Get rid of the hokiness! Come down to earth. Real military terminology. Real scientific terminology. Needs to be dark and gritty. Aliens need to look like aliens and...... Timeline progression through seasons. Character development. Ships need to look like science/military vessels inside and out. Uniforms, I am 15 years ex-Navy don't get me started..oops too late! Officers and ENLISTED please! Special forces away teams! Contractors Sound does not travel in space! So I'll try and not be closed minded... Dennis has a point...the ST09 movie pretty much did away with explaining anything, they don't really have to! Some of it is familiar to us, the other is there for us to make decisions about it. What they DID do was ground it somewhat more more, pull back some of the futuristic elements so that the 21st century non-fans could latch onto it abit more. Individually: 1. I don't think the last few series have been "hokey". They had good budgets and good writing...what irritates me is shows like NuBSG, that try not to postulate any kind of tech advance that makes concurrent sense (light speed and wired telephones from 1955...come ON!) or any kind of social evolution. To me these shows are more creatively bankrupt than ST. 2. Fine idea, but unless you ignore all the past and do a total reboot, not happening. Warp drive will be the same. 3. Starfleet at best is only partially military, no matter what you say about weapons etc, they are still a force for exploration, and have large numbers of scientists and the like aboard ship. 4. Again, a good idea, but unless you want to contradict all ST history (as the ST09 movie wisely did not do) then you can't change this. 5. No, maybe you can ground it in "reality" more like ST09, but that's exactly what ST should NOT be. 6. ST has it's fair share of totally alien entities but in general audiences don't warm up to these...also these aliens cost money....that's the practical aspect aside. I'd like to see more "alien" aliens, but within reason. 7. Ugh, as much as I find the history of the UFP interesting, politics and historical travelogues don't do well on TV. I say nix the idea of trying to show the UFP's Facebook timeline. 8. Characters are great, but I don't need to identify with my crew to like them. I also find that in sci fi, like it or not, it's the ideas that get me coming back, doesn't matter WHICH crew it is. So development is nice, but I don't want to sacrifice ideas for drama. 9. Never had an issue with this one....tell me have you seen a 23/24th century starship lately?? 10. There are many fan designed uniforms that are carbon copies of 20th century military uniforms with possibly a wispy delta shield added. They wind up looking unimaginative and boring. Nix the "realistic" retro uniform idea. 11. Wasn't it Gene Roddenberry who suggested every Starfleet officer was a qualified astronaut and therefore an officer? Nope, don't want to see your idea. I never liked the addition of enlisted men to STNG. 12. Don't get me started...98% of space dramas use sound in space...100% are inaccurate in some way.
Glad to see I am not the only one who thinks that way. I just love how so many people think the future MUST work out a certain way. How many of them would have found a show about our real life 2012 believable if it was perfectly accurate in every detail and released in 1970. If someone created a show about transhuman fighter pilots, I'd watch it even if I didn't like the idea of there being real transhumans made. But that is not what Star Trek is. If you think the future will work a certain way, make your own story. Don't try to force other stories to comprehend. Most science fiction does the officer/enlisted thing unrealistically and laughably so. DS9 and Galactica both had enlisted men (O'Brien and Tyrol, oddly so in that he was a fighter plane mechanic who also did ordinance collection, hull repair, and seemed to be the command chief as well) who were effectively chief engineers at major commands. Now if they were small commands with only one or two officers, I could see the engineer being enlisted. But not when you have hundreds and even thousands of people on board. Again, Trek should stick with what it is. Every version of the series for 40 years has shown that (almost) everyone in Starfleet is an officer, Starfleet officers always get their hands dirty, rank has no meaning when it comes to getting the right person to do the job, and leading from the front is taken to comical extremes. A somewhat more realistic show where the captain is an older, more experienced officer who commands everything from the bridge while a permanent away team of 20 somethings would be more TV friendly. But it wouldn't be the Trek that we all know and love.
Of all the fan proposals as to "how Trek could come back to TV" in the 70s and 80s, there never was anyone who said "set it on the Enterprise again but advance the time frame a century with an entirely new cast of characters." So, the fannish assumption that the best or likely most successful way to recreate it again is to move it back and forth along the established "Star Trek timeline" is just another example of mimicking what we already know - the way in which a creative person immersed in the business will re-invent Star Trek again probably will have no more to do with "modern Trek" or TOS than TNG did initially. Hopefully it will add a new dimension to the property that no one has seriously thought of.
