Where is your confidence level now with ST:Dis?

i agree that i would have liked a continuation into the future instead of another prequel, though i am curious what big historical event that was mentioned in previous canon this is going to be based on. I'm thinking the eugenics war. if its that, it could be interesting.

 

Too late to directly involve the eugenics war methinks, I'm wondering if the Klingon/Romulan alliance may be a factor.

 

there was announcments for actors playing klingon characters, so i suppose it could be somethign involving the Klingons.

 

My point is we already know where we end up. In just 10 short years with TOS. That's my problem with prequels, they take a lot of the suspense away.

A show about Khan and his conquests would be much better if your really looking to do a prequel since a lot of the details are missing from that, though still we know where the show would end up. DS9 was great because they did something BIG with the universe with the Dominion War. They can't do anything of that magnitude because its a prequel. They also can't really discover too many strange aliens and world because if its too much like TOS its going to be like, hey why didn't the enterprise know about that? The show Enterprise suffered from that I thought.

 

Ridiculous.

We don't know a thing about the lives and adventures of a single one of the characters in Discovery.

We don't even know a thing about the damned ship.

Star Trek is not a history of the future. It's just a lot of stories about a lot of people.

 

I really do not get the rationale for these arguments. Saying "we already know where we end up" basically says any movie that takes place before the modern day is also inherently lacking suspense because we know how it ends up. Saving Private Ryan and Titanic disagree with you.

And if TOS doesn't reference it then it can't exist? You do realize the universe is massive and teeming with life in the Trek universe, right? Is it that hard to believe that Discovery actually...well...discovers some things?

EDIT: The key is story, not setting. You can have a story set as many years out from DS9 and VOY as you want, but that doesn't guarantee compelling stories or interesting ideas and characters. Setting is just backdrop. What matters is the characters and the stories.

 

Couldn't agree more.

 

Some people like the history part of it, the big picture. I would have liked to see what happens next in the ST-universe instead of "smaller" stories set in the earlier times.

I agree that good stories can be told in a timeframe where we know what happened before, and we know what happens next.

My confidence level is still pretty high and I'm sure that DSC will be a good series. But hopefully next series will be set in some other timeframe.

 

I don't think it's ridiculous. The truth is, you are working with more restrictions when you make a prequel instead of a sequel. It is a greater challenge to make sure what you're doing writes well into all the TOS/TNG/DS9/VOY canon already established while also still being it's own exciting story. It would be easier on the writers to jump another 100 years into the future... there's a reason TNG took that approach first. I completely agree with BlueshirtGuard that a lot of DS9's greatness came from having been the only AQ-based Trek on the air starting season 3, and being set in the "present", which left them totally free to imagine huge universe-shaking stories.

However, the main thing I feel this tells us is that if DSC is good, it will be good in different ways than TNG and DS9. While I really do believe that making a good prequel is harder, if the writing staff is up to the challenge, we viewers will not see the strain on screen. Sometimes working within the restrictions and overcoming the obstacles is just what you need to strengthen a project and make it a better, more focused piece of work.

If the writing staff is NOT up to the challenge (or crushed under the heel of executive meddling), we'll get another VOY -- an interesting but hard-to-execute premise that they just can't quite pull off.

If I were up to me, my favorite approach would be to jump us another 100-ish years beyond TNG/DS9/VOY and then do that sequel. But I certainly understand being excited by the idea of filling in some previously teased continuity -- I can see myself pitching a prequel series involving the Federation/Tzenkethi war. I totally got Fuller's reference about wanting to flesh out some offhand reference to a dramatic, unseen historical event -- when "The Adversary" unspooled all that Tzenkethi War backstory, I was immediately fascinated. With the Tzenkethi we have this species that is a total blank slate but also already established as a major Federation adversary -- it would be hard to write it within the TNG continuity, but you definitely could do it and it just sounds like such a cool story to explore.

In conclusion, why is it not May yet?!?

 

In Deep Space Nine we always knew the Federation and it's allies will come out victorious. Honestly, knowing that it was a Star Trek show, you ever doubted that it will be anything but victory? Of course not. So in the Discovery settings if we get the 4 year war with the Klingon's, we know that it won't be the Federation's end just like we knew on DS9. And because we know very little about that time period or the wars they fought it will be just as interesting as the Dominion War because not the end result is what it makes interesting but the way there.

