I doubt Elizabeth Dennehy had any plans at all. A sweet series regular gig would have been a hard thing to turn down.
If tng had an 8th season.
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I doubt Elizabeth Dennehy had any plans at all. A sweet series regular gig would have been a hard thing to turn down.
I wouldn’t send off any characters along with the two actors who wanted out. Troi had plenty to do when properly utilized. She was great in “Nepenthe,” for example. And she could carry an entire episode as in “Face of the Enemy.”
I think the changes in the dynamics on the ship with everyone shifting could be rather striking. Are she and Riker now mom and dad on the ship? Can he send her to die as Picard couldn’t Nella Darren? Are she and Worf still an item? Will this be the catalyst for she and Will to get together? Then there’s the courtship, engagement, wedding, adventures on the honeymoon (murder mystery on Risa?), etc.
You’d need new blood in the writers room and producers passionate about doing an almost brand new show, but I see these things as challenges, not impossibilities. Be wary of conventional wisdom.
I think the changes in the dynamics on the ship with everyone shifting could be rather striking. Are she and Riker now mom and dad on the ship? Can he send her to die as Picard couldn’t Nella Darren? Are she and Worf still an item? Will this be the catalyst for she and Will to get together? Then there’s the courtship, engagement, wedding, adventures on the honeymoon (murder mystery on Risa?), etc.
You’d need new blood in the writers room and producers passionate about doing an almost brand new show, but I see these things as challenges, not impossibilities. Be wary of conventional wisdom.
That's my contention. The idea of continuing the show sans Data and Picard is unrealistic at best, hence my sarcasm earlier in the thread. However, just to play the game as it were, these are the changes I would make.
Riker finally gets command of the Enterprise. However, years of complacency because he hung around so long as number one, leads to him being dissatisfied with the job. Over the course of the season he becomes more and more despondent and unfulfilled. Not having Troi on board because she leaves Starfleet to teach university back on Betazed, he has no one to turn to and slowly falls into a depressive spiral until at the series finale he sacrifices himself to save the Enterprise.
Worf becomes Riker's number one and performs that role well until his growing criticisms of Gowron and the direction he is taking the Klingon Empire leads him to attempt a coup. It fails and Gowron, growing more and more delusional, blames not only Worf but the entire Federation, seriously threatening the Klingon/Federation alliance. The Romulans and Tholians exploit this and bring the Alpha Quadrant to the brink of war.
Doctor Crusher continues to put medicine ahead of common sense and any interpretation of the PD that she doesn't agree with. Haunted and disturbed by her longings for her ghostly lover, her mind slips a bit and she almost tricks Riker into taking an experimental medication for his deepening depression but regains her ethics and her self just at the nick of time. Would the medicine have worked? We'll never know.
Geordi Laforge finally scores (yes really) with a new crew member who just transferred to the D. However, his awkwardness with relationships makes it a rocky affair. By the end of the season, he has matured in the relationship and marriage is planned.
Tasha returns from the dead. Unknown to all, she wasn't really dead. Armus used its powers to create a duplicate of Tasha and then killed it all the while transporting the real Tasha away for his later amusement. Hey, it could have happened. We don't know the extent of Armus' powers. She was later "rescued" by a Pakled ship looking for things. They managed to trick Armus into giving Tasha to them. His screams of anguish made Kirk's "KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN" sound like a whisper. Tasha eventually escapes from the Pakleds and makes her way back to Earth and then to the D.
Wesley's old bridge station is manned in each episode by a new person, 3/4ths of which die in the episode that they appear. Curiously, none wear red.
Lwaxana gets kidnapped by Ferengi once more and is never seen or heard from again. EVER!
Episodes - All killer, no filler.
Another Doomsday machine shows up. This one an upgunned version of the original. However, nothing will stop this new threat until another giant space amoeba shows up. The machine and the amoeba duke it out and in the process destroy each other.
The Enterprise travels to Sigma Iotia II to discover the effects of McCoy leaving his communicator there decades ago. They find a planet ruled not by 20th century style gangsters but by a culture all but wrecked by rampant misuse of technology too advanced for them to handle.
The Borg return and this time Riker does what Picard should have done, infect the Borg with Geordi's virus, ending the Borg threat forever.
The Enterprise gets sent on several missions to explore new worlds and make contact with new species. Riker does not get it on with aliens on any of these worlds. He's learned his lesson. They discover another Iconian outpost and this time recover the portal tech and bring it back to the Federation. This tech will be a key element in preventing war between the Fed and the Klingons.
The Enterprise flies through a temporal wormhole and ends up orbiting Earth in the 1960s. In orbit with them is another ship. It's NCC-1701.
Any writer who submits a story like most of the crappy ones seen in season seven are fired on the spot.
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The question I would have with Shelby's returning is what do you do with her? Is she still the ambitious lieutenant commander of BOBW? Or has a couple years rebuilding the fleet and a couple years as a first officer on a smaller ship mellowed her a bit? The latter, I hope.
In my mind she’s still a pain in the ass. She’s on long term assignment now and will need to settle in and make friends, but she’s still a source of conflict. There will be head butting with Riker and his imzadi, possibly with Worf (or they might really get along…romance?), and she’ll both bring things to the table and have some hard lessons to learn through failure on ship and on away missions she’ll be leading.