Yes, Star Trek is definitely too tame for modern audiences, especially on cable. The audience needs to be freaked out every so often, a la The Walking Dead. Some episodes should need that "may too intense for some audiences" warning at the beginning. I think there is certainly enough freaky content to pull from Path to 2409 to really build a compelling series. I mean lets recap some of the major events, shall we? Spoiler: Star Trek Publicized Stories Sisko is stripped of being the Emmisary and after a fashion becomes the Captain of a ship with a crew that largely learns to hate him due largely to him not being able to exactly come to terms with the Profits decision. Janeway becomes the new Borg queen. There's a major unheevel regarding the ethics of bringing Data back. Riker's ship is the most diverse crew in Star Fleet with only 20% of the crew being human. Kirk comes back from the dead. We find out that their are beings higher then the Q and Qs' escapades over the years was really just a front to prepare Jean Luc to face them. Dax becomes captain of the most advanced ship in the fleet in the middle of a major conflict. There's a ton of political posturing going on in the Federation some of which is largely related to the deterioration Romulan situation. Picard and Crusher finally get married (and of course later divorced). Picard retired and Data is promoted to captain of the Enterprise. You wanna talk about a lot to draw upon for a Space Opera with turns and twists everywhere? I think Star Trek has so much to offer there right now with so many stories REALLY fleshed out. This is BARELY scratching the surface of stories they can pull upon. I just can't see how they could go wrong if they plotted out a plan to bring back Star Trek as a quarterly released TV movie. You can bank on EVERYONE who had any affinity for Star Trek tuning in to see whats been going on with the favorite characters since the end of each respective series. You're also not committing the same resources it would take to produce a 26 episode season serial where you have long standing contracts. You also don't run into the typical problem of lacking story to draw upon --- it's already there in book form with a very large arching continuity.
One reason I'm not much of a horror fan is that it appeals mostly to the base, raw emotional reaction for its entertainment...all well and good, but I don't want to see it in ST, at least not in any great measure. ST doesn't have to be "intellectual", but let's engage some other thought process other than "eeek". I like the idea of a shorter season, gives more time for creativity. A 13-15 episode season sounds good to me. I hate splitting seasons up though, that's something they must not do. I can't tell you how much that takes the steam out of a show when the hiatuses are so long, ie Lost, Fringe, etc
OK, so instead of saying what it should not be, let me suggest a few things... Firstly, ST is probably never going to be up to the level of it's literary cousins. It has to be entertainment first and foremost. Still, its hard to take any future SF series seriosuly unless they come to terms with what SF writers have been for almost 2 decades...what are the implications of a singularity event for ST/Earth's future? The 23rd and 24th century shows already got it wrong by that measure, but to seem up to date they are going to have some perspective on it. If the show takes place in the 23rd-25th centuries in the "Prime Universe" it'll be a moderate view, we may encounter more civilizations that have passed through this stage or multiple stages of development to comment on it. In JJ's universe, probably much of the same thing will occur, but it'll probably be more open ended. A whole new universe and history would probably make more sense, but then you'd have to create a hole new show! So I propose this...technoglocial advances in the next 30 years will make most of Trek tech seem quaint (prob not transporters or warp), let's make a 25th century show that deals with a UFP that's been an arrested culture, one that legislated out eugenics, nanotech, and AI to the point we've seen so far, but by the 25th century such advances cannot be contained, we start to see certain parts of the UFP evolve through transhumanism. Nanotech and foglet technologies transform UFP ships into maleable things...AI is everywhere. The crews are part "trans" with others relatively unmodified, though no one can be totally unmodified and function on a starship anymore. One aspect may be a conflict between those choosing to advance and those who do not. More conflict might arise with alien superpowers, some who may just be embarking on their own self-evolution, but are afraid of the advanced technological Federation. At this point, the final outcome, whether the UFP becomes a threatening machine civilization or a benevolent one is in question to all. Potentially we could see anti-Borg fanatics, terrorists. Such a ST show will have advanced tech, exploration outwardly, but also inwardly to a large degree. It would have to leave a POV open to question, though no doubt there will be morality plays as well. Questions of aging, modes of thinking, analogies to racism and bias, man vs machine, and really where we are headed in the contemporary age would all be raised. RAMA
The current skiffy fascination with "the Singularity" and transhumanism is just the currently fashionable version of apocalyptic thinking - it's as "inevitable" as manned exploration of the Solar system following the Moon landing was in the 1960s - and it'll date as quickly as anything you can imagine.
