Spoilers Meet the bridge crew of the USS Titan-A

I went into the theatre opening day, back in '93, convinced that they were going to kill off Kirk. I wonder if a previous script contained that eventuality.

 

TOS have aged a lot and I'd say so has TNG's by now. Those LCARS reaaaaally don't move much.

I mean, ok, you can't expect them to extrapolate or guess what technology was coming, and all of television did this. The Jerry Anderson puppet series of the 60s also had these quaint, chunky controls that still looked fab for their time and clever. They're positively twee by now.

Bare in mind as well, 1965 was when the first touch screen was invented by the RAF and kept somewhat under wraps before seeing widespread adoption at air traffic control... in the 90s.

Even the Elograph which saw far wider appeal and adoption wouldn't really take off until the 1980s personal computer revolution and even then, it was awful.

I remember playing with the technology in the 90s and it was utterly crap. One of the fun things watching TNG knowing they based it off this tech is that, eventually, Data or Geordi should be practically punching the screens to get the stupid things to work.

Another one is the sheer quaintness of the PADD. The computers on ships and star bases had literal gigaquads of memory space, but a personal data pad seemingly couldn't hold more than one or two equivalents of the rich text file.

Yet in 2023, I can beam any of that information from my phone and receive hundreds of files to it. Realistically by the 23rd/24th century you'd be issued with a single PADD you'd be expected to keep on your person at all times as part of your uniform and day to day service.

In some ways, the way the franchise can actively date itself is part of its appeal, it's a fascinating window of a decade thinking what several hundred years into the future would look like and is often hilariously superceeded within the decade or two.

 

The website TV Tropes calls it "Zee Rust".

On October 21st, 2015, I had some friends over and we watched Back to the Future, Part II. It was a weeknight, not the weekend, but it was the only way to watch it to get the type of effect we wanted, and we got a huge kick out of it!

Bonus points because not only did we get to see a 2015 so different from ours, but we also got to compare Biff to Trump! That movie is even better now than it was before.

 

Maybe not. But there was no evidence Pike was getting his own show either.

 

Pike got his own show because he was a huge hit as a guest star on DSC and the fans demanded a return.

No disrespect, but I just don't see the same thing happening with Seven.

I've always thought that part of Marty's mission was to see that the real 2015 doesn't turn out as cartoonish and obviously silly as the one we got in the film.

 

But, yeah, not to hit the canon point too much more, I much much much would rather have a The-Next-Next-Generation that moves forward in universe that can handle the change in technology and way television is done in an organic way, much as TOS -> TNG did.

What's really crazy though is how nothing dates more quickly than what people think the immediate future will be like. Parks and Recreation had a three year time jump in their final season to 2017 (while being produced in 2014). Mobile devices that were 20 years away, not three. No idea the ahem orange man was was on the horizon.

Something more Picard related... Just look at the DS9 "Past Tense" version of 2024. 1988-1992 and say 1996-2002 all slowly blend together. But 1992-1995 is the only part of the 90's that screams the 90's -- and is super distinct. And the one time Star Trek went "20 minutes into the future" they did it with that pocket of the 1990s on steroids. There's this Twin Peaks-ish miniseries from 1993 called Wild Palms that is set in "2007" with many of the same aesthetics of "Past Tense". Worth a view on YouTube.

I'm glad Picard season 2 was able to be set to as close to modern day as possible while plausibly keeping all the alt-21st century stuff previously established.

 

This is in addition to the eighteen years she spent with the Borg (plus her four years on Voyager).

Biff actually WAS modeled on Donald Trump (he was big back in the 80's).

 

I break up the '90s the same way.

On August 30th, 2024, I'm re-watching "Past Tense". I'm holding off on watching it again until that point. Sadly, I won't have any friends over for this one, because all of my friends who like Star Trek are only fans of TNG. And they only talk to me about Picard and are only interested in it because they see it as TNG.

 

That and P+ decided to greenlight an Enterprise series because the AOS movies are taking FOREVER to get off the ground (it's now been seven years since Star Trek: Beyond ... and we're no closer to another movie now than we were back then ).

 

Another reason I don't think Seven will get her own show - and again, I am NOT ragging on Seven, she is a fascinating character, and Jeri of course knocks it out of the park - is that we've just been seeing a lot of her lately. When Pike turned up on DSC, it had been decades since we'd last seen him (the prime version, anyway). So that, and Anson Mount, was part of the reason fans took to Pike so much.

Trump can't hold a candle to Biff.

At least Biff had guts. He was evil through and through, no doubt, but he wasn't the spineless weakling that Trump is.

 

SNW currently holds the world record for longest time between pilot and series order (fifty-seven years).

There's a great deal we know about Trump now that we didn't know back in the 80's (back then, he had this image as a big shot New York real estate developer).

Hindsight is twenty-twenty.

 

Star Trek: The Next Saturation!

Paramount: A Gulf + Western Company.

 

Speaking of novels... Amazon and elsewhere have the already published four PICARD novels on sale as eBooks for $1.99 each.

 

I'm not so sure about Seven-Rafi love drama spin-off while we still have actors who served as Dr. Bashir, Garak, Quark, Sisko, O'Brien... 25. century should be theirs. Master actors, master rolls. Who wants to watch that psycho junkie Rafi while we have these big names? Give us back DS9 legacy!!!

 

Do the actors want to come back?

 

It's not.

Its been twenty years. DS9 is not coming back.

The fact that you're triggered by Seven/Raffi says something about you.

 

Nor does it belong to one crew.

 

Plus, even if DS9 came back, they'd hate it.

Ira Steven Behr, Robert Hewitt Wolfe, Ron Moore, and everyone else in that Writer's Room could come back, they could write all the episodes, and they'd say, "What happened?! They lost their touch!" And they'd weigh what they want against what they'd actually get.

 

Guaranteed. Like, I am not a betting man but I would bet money on this outcome.