Star trek Mystery show

[Kor]

That's a horrible place to start! I am talking classic detective fiction like Sherlock Homes, Hercule Poirot, Lord Peter Whimsey, Ms. Marple, Albert Campion, Rumpole of the Bailey, George/Dominic Felse, Cadfael, &c.

Personally I'm less of a fan of those stuffy Masterpiece Theatre "manor house" type detective stories, and more of a fan of gritty, hardboiled gumshoe stuff from the 1940s. But perhaps the two approaches could be combined, as we saw with Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin in Rex Stout's books.

Kor

 

[The Wormhole]

Maybe we can start getting televised Cardassian Enigma Tales, where at the end of the episode all the suspects are found guilty and summarily executed.

 

[dupersuper]

I don't think illegal Romulan tech would hold up in court, so maybe every episode opens with them knowing who did it but the next 45 mins are them trying to prove it in a more traditional way.

Like a Howcatchem?

The main characters can be a pair of Starfleet security officers: one Columbo type and one Monk type.

 

[publiusr]

Set it on Yorktown Base and I'll watch.

That or the Dyson Sphere from “Relics”

 

[JesterFace]

Data likes old detective mystery stories Sherlock Holmes style.
I think we need a series starring Data and Geordi acting all the Sherlock Holmes stories on the holodeck.

 

[Bry_Sinclair]

If René Auberjonois was still with us an Odo P.I. spin off would've been great!

 

[1001001]

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Colonel West in the conference hall with the sniper rifle. He woulda gotten away with it, too....

 

[Captain pl1ngpl0ng]

it could be set on Yorktown...
edit: or Risa

 

[Swedish Borg]

TUC was partially a detective story

The problem with TUC is that it contains plot holes you could fly a cargo ship through. Spock's reason for concluding that the assassins beamed back on the Enterprise is invalid for example.

 

[Tim Thomason]

You're supposed to put Prodigy spoilers behind spoiler tags.

 

[JesterFace]

Orion (slave) Scoopy-Doo?

 

[Kor]

Part Orion and part Andorian, judging by the antennae.

Kor

 

[Swedish Borg]

I think Spock once claimed that Sherlock Holmes was an ancestor of his and also that a say about Nixon was an old Vulcan proverb. Coincidentally the Klingons also claimed that Shakespear initially wrote in Klingon...

 

[The Wormhole]

Part Orion and part Andorian, judging by the antennae.

Spoiler: Is this still a spoiler?

All Emerald Chain

 

[Swedish Borg]

The Star Trek people are usually not very good at writing mysteries. They keep making these simplistic incredibly flawed inferences. They need to hire new people for that, people as talented as Agatha Christie and Artur Conan Doyle used to be.

 

[Relayer1]

Star Fleet Investigations - focusing on the different teams within the SFI building on a weekly basis.

Sometimes an NCIS like procedural, sometimes a Starfleet Legal team for a courtroom setting, sometimes a gritty undercover noir, sometimes Starfleet Intelligence spy story, sometimes X-Files weirdness.

And just occasionally Department of Temporal Investigations...

 

[Timo]

The problem with TUC is that it contains plot holes you could fly a cargo ship through. Spock's reason for concluding that the assassins beamed back on the Enterprise is invalid for example.

The same is true of all mystery fiction, to varying degree. Which I guess is the problem with this concept: if something takes place in 1950s Britain, we don't give a flying fuck to the fact that the 1950s Britain is portrayed all wrong, from car makes to telephone technology, and the motivation of the culprit is implausible, and the timetable of the crime doesn't and can't work - but if it takes place in 2290s outer space between the KNZ and Earth, we do care, because we have just enough information about the setting to spot the discrepancies, and not an ounce more.

Star Trek is a preexisting universe, so we don't need every mystery to be 90% exposition before we can get on with the actual crime and its uncovering. But we still need it to be 75% exposition, which is really, really bad for storytelling. Columbo in the 1980s might need to tell us what a "VCR" is before we can proceed; Poirot in the 1930s wouldn't bother to tell us what a "milkman" is, and Holmes can have a plot (rather literally) hang on the "bell rope" needed to call the "servant" to take care of the "bedpan", and we can shrug it off as reverse science fiction, utterly alien stuff we don't need to worry about. But if Odo grabs the phase disruptor from the wrong end, the mystery is ruined for us, since knowing the business end of the disruptor from its stock is all we do know so we hang onto that for dear life.