We may get visits from character pre-Enterprise life too. Exes, coworkers, family, as we get to know her. Maybe other characters too…I always wanted to see more of Riker and Troi interacting with the crew and department heads…see more of the “Little People” on board. More “Lower Decks” episodes?
I’m guessing if the show goes on another 2-3 years, there will be no getting away from the next logical Borg interaction: an armada. Maybe that’s the season finale. And everyone on this side of the galaxy (from the Federation to the Sheliak, etc) has to come together to repel the attack. Maybe here, where Shelby should be her best is where things come to a head with her character. She’s grudgingly learned some minor lessons and taught a few over the season, but now we’re in her playhouse. Still, the fancy new weapons she’d been working on don’t quite do the job, and it’s ultimately the softer power of alliances and their greater numbers that achieve the costliest of victories (to the point that another armada sent right then would easily assimilate the Alpha/Beta Quadrant!).
Still, they save the day and Shelby…I dunno…does she lose her life to save the day at the end? And we get a new first officer…Worf?…the following season? Or is she family now? Who would replace Worf at ops?
^ you know, all that said, we would need to see another side of Shelby if she was going to be someone we care about for a season or two. Being a pain in the ass is great in moderation, but as first officer and the leader of every away mission, she couldn’t just be a hotshot burning at 110%. She needs to be, time to time, family. If for no other reason than we’d feel her loss more…get that feeling of “I wonder what might have been” after that point, not the feeling of “okay there’s nothing more to that character/arc, thanks and bye.”
That reminds me of a joke a made once, when talking about transposing TNG episodes back into "Phase II" episodes to speculate how the original crew would have responded, and which TNG characters could be reimagined in Phase II...... someone said everything isn't about Kirk/Shatner, and I said sure it is.... after Phase II, you could have Kirk's stint as a space station commander, before he gets Lost in Space on the other side of the galaxy....
I don't hate the Shelby idea. There's ways to make that character interesting imho. I'd see her as a more upbeat kind of strong female part. She isn't just "Ambitious". She's proactive, forward thinking, something in my view Riker had almost never been as #1.
I think the main dynamic that needs to be addressed is Riker's attitude toward her. Is he now a confidently legitimate leader, or is he going to keep being the pissy blowhard that thinks she's too ambitious? That's not going to work at any level, & one thing I've noticed about Frakes, in how he plays Riker (& it's usually for the better) He tends to play him a bit grumpy about people with alternate perspectives, more so than even the writers would write him. Even recruiting her for the post is imho a departure for him that's nearly out of character.
As much as I often harp on Denise Crosby in season 1, I actually think someone like Yar would be a much better fit as #1 for a Captain Riker than Shelby, if you could come up with some sci-fi way to have her reemerge
Captain Riker, Yar as #1, Dr. Crusher, Worf still at TAC, Geordi still in engineering, but as #2, & grown Wesley at OPS, is a mix I might actually give a chance. You'd still have to sell me on keeping Deanna around though lol. Narratively, she just works better leaving to work with Picard imho
I think the main dynamic that needs to be addressed is Riker's attitude toward her. Is he now a confidently legitimate leader, or is he going to keep being the pissy blowhard that thinks she's too ambitious? That's not going to work at any level, & one thing I've noticed about Frakes, in how he plays Riker (& it's usually for the better) He tends to play him a bit grumpy about people with alternate perspectives, more so than even the writers would write him. Even recruiting her for the post is imho a departure for him that's nearly out of character.
As much as I often harp on Denise Crosby in season 1, I actually think someone like Yar would be a much better fit as #1 for a Captain Riker than Shelby, if you could come up with some sci-fi way to have her reemerge
Captain Riker, Yar as #1, Dr. Crusher, Worf still at TAC, Geordi still in engineering, but as #2, & grown Wesley at OPS, is a mix I might actually give a chance. You'd still have to sell me on keeping Deanna around though lol. Narratively, she just works better leaving to work with Picard imho
I always liked Deanna and felt she was short-changed by the writers. To me once a character is established they’re family. The onus is on the writers to do right by them and entertain us.
Same for the other characters. Crusher and La Forge. I’d want La Forge to develop a meaningful relationship. That he (a handsome amiable lieutenant commander and head of engineering on the flagship) can’t get a girl is silly. Plus, his experience with John Doe in “Transfigurations” and his relationship in “Aquiel” should have gotten us past that.
Also, if he’s a writer in the future, maybe one of the episodes this season could be him writing a holodeck program that somehow showcases his creative and engineering talents. He could be the Michael Crichton of his day.
Back to Troi, aside from the Game of Thrones two-parter among the nobility of Betazed, another story for could be one about 24th century psychohistory like out of Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. She had a quality about her early on, a mystique, that coupled with the mind-reading could be unnerving. I wonder if we play that up a bit when you see how predictable and manipulatable we mortals can be through future science.
