Star Trek: Jumper

[All Seeing Eye]

Something happens to a member of a Federation ship and his soul or essence keeps jumping into other people bodies not only through space but also through time.

We get to see this guy jump all across the Galaxy and through different centuries and eras trying to find a way to return to his own body.

He becomes all sorts of different people from Klingons to Romulans, to Jem'hadar to pakleds to Cardassians etc etc

Best of all he ends up in the future and witnesses the rise of an major enemy to the Federation and has to find a way to alert Starfleet. At one point he ends up so far back in time he becomes an Iconian during the time of their downfall.

 

[Wingsley]

STAR TREK: QUANTUM LEAP?

 

[All Seeing Eye]

STAR TREK: QUANTUM LEAP?

No, Jumper my friend................ JUMPER.

 

[Borgminister]

 

[JoeFromEarth]

So would this person be Captain Archer?

 

[TJinPgh]

Give him a device with 2 lights on it, a red one for when the time line is messed up and a green one for when history is correct and we can call it Star Trek: Voyagers :-p

 

[ThePlumsofWrath]

Fail.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

Ugh.

 

[Captaindemotion]

Is this suggestion for real?

 

[Crewman47]

STAR TREK: QUANTUM LEAP?

No, Jumper my friend................ JUMPER.

Like the idea but I'd have to say that it sounds more like Quantum Leap than Jumper, if you're comparing it to the movie/show.

Jumper had Hayden Christensen able to teleport from one place to another in a flash, but only if he knew where he was going, where Quantum Leap is more what you're describing in your post.

 

[All Seeing Eye]

I'd have to say that it sounds more like Quantum Leap than Jumper, if you're comparing it to the movie/show.

No I'm not.

 

[steve1961]

You mean captain Archer would teleport?

 

[O'Dib]

Y'know, both of Legend's joke threads raise an interesting point. Star Trek has suffered from never doing a new show with an entirely different premise. Aside from the slightly different DS9 (which I like best), all shows take place on a ship and are about exploration and interstellar politics, and are essentially the same thing. Roddenberry's vision of a prosperous unified humanity, as interesting and timely as it first was, drove the franchise into the ground. There was never a game-changing series premiere that set up a vastly different universe to play in. How about our hero (or ship) getting permanently stuck in the MU? How about a devastated, federationless alpha quadrant? Or even just a premise that allows a focus on characters of lower rank/ different professions, like an Earth-based Academy show, or whatever. Requiring the writing team to play by different rules in each iteration would've helped them avoid the pitfalls of story recycling. Well anyway, I'm not complaining, JJ's take feels fresh enough.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

Roddenberry's vision of a prosperous unified humanity, as interesting and timely as it first was, drove the franchise into the ground.

That's Star Trek's premise (well, to be more precise: an optimistic vision of humanity's future is the premise, and prosperity & unity are important factors that bolster the premise). If you delete the premise, you don't have Star Trek. You have a different sci fi series. Just name it whatever you like and trot it out there, but don't try to pass it off as something it's not.

If you want to expand the definition of Star Trek, fine. But you have to know what the core premise is, so you understand what part can't be re-defined. And there must be something that can't be re-defined. Otherwise you got a whole lotta nuthin, and Star Trek would not have survived this long if it were nuthin.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Y'know, both of Legend's joke threads raise an interesting point. Star Trek has suffered from never doing a new show with an entirely different premise.

No, Star Trek has suffered from not doing entertaining episodes. Star Trek is about people in the future, on spaceships. It's not anything else.

 

[Ronson2k10]

You could also be describing 'Wolf in the Fold'? Where the essence of Jack the Ripper is moving from body to body trying to survive. It's an interesting idea but has been done a few times in Trek. Sometimes via force and sometimes by accident. Spocks Katra was passed to McCoy and McCoy had to find a way to put it back. Picard lived an entire lifetime as a member of an extinct race. Janeway and crew fought a war out of remembrance of an ancient war. Sargon and Felicia transfered there Spirits into Kirk and Dr. Mulhul. Embassador Kollos occupies Spocks body for a time to fix the insane events that happened earlier.

In Jumper the character is moving from one location to another and at will. He isn't taking over someones body. I think Quantum Leap or Sliders is perhaps what you're talking about. Where they have no control over where they are going and have to deal with the events and people they meet on the spur of the moment.

