• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

If tng had an 8th season.

In Season 8, Data is a standout star as the Tin Man in Beverly Crusher's production of The Wizard of Oz; Data's cat Spot becomes sentient; Geordie's visor gets a Draft Punk makeover; the replicator in Picard's ready room starts spitting out iced siracha mint matcha tea despite Jean-Luc's best efforts.
 
And Troi dumps Worf to resume things with Riker, so Worf finds the Duras sisters and they... cheer him up.
 
No, because you're still ignoring the thread's premise. The quality didn't suffer because the show was past its expiration date, the problem was that the writers were out of ideas and needed to be replaced. With fresh blood in the writers' room and some new characters the show could have easily kept going.

With Picard and Data gone I'd ditch Will too, he finally becomes captain but not of the Enterprise, starfleet would not give the flagship to someone who never had a command before. I'd bring back Tom Riker as the new operations officer, that way Frakes can stay.

New characters:

Captain: A human woman in her late 40s/early 50s with a science background
First officer: A bajoran man in his early 30s, born on an earth colony where his parents
Pilot: Ro Laren, in this reality Michelle Forbes decides she wants to be a series regular after all, there's some tension between her and the new first officer because he didn't grow up as a refugee, his family was part of a group who emigrated from Bajor before the occupation.

Troi becomes second officer, by the end of the series she almost felt more like the second officer than data anyway with her doing crew evaluations with Riker, just make it official. This also justifies her having one of the center seats more.

With Will out of the picture Deanna and Tom become a couple and eventually get married making him Thomas Troi (because Betazed was described as a matriarchal society and also because Tom resents being "the other Riker"). Certain parts of the fandom exploding because a man takes his wife's name would also have been really funny which might be the real reason I'd do it.:rommie: Seriously, why is this an issue in many English speaking countries?

Why is what an issue in English speaking countries? A man taking his wife’s name? Is there any culture on earth, English-speaking or not, where it’s customary for a man to take his wife’s name?
 
Why is what an issue in English speaking countries? A man taking his wife’s name? Is there any culture on earth, English-speaking or not, where it’s customary for a man to take his wife’s name?
Not customary as far as I know but it feels like a man talking his wife's name is often ridiculed in English speaking countries according to many people from those countries saying their coworkers of friends would make fun of them. I live in Germany and while a woman taking her husbands name is more common a man taking his wife's name isn't that unusual and is just something that happens and definitely not something anyone jokes about. "Have you decided what last name you'll use?" is a common question when people get engaged, it is not assumed that the husband's name becomes the name for both. What is unusual is both partners keeping their own names while that seems to be more common in English speaking countries, pretty much everyone will assume that one spouse will change their name.

And you know how certain people on YouTube react if anything "woke" happens on Star Trek, some heads would have exploded if Tom Riker had become Tom Troi.:rommie:
 
Not customary as far as I know but it feels like a man talking his wife's name is often ridiculed in English speaking countries according to many people from those countries saying their coworkers of friends would make fun of them. I live in Germany and while a woman taking her husbands name is more common a man taking his wife's name isn't that unusual and is just something that happens and definitely not something anyone jokes about. "Have you decided what last name you'll use?" is a common question when people get engaged, it is not assumed that the husband's name becomes the name for both. What is unusual is both partners keeping their own names while that seems to be more common in English speaking countries, pretty much everyone will assume that one spouse will change their name.

And you know how certain people on YouTube react if anything "woke" happens on Star Trek, some heads would have exploded if Tom Riker had become Tom Troi.:rommie:

I don’t know of any country on earth where it is customary for a man to take his wife’s surname. Pretending that it is somehow only a product of English speaking cultures reeks of cultural narcissism.

The reason why people would treat it as something abnormal is because it is abnormal. Anywhere on earth.

There is no such thing as a feminine surname. Every woman takes the surname of a man, whether it be her father’s surname or her husband’s. If she wants to take her mother’s maiden name that’s also a man’s surname, her grandfather’s surname.

Anyway, this is your fantasy, so you can write it any way you want it, but if history is any indication, writing simply to piss off your fanbase isn’t really a good business decision.
 