Same for the other characters. Crusher and La Forge. I’d want La Forge to develop a meaningful relationship. That he (a handsome amiable lieutenant commander and head of engineering on the flagship) can’t get a girl is silly. Plus, his experience with John Doe in “Transfigurations” and his relationship in “Aquiel” should have gotten us past that.
Also, if he’s a writer in the future, maybe one of the episodes this season could be him writing a holodeck program that somehow showcases his creative and engineering talents. He could be the Michael Crichton of his day.
Back to Troi, aside from the Game of Thrones two-parter among the nobility of Betazed, another story for could be one about 24th century psychohistory like out of Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. She had a quality about her early on, a mystique, that coupled with the mind-reading could be unnerving. I wonder if we play that up a bit when you see how predictable and manipulatable we mortals can be through future science.
This is so unbelievably off-brand for what TNG was as to be both delightful and hilarious at the same time.
This is so unbelievably off-brand for what TNG was as to be both delightful and hilarious at the same time.
It was written tongue-in-cheek but reading it over again I kinda like it.
You could always make 2 or 3 more episodes about Data being controlled by some evil entity. There could be a few more Worf lecturing to others about klingon honor episodes. How about Geordi getting turned down by women, I am sure Lwaxana Troi could show up and be over the top and embarrass her daughter again, Of course, there needs to be a few episodes with some mediator going to try to bring peace to a warring planet.
Stewart and Spiner were critical for that cast to work. With that jarring of a change, I think one way to get the remaining characters to work, assuming no new cast were added, and we have a Captain Riker ship would have been to give the 8th series a long arc, something like ENT's Xindi arc, or at the least a compressed "We gotta get home" mini-voyager season. tension.
This gives a new focus and importance on the characters. DS9 would have been moving in that direction by then, anyway.
There would have had to have been some way to show that TNG was still compelling and wasn't going to be a bland season of diplomatic intrigue, mind rapes, or using good old common sense when scienitific knowledge fails the crew, etc.
This gives a new focus and importance on the characters. DS9 would have been moving in that direction by then, anyway.
There would have had to have been some way to show that TNG was still compelling and wasn't going to be a bland season of diplomatic intrigue, mind rapes, or using good old common sense when scienitific knowledge fails the crew, etc.
Problem with introducing g new cast is that we might get what I call the Ezri Effect.. instead of allowing neglected characters like Crusher and Geordi more stories, the S8 episodes might focus almost exclusively on the new arrivals. How good they were would depend on how interesting the new characters were, and whether their actors could carry an episode.
Ezri was kind of a flake. A zombified Dax (murdered Dax in an uninterested host), and like “everyone’s favorite lil’ sister comes to the station. And immediately gets it in with Worf and Bashir. When the whole point of Joined Trills is NOT to associate with your previous mates/lives. Still I didn’t hate Ezri and maybe a couple more seasons would have changed things.
An example of how to do a late add-on is Seven. She’s not what I had in mind with my new tactical officer that’s maybe a cyborg (just to give her something different to play with), but there you go for both her and Shelby. It’s all in the execution.
Reintroducing Dax as quickly as they did was a mistake, because it cheapened Jadzia's death. Only one of two A-list characters killed in a Trek series (not counting Trip because that was a series finale), and they made it largely irrelevant.
Kind of like Superman, who I pretty much lost interest in when they pulled that "let's give him an epic, heroic, tearjerking death... then bring him back like it was no big deal" crap with him (haven't seen "Justice League", don't intend to).
Kind of like Superman, who I pretty much lost interest in when they pulled that "let's give him an epic, heroic, tearjerking death... then bring him back like it was no big deal" crap with him (haven't seen "Justice League", don't intend to).
It was written tongue-in-cheek but reading it over again I kinda like it.
I know it was! And part of me wishes we lived in a world where Star Trek actually DID have evolving storylines and characters (thought DS9 did a nice job with that on their end) where you really could have shaken things up like that.
I don't have to wonder what the eighth season of TNG would've been like. It's the first season of VOY. Just switch out the ship, the characters, and put it in the Alpha Quadrant. 
Most of the VOY stories can be translated into TNG with just a little bit of tweaking. So, given most of the same people would've been involved in making it, that's probably how it would've turned out.
Most of the VOY stories can be translated into TNG with just a little bit of tweaking. So, given most of the same people would've been involved in making it, that's probably how it would've turned out.
Interesting point @Lord Garth. If we’re talking 22-26 episodes a season, maybe a handful of them could be reworkings if VOY and even DS9 stories. DS9’s universe might be really effected by continued TNG as the Cardassian, Bajoran, Ferengi, and Maquis could all go in wildly different directions. Was it any doubt they were heading for war with Cardassia over the Maquis? Bajor would still be occupied…the Ferengi…could have gone in like four different directions.
Another thing to consider is what was going on in the culture in the mid-90’s that might have impacted storylines of this series. Changes in television storytelling (camera and effects stuff) stuff in politics and other popular TV shows, etc.I can see the hands of both nBSG and GoT in DSC for example.
Another thing to consider is what was going on in the culture in the mid-90’s that might have impacted storylines of this series. Changes in television storytelling (camera and effects stuff) stuff in politics and other popular TV shows, etc.I can see the hands of both nBSG and GoT in DSC for example.
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