General Trek Questions and Observations
- Thread starter The Old Mixer
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Wormhole X-treme!
Before becoming institutionalized for mental illness and later becoming homeless, time enforcer Captain Braxton needed to raise funds to stop Henry Starling from using the technology he stole from Braxton's timeship for his own greed and to enhance humanity's technological development.
Seeing as he was tracking Starling in Los Angeles in 1967, Braxton naturally gravitated towards the entertainment industry as a good way of making money in this primitive capitalist society.
He figured telling stories from hundreds of years in the future wouldn't disrupt the timeline, since no one would know they are true for centuries to come, so he recounted the tales of history's most infamous temporal violator, Captain James T. Kirk, which every timecop knew from the Academy.
The suits at Desilu Studios ate it up and gave him a five season contract to produce 'Star Trek' from 1967-72. Braxton was rolling in cash for his mission to stop Starling, but also caught up in drugs and booze and enjoying the lifestyle and attention his career afforded him. He got careless and started telling people he was from the future, which prompted his agent to get him placed in the mental hospital on an involuntary hold to he could go cold turkey and get some help.
While in the hospital he met a fellow patient named Benny Russell, a science fiction writer and ancestor of Benjamin Sisko who had been receiving visions from the Prophets of his future progeny that he could not explain, but which he had written all over the walls. Unable to explain how he was receiving the visions but recognizing their accuracy, Braxton assured him that what he was seeing was real events in the future, and not to lose hope.
Working together, the two became close friends and were released from the mental hospital. They went back to the studio and pitched a followup to Star Trek based on Russell's stories merged with Barxton's universe, which became Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and ran from 1972-79. Following that came Star Trek: The Movie in 1979, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kang, and so on through the series Star Trek: V'ger, about Braxton's other nemesis, Captain Janeway and all the other Trek shows, films and novels, etc.
Braxton never lost sight of his mission to stop Starling though, so using his newfound wealth he produced a documentary about up and coming tech billionaire Henry Starling that labelled him a fraud and claimed he stole all of his ideas. Starling's army of lawyers sued Braxton for defamation of character and left him destitute from the court mandated fines and legal fees fighting the case, and blacklisted in Hollywood circles because Starling used his connections to undermine him. His friend Benny wanted to come to his defense but Braxton told him not to or else Starling would bring him down too.
Braxton wound up living homeless on the streets, another tragic tale of Hollywood. But his legacy of Star Trek would continue to thrive under his former partner Benny Russell.
Eventually, the starship Voyager would visit 1996 Los Angeles, and Neelix and Kes would be watching TV and see an episode of Star Trek: V'ger and be thoroughly confused by the accuracy of its future predictions, but forgot about it when footage of the actual Voyager streaking across the sky was broadcast on the evening news, something which Angelinos eventually chalked up to being a cleverly done promo for the show.
Just rewatched (part of) DS9's Armageddon Game. Another one of those loose ends. The T'Lani and Kellerun government seem pretty intent on killing off Bashir and O'Brien, as they believe that without their deaths, the knowledge how to construct genetic Harvesters still exists, and that cannot be tolerated, and it seems one cannot convince them to think otherwise. They also know they escape. And yet, we never hear anything about it anymore. No assassination or abduction attempts aimed at them because of this later in DS9 . No Federation response to this diplomatic 'incident'. Nothing. Yet the T'Lani and Kellerun don't seem like the type of people that would simply give up on this (after all they also kept warring for hundreds of years).
I mean personally I don't like the idea because I don't like 1) Meta-stuff like that 2) don't like Star Trek episodes that don't take place in the Star Trek setting.
But Buffy and the original Charmed got away with it to varying degrees. Though I know a lot of people were seriously pissed at the episode that suggested that Buffy is a mental patient and all her adventures are just in her head.
Charmed tried the same, with Piper being the mental patient, but because the show wasn't as brave or intelligent as Buffy they made it clear that the mental hospital was the illusion and the regular Charmed universe was the "real world"
So I guess it could be done, but it both has been done before (Galaxy Quest, Buffy, Charmed) and, in my opinion, isn't really all that much fun.
Show me the Murfandise!!!
It was done on a regular basis (almost every year) on Supernatural, and it generally worked really well there. They even did it multiple different ways both having the main characters adventures become a cult hit book series with fan conventions in their own world and also accidentally getting knocked into a different world where they're all just actors on the tv show Supernatural.