As for the question, I'm still where I was a few pages back: I'm somewhat confident but I will pass my judgment first after I see the pilot and than after I see season 1 ...

 

I'd have been happier with something beyond TNG/DS9/VOY as I feel, unless they're very careful, the stories will paint themselves into a corner. There mustn't be an episode, for example, where a younger version of a character we know, let's say Sarek, is in peril because our knowledge of the series immediately renders the whole story pointless.

That said, there is plenty of scope to tell good stories in this particular time frame and we can't ignore the current zeitgeist for revisiting the past, particularly in entertainment media be it Rogue One or U2 performing The Joshua Tree album live etc etc.

 

You make it sound like DS9 was toggling between two possible outcomes, "total defeat" and "total victory." But the more relevant dramatic question was "how severe will the cost of victory be?", and there's a greater range of possible outcomes to that if you're not writing to an already-established future.

Though

is pretty much exactly what I feel/hope as well.

 

These are strange things to say, it's like saying we know how the 20th century ended, so why write any stories set in it? We know how the cold war went, so clearly there's no suspense in spy stories, the George Smiley novels really suffered as a result. We know Hitler lost WW11 and America got bogged down in Vietnam, so Guns of Navarrone, A Bridge Too Far and Platoon were not worth making. Saving Private Ryan and Fury held no drama at all because we already know the allied forces took Berlin in the end.

We actually know very little about the 23rd century at all, we've seen a tiny little bit of it through the eyes of a handful of characters. We have no idea how the Romulan Klingon alliance came about or fell, we know next to nothing about the Kzinti, the Tholians, or any of the hundreds of other species the Federation has interacted with

 

I just do not understand this obsession with a post-Dominion War show, and the refusal to consider that a show set prior to the Dominion War will have nothing new or interesting to say, no compelling stories, and no characters worth caring about. That makes no sense to me.

I wouldn't mind seeing a new show later that takes place in the same time period as TNG and DS9. Or a show set between TOS and TNG. Or yeah, a show after VOY. That too. I think there are story opportunities in all of those settings. But fixating your hopes and dreams on one specific period of time and totally disregarding a concept that doesn't fit that narrow requirement is just silly.

 

I'm really keen on a post DS9 story - or to be more accurate, a post-2009/Fall of Romulus story. There is a tremendous amount of things that can be done that could even use the modern political climate as it's muse. But.... there are ideas for every era. It's not a deal breaker to find out Discovery isn't my first choice.

I'm still not sold on the idea of this being focused on the Klingon war though. For what little has been said about the show so far - right down to the name Discovery - war doesn't quite fit in.

 

Some people just don't like prequels. It's a valid preference. Maybe it's further back in the thread, but I haven't seen anyone recently posting that a pre-Dominion-War show can't be good, just that they themselves would have preferred a sequel show and/or don't like prequels.

And I say this as someone who's actively excited for a prequel, and agrees with your main point that a good show could be set in any Trek era.

 

I do think it helps suspend disbelief to be in the uncharted waters of unwritten canon as it gives the feel of history unfolding as the show is being produced.

Unfortunately too much of Trek canon is already baked into the cake. Even some post-Nemesis events are canon as well due to various time-travel plots that have come and gone, books, games, etc....

So I think people should just accept the fact that the main draw of prime continuity Trek is going to come not from finding out what happens but how it happens, micro rather than macro.

 

Now that would make an amazing movie or TV series! How Hitler lost WW11?! And the prequels that show us what happened in WW3 through WW10!

 

Bryan Fuller was talking about "Balance of Terror" being a 'touchstone'
I thought that episode was about Enterprise struggling to keep a bad situation escalating to another Romulan War.
Maybe this arc is the same, with the events of the Klingon War as background, raising the stakes

 

Balance of Terror and Undiscovered Country both coming up at various points make me think of tension, drama, fear more than plot devices used for that.

The idea of it all coming down to a fear of reviving a Klingon war would be quote a good shout. If the shows key elements are about understanding one another, it makes sense to me that it would be post-war. That uneasy tension, the blind assumptions through hatred and fill that gap between killing on the battlefield to Kirk and Koloth standing in the same room together without reaching for their guns.

Really eager to learn more, the possibilities are quite exciting.