It won't because it has it's roots firmly in real world projections based on real world mathematics...and it's exponential..building upon previous advancement, it is therefore self-generating (or re-generating as the case may be) and isn't going anywhere soon. On top of this, there is self-fulfilling advancement based on companies and individuals keen on bringing it to life based on already existing growth, the development "real-world" continues unabated and will likely continue despite economic, gov't and regulatory issues (as it has been shown statistically from past history). Regardless of the actual timeline, such an event is almost a certainty, although the path(s) it will take there are not quite certain--and are ripe for exploration by a forward thinking show. Its time to realize the past paradigms are no longer adequate and these massive changes of the next few decades have implications we can explore now...without such consideration, SF is in danger of becoming old hat and irrelevant, as much of it seems to me to be in the stone age already. You can stay stuck with the quaint notion that the future 100 years from now will be the same but "different", or follow the evidence where it leads. Also, its not necessarily apocalyptic, Hans Moravec's work could be seen as apocalyptic, transhumanism and versions of the singularity actually allow humans to take control of their evolution as opposed to being subjugated by indifferent machines...to me this positivity is firmly in line with Star Trek, it just takes a different route. This is really the first time ever that SF speculation and technological advancement have intertwined in such a concrete way (the futurists of the 80-90s werent). Previous connections were incidental, singular or linear. Currently SF is behind the curve and needs to do some work to keep up. Vernor Vinge [yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alxyAeCPits[/yt] http://www.kurzweilai.net/singularity-chat-with-vernor-vinge-and-ray-kurzweil Potential outcomes without a Singularity: http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/longnow/index.htm RAMA
Would love to see more of this type of movie: [yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=D-FArUHgUJs[/yt] Defenders could be one of the great sci fi shows, if they can get it on air and get all the elements right.
Ack, those spoilers! From books, but they don't count, but still... Spoiler: you keed, right? Janeway becomes the new Borg queen. That may be horrifying but it's not the kind of gut-level horrifying I'm talking about. What I mean is, the kind of series that some people will refuse to watch at 10pm because they can't sleep afterwards, and will have to save it on their DVR till the next day just for their mental stability. It can do that, but ideally, it can also do more. The Walking Dead is a good example of how to strike a balance between the talky part that advances the characterizations, character conflicts and theme/morality, and the action part where zombies try to eat everyone. Sure, some of the audience gets antsy during the talky part, and the ratings did dip during the middle of the season when it was talktalktalk, but then ratings went through the roof for the ultra-violent final episodes, so no harm done. I just think a lot of the potential audience for Star Trek (which is the same as the audience for any sci fi series) has been so jaded by ultra-violent video games that any series that needs the male demographic in order to survive, is going to have to ramp up the violence just to not seem overly tame and toothless by today's standards. You can decry the coarsening of society all you want, but that's not going to solve the problem.
Star trek is all about great story telling and showing whats good with humanity.Leave the dark and gritty to the aliens
As much as I like trek, this brings up some points that I did in my "proposal": http://io9.com/5906586/why-star-treks-vision-of-the-future-is-out-of-date?tag=star-trek
Another thought, in terms of story, the UFP will not only be wrestling with issues of trans and non-trans humans, and outside aliens, but simply the fact that they won't know how they'll end up...whether what is happening will end up for the betterment of civilization or not, much like the debate is today. It makes the issue more complex...though of course everyone feels what they are doing is right. RAMA
However, I don't think accuracy matters too much. No one is watching a show with robots as the main characters instead of humans.
Trans humans or the singularity, is near impossible for star trek, unless you do a total reboot, and alter the show to the point that it is no longer star trek. Ignoring the technical challenges of the singularity on television. The writing for it is near impossible, because it creates plot holes that aren't easily resolved. If the doctor can copy his unimatrix, and have multiple copies of himself, why isn't voyageur using this to aid them since they are desperate to get home. Sure you can make up some reasoning, but a patch work of made up reasonings does not add up to a coherent show.