Having said that, I don't think it's the kind of thing that really would work as well on a show that isn't already a bit over the top to start with, and while Star Trek can do that sort of thing sometimes it's not really what I want the average Trek episode to be.
Something like this, I think could work well once or twice on a show like Lower Decks but I don't think I'd want to see it anywhere else in Trek.
There are a couple of classic short stories involving different takes on the Starfleet crew interacting with the television production. The first was a fan fic, and it inspired the second that was published in an officially licensed Trek Lit short story collection.
Quoting myself in a recent thread [https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/wha...knew-about-our-timeline.309820/#post-13965363]:
See "Visit to a Weird Planet (or The inside story behind the antagonism of a certain network toward a certain segment of the population)" by Jean Lorrah and Willard F. Hunt, and see also "Visit to a Weird Planet Revisited" by Ruth Berman.
https://fanlore.org/wiki/Visit_to_a_Weird_Planet
https://memory-beta.fandom.com/wiki/Visit_to_a_Weird_Planet_Revisited
https://memory-beta.fandom.com/wiki/The_New_Voyages
They are both utterly ingenious. The second one was published in Star Trek: The New Voyages from Bantam.
https://fanlore.org/wiki/Visit_to_a_Weird_Planet
https://memory-beta.fandom.com/wiki/Visit_to_a_Weird_Planet_Revisited
https://memory-beta.fandom.com/wiki/The_New_Voyages
They are both utterly ingenious. The second one was published in Star Trek: The New Voyages from Bantam.
I remember that book. I have it asomewhere. Only a geological age ago.
Edit - Never mind! I was beaten to it!
Meta/self-referential stuff? Only in the season 5/series finale, which is so steeped in it that you need a thick set of hip boots to try to get through it. What were they thinking... it's otherwise an underrated season, clawing its way up after how blankingly bleepingly bad seasons 3 and 4 were... well, 4 when the got away from the sort of barrel-scraping trite tropes of how "Lead/main character and their super-dee-duper sibling(s) aren't just normal people, they're speciaaaaaaaaal and can save the multiverse, squeeeeeeee!!" Ugh. 1, 2, very little of 3, a little more of 4, and most of 5 is where it's at if you want the show at its best, without the ridiculous baggage (Quinn going from hapless traveler to the savior of the multiverse crap) and/or uninspired "movie of the week" ripoffs (think season 3)...
Meh. Trying to pass their deaths off as an accident/attack was one thing. Trying anything after they got caught red handed would've just put them on the enemy list of a superior power. They didn't seem a match for the Federation at all.
Let's see. O' Brien and Bashir getting 'accidentally' vaporized, Sisko getting suspicious, finding out the video they got was probably tampered with, trying to find out what happened and promptly also accidentally getting killed. All this in an area that supposedly has been pacified. He most certainly would have logged his suspicions to Starfleet before he went in to investigate, after all Starfleet isn't the Wild West. Even in the ' best/worst case scenario ' (for the T' Lani and Kellerun, I mean), in which Sisko mysteriously disappeared without a trace, I think the T' Lani /Kellerun diplomatic liaison to the Federation would face a very unpleasant session having to explain to the Federation what happened according to them, and a significant risk they would end up in their ill graces anyway.
I love the throbbing hum of power you hear as you enter the transporter room in "The Cage". You knew there was some serious energy waiting to be channeled here. And rightly so.
I do miss some of the sound effects from TOS that even regular weekly TOS dialed down on or abandoned. The transporter platform "throbbing" from "The Cage" is one of them. But I can understand why that effect would have added money to the weekly postproduction budget and distracted from dialogue in the transporter room.
Sisko contacts both factions and explains that information about the bioweapons is stored in the Federation's database. Killing Miles and Bashir is now pointless.
There’s still a distinctive hum during the production run,* but it’s subtler and quieter. “The Cage” sound effect was menacing, suggesting enormous power just barely under control. It also seemed somehow primitive compared to the production sound effect.
I also liked that the materialization sound effect was different than Kirk’s ship. Much like the room effect, it was related to but different than what was used from WNHGB on. When I heard it mixed into the beam-out of Spock and Michael (you know which one), I squeed. No, really.
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*
Yeah, it's easier to conduct a scene between characters in the regular series transporter room with the quieter and more subdued hum. With the background sounds from "The Cage" it's definitely a lot more distracting but in a good way.
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