on the holodeck?
Also, not all stories still work. The Vidians were great Voyager villains, but in a later VOY episode there is a "Think Tank" that allegedly healed the Vidian disease, so the original source of conflict and horror would be gone. (I'd probably retcon that in some way, like "we thought we had healed it, but it came back with a vengeance", because an arc with some horror elements could be neat. But that is my "creative" ideas, not theres. And it wouldn't have fit so neatly in the whole Vaadwaur/Iconian arc the developers finally wanted to tell to conclusion.)
Tom Paris wasn't just created because of having to pay the creator - it's also that Nicholas Locarno was a different type of character, he wasn't as sympathetic as Tom. He didn't do what he did out of some misplaced sense of idealism, but for his ego, he was dishonest, and he got people killed for no good reason.
Because the writers thought this combination of races would make an interesting season, and having less existing canon material gave them more freedom to create their own stories.
Captain Proton was not part of the "real" Trek world so could not be part of the actual story. And it was almost as divisive as Neelix's cooking. Scratch that, everyone hates Neelix's cooking. Almost as divisive as Neelix? (Some people actually like him, I guess.)
But that also meant that there was less room for Cryptic's writers to come up with their own stories.
Essentially anything that introduces a race or species or class of technologically capable opponents works. Anything that uses a one-off incident - wandering asteroids, mad scientists, individual super-entities, planet-bound threats, science puzzles etc. - does not work for an expansion.
DR really, to me, felt like romp through the Delta Quadrant fixing or experiencing all the ways Janeway broke the quadrant. Which made a lot of sense, because Voyager basically traveled a quadrant, TRIBBLE with whoever they ran into along the way. So to me, DR really felt like it touched upon a lot of the consequences of Voyager's journey. Cryptic really took an awesome perspective of focusing on what those consequences would look like a couple decades later. So races like the Kobali or the Vaadwaur, sure we only say them in one of maybe to Voyager episodes, but Janeway's journey has serious consequences that we get to see in DR.
The rest well, they need something for content, and so they have some species that aren't seen much so they expand on them, and overall that is pretty reasonable and well done. They should be coming up with some original stuff though rather than relying solely on the shows.
However captains in STO have the full might of Starfleet or KDF at their disposal and such aren't short of allies or resources. Thus making vidians a trivial matter to deal with.
Yet.
Spock to Kirk, as Kirk is about to hug him.
Star Trek V: "The Final Frontier"
Your second question is really the answer to your first. The lead dev (or the top few) decide where the story is going to go, and that's pretty much all there is to it. So you better hope their tastes align with yours!
Also, they prefer to take plot points that were not fully explained and then build on them. Since a plot that spans multiple episodes is more likely to tie up more loose ends, it just turns out that many of the stories with open questions happen to come from single episode stories.
The-Grand-Nagus
Join Date: Sep 2008
As for Captain Proton...it could be that it became reality, with Chaotica travelling to the very real fifth dimension, setting up shop there and going to war with the alien explorers. I don't know...I'm just looking for fun content.
In the Delta arc, Seven was as she always was in the series, but I'm really hoping that Jeri comes back with a Picard arc and is as we've seen her in the trailer...bohemian and slick.
I suppose it's also going to bring the Cooperative back, because I think STO and Hugh being part of it, might have influenced the direction of Picard...is that the first time STO has made a difference to Trek outside?
The-Grand-Nagus
Join Date: Sep 2008
There are not that many loose ends left that are so narrow that they could not be made to work in a faction agnostic way though. Even things that normally would not interest a faction like the Klingons would not prevent a KDF ship from getting involved for the good of the Alliance even if they would have normally ignored it in pre-Alliance days for instance.
A Klingon start to one of those missions could even have mild ironic humor like "you are the closest ship so it is your day to honor the Alliance by looking into this ridiculous thing. Fight with honor."
Dominion would not be a problem since Odo has one foot in the Federation to begin with and the PC horneytoads are all his subfaction, and Romulans are paranoid and curious enough to follow up on anything the least bit odd to make sure it is not going to bite them in the posterior (like just about everything else has) so they would not be a problem to get involved either.
The-Grand-Nagus
Join Date: Sep 2008
Well, since the FED's and KDF aren't at war, ROM and Dominion have to choose to ally with one of the other (I was so disappointed when the Romulans weren't a new standalone faction) it wouldn't be too difficult to share a lot of those ideas. A Sherlock Holmes on DS9, available to everyone. A planet everyone can visit, etc.
You don't seem to be grasping the point. It's not simply a matter of putting the mission starting point at a place all factions can access, like DS9. The question is would a Klingon or JH actually be playing a Sherlock Holmes story? Or, can a Klingon or JH "fit in" on the Gangster Planet the same way Kirk and Spock did? If the answer is no, then that isn't going to work.
The-Grand-Nagus
Join Date: Sep 2008
Let's be honest, fictions tend to be pretty culture-specific even on just our one planet (think of the difference between Western animation and Japanese anime, for instance, or magical realism vs the classical Russian novel). Cross-species fictions would be even harder to imagine.
How to involve the Vidiians? That's an easy one: the Think Tank lied.
Think about it:
But I guess it requires Cryptic to not take a character's statements at face value, which given Section 31 and the Iconians, they're not very good at doing.
I was also working on a fanfic once where the Phage was analyzed by the Doctor and turned out to be a bioweapon. It never got beyond outline stages, though.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
Well, in a lot of the episodes, a Klingon and a Jem'hadar aren't behaving the way they should...both would be a bit more violent and less understanding in episodes, but you still follow the compassionate Federation ideals.
In other words, one of the alternate ideas for the episode that became "Trials and Tribble-ations".
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
My character Tsin'xing
Rather, if Starfleet did leave them alone rather than following up on Kirk's first contact, one might expect their society to evolve along slightly different lines than it had before (as Kirk pointed out the waste of everybody jumping everybody instead of working together), developing communicators and phasers, and possibly beginning to work on spacecraft and transporters (although achieving spaceflight in a matter of two centuries based solely on the fact that you have learned spaceships exist implies a level of inventive genius that's almost frightening, akin to Italy developing manned heavier-than-air craft in the 1600s based off of da Vinci's drawings and moving on to Lunar colonies by the 1700s). One of the authors in this forum's fanfic area (I can't remember who, please forgive me - I think it was Starsword, but don't hold me to that) posited that they would develop into a sort of planetary mercenary protective service, similar in some ways to the Pinkertons in the days of steam engines, hiring themselves out to anyone who needs a paramilitary force that isn't beholden to one of the major interstellar governments.