Is Trek obsolete?

[Balthier the Great]

It has some grey around the temples, but I think it still works.

I have a few beefs about how they show things. The genetics=destiny bit *is* obsolete. It was certainly true for the most part on Earth iup unitl the mid 20th century -- but that was do mostly to lack of travel and global communications. I'd love to see more diversity on that front. For that matter, Trek has fallen way behind in the weird aliens department. That's one thing I liked about Star Wars, Farscape, and Babylon 5. The aliens are supposed to be somewhat weird. Incomprehensible in some cases. Maybe even a million years ahead of us technologically.

For that matter, I think trek often falls into the trap of "preachyness" which is a major problem for TV trek. It seems like there are many instances where the plot takes a back seat to hitting the viewer over the head with a message. The best example I can give is the anti-drug TNG episode. It doesn't get much more contrieved than the dialog between Yar and Wesley about the dangers of drug abuse. I think it should present the issue and let the viewer see the consequences of the decisions that the characters make for plot reasons. Let them make a bad choice once in a while.

 

[Morris Irvine]

ive been thinking this for a while so I made my own sci fi film called COSMOSIS http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTs7EyVAcXw basicaly it takes the basic premisal of star trek but probes way deeper into deep philosophic issues and takes the viewers mind to new realms of consiousness but also has intense action scense at the same time aswell. star trek will definatley be obsolete when COSMOSIS makes it big but i still love star trek though

 

[DWF]

DS9 and Voyager have been forgotten about, the other shows are at least still on the air. But TNG still remains a well watched and well discussed show. Even JJ Abrams and the writers of the new movie are fans of TNG more so than the other shows.

Voyager is actually the show I get the most re-runs for (in terms of how many channels have it and how often they play it). And if I'm not mistaken, as far as DS9 is concerned, I think there was a syndication issue that makes it a lot harder and expensive for channels to run it.

Spike brought TNG, DS9 and Voyager for a record amount of money, but DS9 and Voyager have been taken off the air while TNG has gone on to G4 and Sci-Fi.

 

[Anwar]

And none of the subsequent Treks were really any more evolved rthan TNG.

Incorrect. DS9 is orders of magnitude more evolved than TNG and is extremely relevant today.

TNG, VOY, and ENT = yes, totally obsolete.

TOS = some obsolete aspects, ie: 'tapes', the hippy episode, gigantic buttons on the bridge that jut out to the ceiling etc...yet despite that, for the most part its ideas are timeless and therefore always relevant and never obsolete.

DS9 = likewise timeless and therefore always relevant and never obsolete, and with almost no obsolete aspects like 'tapes' or hippy episodes dragging it down like TOS has.

Nah, most of the stuff people liked about DS9 were in TNG anyways or at least began in TNG. DS9 is hardly the end all the more extreme fanboys claim it is. DS9, VOY and ENT are all in the same boat but TOS and TNG are the logevity of Trek.

 

[Kelso]

I'd love to see a revamped Star Trek future in which our current concepts of nationality, ethnicity, sexual preference, etc. have become completely meaningless. No more white people or asian people or african people. No more straight people or gay people. Just people- multi-cultural, multi-racial, sexually liberated people.

I'd also like to see them lose the humanoid aliens, entirely.

 

[Danoz]

I'm still pretty sure that when we start to explore the galaxy the women on our space ships with be in miniskirts; answering the phone, delivering meals and handing the captain a pad to sign.

Eh, it's not entirely inconceivable that we take a few steps backward in gender equality once or twice in the future. I like the way Ds9 approached this topic in "Trials and Tribbleations"

 

[Herkimer Jitty]

Conceptually Star Trek is a sound platform. However, it's content has greyed around the temples significantly.

The shows relied on a lot of older concepts in science and technology, even through the later Treks (For example: the complete unimpressive lack of smart materials, computers of the future are big, bulky mainframes as opposed to a shipwide network, etc etc) Through the TNG era, Star Trek fell a couple of decades behind the times in science both real and speculative.
The social concept of the Federation also decayed - becoming more and more overbearing, smug and imperialistic with a propaganda that encourages all kinds of double-think ("We're not a military." "The Defiant isn't a warship, it's an escort.")

That and a few episodes (Like "The Wounded") have demonstrated that the "perfect society" keeps everyone from paying attention to their negative emotions - these people can't deal with real strife.

For a while, I've felt the Trek universe to be rather bungled, and have been in favor of a few retcons to keep it from being a technologically anachronistic dystopic utopia.

 

[Warped9]

What is your opinion of Babylon 5? That was pretty hip and edgy.

I really liked B5. I think there was lots of mileage left in it. But I think J.M. Straczynski got tired out it when he was done. Crusade had potentiel but no real support. And after B5's five year season arc it seemed the story was done and no one wanted to explore it and further.

TOS and TNG were essentially open ended.

Part of what really disappointed me about ENT was it's throwing away the opportunity to really inject some fresh creativity into the franchise. They just redressed the same old, same old.

If you're doing space adventure there will be inevitable similarities to what has come before. But if you strive to play with details and the overall flavour then you can reinvigorate it. It's rather like adding a hint of something to a favoured recipe to make it interesting again.

 

[SFRabid]

Re: gender and officers/crew

when we start to explore the galaxy the women on our space ships with be in miniskirts; answering the phone, delivering meals

This thread covered it as far as the gender heiarchy of Starfleet Officers and promotions in Star Trek.
If you are referring to in real life then you are going to be getting some hate mail private messages from the ladies here.
Without responses to SFRabid's post going off topic SFRabid you may want to review this. Enough said.