I rather like the idea of women keeping their last names in the future and even girls taking the mother’s last name.

On alien planets, I don’t see why children shouldn’t take their mothers last name. Or more exotic arrangements, like families creating or adopting a new name for themselves upon formation.
 
There are a number of things that they could have followed up on, and a number of new stories to tell.

A few follow ups I’d have liked would have been to the “Conspiracy” Parasites, Nagilum, those trans-dimensional aliens from “Schisms,” and maybe to the new life-form from “Emergence” that arose from the Enterprise itself. That last one in-part because I actually couldn’t stand that episode, and I’m a sucker for ideas that salvage something and making it something strangely great. Like, I think there’s a far-out follow-up story there. Questions to raise about how the Enterprise is treated by the crew (a Cylon story?) and how unusual a consciousness the life-form born from it might be…maybe something Solaris or 2001-like even.

Oh, and…given that Tom Hanks wanted to "play a Romulan when it’s time at last to make peace with them," how about getting him in a two-parter…maybe that’s when you bring in the afore-mentioned Ambassador Picard for a guest-spot, too. And Leonard Nimoy leading the Reunificationists, and maybe even James Doohan there to help his friend...like when Han Solo returns with the Millennium Falcon at the end of A New Hope to save Luke during his final pass at the Death Star. ...All that would have made for one Hell of a two-parter. People would be breaking down the door to be in that one. Andreas Katsulas could be back as Tomalak on the eeevil Romulans side, along with Denise Crosby. Maybe Admiral Mendak comes back on the side of the moderates.

I could see the story be sprawling. Maybe this could be Trek’s first three-parter, not The Circle Trilogy that opened DS9 season 2. Could we see the Romulan Senate? Is Hanks the Emperor or a reformist senator? What would Reunification look like? Does the Star-Empire dissolve and then you see chaos among the newly-free subject-races? Is there an interim state between the Romulans and Vulcans that’s neither in the Federation nor out? Would this make the Klingons saber-rattle?

An idea I’d have for completely new stories is one in which the episode...runs backward. We start off with something cataclysmic, like the destruction of the Enterprise (or something else we care about) and go from there all the way to the beginning. And what if we see the story unfold through the eyes of an anti-time being….maybe the "Schisms" aliens or Nagilum again or something? And it all just looks bad and getting worse as we get closer to the start -- the point at which they'll set the cataclysm in motion. Only, we find that our (the viewer's) perspective was off and the cataclysm we saw at the beginning of the episode wasn’t what it seemed at all.

…I wonder if this would be the “Move Along Home” of TNG for some people lol. Well, maybe if the anti-time aliens are just as surprised as we are at what happens, and now they'e more interested in doing being evil than ever after seeing how close to destruction our heroes came. And maybe at some point in the episode Troi is in command... That’d scare some fans, and give her opportunity to shine, too.
 
Last edited:
I don’t know of any country on earth where it is customary for a man to take his wife’s surname.
Neither do I, I literally said that.

Pretending that it is somehow only a product of English speaking cultures reeks of cultural narcissism.
I didn't say that but it seems to be a bigger issue in English speaking countries than it is in some others I'm familiar with. That doesn't say that it's not seen negatively in other countries as well.

The reason why people would treat it as something abnormal is because it is abnormal. Anywhere on earth.
That's factually wrong, in many parts of the world it's unusual but not abnormal.

There is no such thing as a feminine surname. Every woman takes the surname of a man, whether it be her father’s surname or her husband’s. If she wants to take her mother’s maiden name that’s also a man’s surname, her grandfather’s surname.
:rolleyes:

Anyway, this is your fantasy, so you can write it any way you want it, but if history is any indication, writing simply to piss off your fanbase isn’t really a good business decision.
Pissing off some fans won't hurt anyone's business. Not every fan's opinion should be respected, it's perfectly fine to ridicule people who are racist, sexist, homophobic etc. and figuratively (or literally) tell them to suck it.
 