It's pretty darned difficult to get stuff like this right. Asimov wrote excellent mysteries in his Caves of Steel series, and could make us look the other way and say "oh, it's the future" when his characters behaved implausibly or obvious down-to-Earth solutions were skipped. But then he wrote Wendell Urth, and (while creating beautiful character pieces and future vistas) utterly blew it, undoing his mystery with his introductory chapter already (see e.g. the first story where gravity is key, yet the story carelessly begins with a superfluous establishing of technology that utterly negates gravity as a factor).

Timo Saloniemi

 

[The Wormhole]

The Star Trek people are usually not very good at writing mysteries. They keep making these simplistic incredibly flawed inferences. They need to hire new people for that, people as talented as Agatha Christie and Artur Conan Doyle used to be.

Episodic television in general isn't really a good medium for mystery stories. Watch any random network police procedural, and the murderer can usually be figured out by picking out the most recognizable name in the guest cast, or sometimes there's a character the detectives chat with near the beginning who doesn't show up again until near the end, at which point it's guaranteed to be because they are the murderer. Sometimes that character is the recognizable guest star, thereby making their guilt obvious. I've even heard there are some situations where the producers are pursuing a particular actor to guest star on the show, and they actually mandate the only way they'll agree is if they get to play the murderer.

 

[ChallengerHK]

I'm not parti

Episodic television in general isn't really a good medium for mystery stories. Watch any random network police procedural, and the murderer can usually be figured out by picking out the most recognizable name in the guest cast, or sometimes there's a character the detectives chat with near the beginning who doesn't show up again until near the end, at which point it's guaranteed to be because they are the murderer. Sometimes that character is the recognizable guest star, thereby making their guilt obvious. I've even heard there are some situations where the producers are pursuing a particular actor to guest star on the show, and they actually mandate the only way they'll agree is if they get to play the murderer.

I'm not particularly enthralled by the mystery-Trek concept. That said, there are all sorts of different story ideas that can fall under "mystery". Not all involve murders, and of those that do, not all are about figuring out "whodunnit". As mentioned above, there's also "how'd they do it". Columbo is an offshoot of that concept, basically, "how will Columbo catch him/her". We know who the murderer is, generally before the show starts; as you mentioned, it's probably the biggest name in the guest starring cast. The point is to determine how Columbo will catch the murderer.

 

[Timo]

And our big problem is that the answer is going to be "Columbo uses the 'establish phase variance of room illumination' button in his tricorder". That is, unless it is "Columbo remembers that Andorians always eat their blues first, and then the greens" or "Columbo notices that the villain mentioned the riots of 2157 even though his species only joined the Federation in 2284".

All three sorts would have to be subtly introduced in the teaser of the episode in order to be eligible solutions at the conclusion of the episode. And "subtly" is unlikely to work, and in fact will generally be clumsier than having the name of the murderer in the opening credits.

(It's actually worse than that: if the show is to cater for the casual user, the teaser of the episode where the murder is faked and the "victim" lives will have to make initial mention of the fact that phasers have a stun mode. Other eps will likewise have to remind the audience that transporters teleport people from A to B, or that Klingons are a warrior race... Imagine a cop show having to feature a "the cruiser is steered by turning the big wheel in front of the driver's seat" scene in the teaser for the plot to make proper sense!)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Kor]

The same is true of all mystery fiction, to varying degree. Which I guess is the problem with this concept: if something takes place in 1950s Britain, we don't give a flying ... to the fact that the 1950s Britain is portrayed all wrong, from car makes to telephone technology, and the motivation of the culprit is implausible, and the timetable of the crime doesn't and can't work ...

Who is "we?" There are plenty of people who would nitpick that stuff to death. Anachronisms stick out like a sore thumb to me. I was watching one of the recent Amazon Prime adaptations of an Agatha Christie novel, actually set in 1950s Britain, and I wanted to scream because one of the characters had a set of dumbbells of a type that weren't sold until about four decades later.

Kor