Where Scott Bakula played in both Trek (Enterprise) and Quantum Leap the comparisons are pretty easy to make.

In order to make it work you would need a character to start out with. He/She would need to be pretty well defined but then grow through the experiences that would happen along the way. It has been done a few times before so it would take some creativity to make it fresh both from a Trek and Quantum Leap standpoint.

 

[Arix]

Y'know, both of Legend's joke threads raise an interesting point. Star Trek has suffered from never doing a new show with an entirely different premise. Aside from the slightly different DS9 (which I like best), all shows take place on a ship and are about exploration and interstellar politics, and are essentially the same thing. Roddenberry's vision of a prosperous unified humanity, as interesting and timely as it first was, drove the franchise into the ground. There was never a game-changing series premiere that set up a vastly different universe to play in. How about our hero (or ship) getting permanently stuck in the MU? How about a devastated, federationless alpha quadrant? Or even just a premise that allows a focus on characters of lower rank/ different professions, like an Earth-based Academy show, or whatever. Requiring the writing team to play by different rules in each iteration would've helped them avoid the pitfalls of story recycling. Well anyway, I'm not complaining, JJ's take feels fresh enough.

Roddenberry's vision of a prosperous unified humanity, as interesting and timely as it first was, drove the franchise into the ground.

That's Star Trek's premise (well, to be more precise: an optimistic vision of humanity's future is the premise, and prosperity & unity are important factors that bolster the premise). If you delete the premise, you don't have Star Trek. You have a different sci fi series. Just name it whatever you like and trot it out there, but don't try to pass it off as something it's not.

If you want to expand the definition of Star Trek, fine. But you have to know what the core premise is, so you understand what part can't be re-defined. And there must be something that can't be re-defined. Otherwise you got a whole lotta nuthin, and Star Trek would not have survived this long if it were nuthin.

What she said.

I'm always a bit wary when people suggest things like Star Trek: Mirror Universe, or Star Trek: Klingon, or whatever - because that's ultimately NOT Star Trek.

You can think of xyz premise for a sci-fi TV show, but why bother calling it Star Trek?

If you want to make a new Quantum Leap, or Jumper, or whatever, then why get Trek involved at all?

 

[bryce]

STAR TREK: QUANTUM LEAP?

Oh boy.

 

[All Seeing Eye]

In Jumper the character is moving from one location to another and at will. He isn't taking over someones body. I think Quantum Leap or Sliders is perhaps what you're talking about. Where they have no control over where they are going and have to deal with the events and people they meet on the spur of the moment.

This series idea of mine will be called Jumper, not because of the film Jumper that came out at the movies but because it would be a little stupid to call it Star Trek: Sliders or Star Trek: Quantum leap. The legal ramifications for such names would make it a bad idea.

The film Jumper has nothing whatsoever to do with why I'd call this series Star Trek: Jumper.

 

[Mysterion]

That's Star Trek's premise (well, to be more precise: an optimistic vision of humanity's future is the premise, and prosperity & unity are important factors that bolster the premise).

I would submit to you that this premise manifested itself much differently in TOS than it did the later series.

In TOS we saw the characters striving to achieve those optimistic goals. Sometimes it worked out, sometimes it didn't. Our heroes were still fallible humans who occasionally fought and argued and had bad days, but we respected and liked them because they kept trying to achieve their goals. And THAt is what made Star Trek special in the first place. Not the idea of peace and prosperity, but the idea of WORKING to get those things. Like the line in the Declaration of Independance doesn't promise hapiness, it lauds the pursuit of happiness as something to be cherished. I think this was one of the messages of TOS: you aren't guaranteed happiness, and peace, and prosperity, but you might get those things if you go out in your starship and work for it. And that's what we got to see Kirk and spock and everyone else do every week.

By the time of TNG, Roddenberry had taken things bit too far, IMO, and we started seeing a world where human/Federation society was pefected (i.e. the whole we got no money, everyone is happy, no one is hungry, yada, yada, yada) and the Feds just go around trying to spread the happiness they already have to all the poor unenlightened aliens. And the crew of the Enterprise comes off like some sort of Est encounter group where everyone is well adjusted (or gets that way pretty quickly lest they get written out of the show), and no one has any sort of goal that isn't totally altruistic in nature. Blah.

Thankfully, DSN went a long way to pulling things back to the original TOS world-view that had captured my imagination in the first place.