Sooooo, you've never been exposed to the concept of sarcasm?

It is ironic that TOS, much like MASH, is credited for forward thinking yet the primary role for women is to be protected, subservient and seduced by the leading male to a point of being demeaning. In respect to sex and race the space shuttle program as surpassed TOS.

 

[plynch]

If Star Trek was obsolete, its most recent film would not have made $350 million worldwide.

Iff Star Trek XI is "Star Trek" then you have a good point.

A good vehicle for storytelling is probably not obsolete. The starship far away from home with a captain who needs to make decisions with conflicting advice from head and heart -- that's a pretty good storytelling enterprise.

We'll see where ST XII goes with it.

 

[jefferiestubes8]

Re: gender and officers/crew

the concept of sarcasm?

Sector 7 cleared it up for me with his post. SFRabid I apologize. Sarcasm sometimes does not come across with email and typed words.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Star Trek is not about the future. It's about the recent past: colonialism, the American frontier and the world wars of the 20th century among other things.

The truth is that as the Franchise approaches its half-century mark, fifty years of technological and social change and scientific discovery have had minimal impacts on the visualization, concepts and characterizations of Trek.

As Warped9 has noted, every putative "science fiction" concept incorporated into Trek was decades old by the time the show premiered in 1966. Designers who've worked on it celebrate the fact that as late as this century they were drawing visual inspiration from the 1939 World's Fair and architecture of the 1950s, as well as designing spacecraft based on the shapes of lawn toys and electric toothbrushes.

All of that works only because evolving perceptions of where we are now and what the future likely holds have little to do with Star Trek's main actual appeal. Star Trek faces resolutely backward, and so many of us react to any challenge to our childhood memories with anything from irritated disinterest to outrage.

 

[Warped9]

I think many of Star Trek's themes are still valid, but it's presentation may be getting a little long on the tooth.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Themes and concepts are two different things, as different as themes and presentation.

Star Trek's themes might be said to include belief in progress, positivism, and the importance of the human urge to explore. Maybe.

Trek's conceptual underpinnings - that the future might be one in which human beings like us travel in FTL ships from star to star, establishing settlements and associating with human-like aliens and fighting interstellar wars - are absolute nonsense. They're simply lifts from that branch of modern fantasy found mainly in the old American pulp science fiction novels of the 1930s and 1940s.

 

[Sovereign_One]

Trek's conceptual underpinnings - that the future might be one in which human beings like us travel in FTL ships from star to star, establishing settlements and associating with human-like aliens and fighting interstellar wars - are absolute nonsense. They're simply lifts from that branch of modern fantasy found mainly in the old American pulp science fiction novels of the 1930s and 1940s.

What's nonsensical about it? If it is nonsense, what should the concept be now?

 

[Goliath]

I think what you may be describing is the obsolescence of not only Star Trek, but the entire 'Golden Age' of science fiction - which, for me, ended in 1981 when William Gibson wrote 'The Gernsback Continuum' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gernsback_Continuum and 'Johnny Mnemonic'. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Mnemonic

I tend to agree with you, though I wouldn't date it so precisely, or give all the credit to Gibson.

I would also argue that the end of the Golden Age of science fiction coincided with the end of classical modernity: the two went hand in hand.

IMO, the single finest fictional meditation on the end of both periods was Gibson and Sterling's "Red Star, Winter Orbit".

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Trek's conceptual underpinnings - that the future might be one in which human beings like us travel in FTL ships from star to star, establishing settlements and associating with human-like aliens and fighting interstellar wars - are absolute nonsense. They're simply lifts from that branch of modern fantasy found mainly in the old American pulp science fiction novels of the 1930s and 1940s.

What's nonsensical about it?

Because it doesn't touch anywhere on what we actually know about the Universe, reality, humanity or anything. For starts. It's very much on the same level as postulating that if the Sun were to blow up one of us could build a rocket, put a kid in it and send him off to a planet where he'd fly and fight evil robot-building geniuses.

The tropes adopted by space opera and consequently by Star Trek - the naval vessel charting far mysterious waters and encountering exotic landscapes and people and beasts while planting the K/i/n/g/'s/ Federation's flag - are history viewed through the lenses of romance and adventure fiction. While it's not inconceivable that at some far future date someone or something that had its origins on Earth may physically contact an extrasolar planet, that potentiality is a long, long way from anything to do with Star Trek.

Now, I know this is someone's cue to post a link to an abstract of a paper that supposedly demonstrates that some aspect of current theoretical physics holds out the possibility of some kind of particles traveling at FTL speeds and that this opens the door to all of Star Trek being real. Peter Pan is forever a boy.

"What should the concept be now?"

Why should the concept change at all? Star Trek is a set of stories. It's fiction about a world that never was and never will be real, just as Tarzan or Superman or Spider-Man or Star Wars are. "How can we remake Star Trek so that it might really be able to happen?" isn't a very useful question to ask (it has a two-word answer: "we can't"). What can usefully be asked is how it can be adapted over time to remain imaginative and somewhat sophisticated storytelling that stays true to itself.

 

[Goliath]

^Forgive me for saying so, Dennis, but I'm pretty sure that's the longest post I've seen you write in six years.

 

[Islander]

^that's because it took him that long to write it...

 

[Herkimer Jitty]

^Give the man a break. His house is really close to a black hole. The time dilation is pretty extreme.