If you would really be pissed off by seeing a man centuries in a progressively egalitarian future taking his wife’s surname maybe you’re missing the point of Star Trek.

If we were looking for a truly egalitarian way to pass on surnames, a more scalable approach than exponential hyphening would be for the married partners to pick a new last name for both of them that honors both family heritages.
 
If you would really be pissed off by seeing a man centuries in a progressively egalitarian future taking his wife’s surname maybe you’re missing the point of Star Trek.
Have you seen what some fans have complained about the last few years?
 
I didn't say that but it seems to be a bigger issue in English speaking countries than it is in some others I'm familiar with. That doesn't say that it's not seen negatively in other countries as well.

And what’s your evidence that it’s a “bigger issue” in English speaking countries? Do you include hyper-conservative cultures in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and South America when making that comparison?

The truth is you made a lazy generalization because you’re a cultural narcissist.

That's factually wrong, in many parts of the world it's unusual but not abnormal.

Unusual and abnormal are synonyms, and men taking the surname of their wife’s father is abnormal in every country and culture on earth. That is factually true.

Your error is that you treat “abnormal” as a pejorative, when it isn’t.


In other words, I was dead on and rather than acknowledge it, you roll your eyes because there is literally nothing you can disagree with.

Pissing off some fans won't hurt anyone's business. Not every fan's opinion should be respected, it's perfectly fine to ridicule people who are racist, sexist, homophobic etc. and figuratively (or literally) tell them to suck it.

So in your completely imaginary 1995, Star Trek fandom is filled with evil istaphobes who you will cut down to size by killing Will Riker, and then marrying his twin off to Counsellor Troi before having him take her father’s name.

With that kind of thinking, I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before you’re writing scripts for Star Trek: Discovery. I wish you luck.
 
Have you seen what some fans have complained about the last few years?

Yeah, and if it’s thinly veiled misogynistic crap about patriarchal naming being applied to alien cultures 400 years in the future because they’re insecure about men’s declining cultural authority, they’re equally missing the point of Trek. :)
 
Bigots and chauvinists can think whatever they want. Aside from a psycho-sociological curiosity as to the pathology of their derangement and general human empathy for them caught in it, one shouldn’t give them more attention than they deserve.

You have to wonder what’s going on with them that they pooh-pooh the new stuff as they do. I’ve got all sorts of reasons that I don’t like more recent Treks, but my racial and gender criticisms are nowhere near the top.

And no, we shouldn’t lump large groups of fans together too quickly as there are those who dislike more recent Trek for completely different and mutually exclusive reasons.
 
maybe to the new life-form from “Emergence” that arose from the Enterprise itself. That last one in-part because I actually couldn’t stand that episode, and I’m a sucker for ideas that salvage something and making it something strangely great.

Here's an interesting thought. What if that episode had ended with the ship itself becoming sentient... and staying that way? Would it have been entitled to the same rights and protections as other lifeforms? Would the crew have to leave and find some other ship to serve on? The mind bogggles...
 
Here's an interesting thought. What if that episode had ended with the ship itself becoming sentient... and staying that way? Would it have been entitled to the same rights and protections as other lifeforms? Would the crew have to leave and find some other ship to serve on? The mind bogggles...
That’s the thing…if the consciousness arose from a ship designed to serve its crew, maybe it’s like a Vorta who underneath it all only wishes to serve its Founder. Maybe it has Asimov’s Laws of Robotics underwriting everything else, so wherever else the story unfolds…where it might look like it’s heading into rebelling Cylon territory…maybe it’ll come around to make sense at the end as the ship acting in the best interests of the crew. Maybe the episode ends with like Moya from Farscape or Andromeda…from Andromeda…where the ship becomes another character and part of the crew.

My Gods…does that mean that the ship chooses a holographic avatar of itself to interact with the crew, and its disembodied voice appears now in the form of Majel Barrett every week?!
 
My Gods…does that mean that the ship chooses a holographic avatar of itself to interact with the crew, and its disembodied voice appears now in the form of Majel Barrett every week?!

Jean Luc would take a shuttle and flee from the Enterprise at the first opportunity :guffaw:
 
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top