Actually, they were still cadets, but whatever their technical status it basically seems to me that you're splitting hairs to evade the point, which is that ST09 drew heavily on the Academy Years concept.
Things you DON'T want to see in a reboot...
- Thread starter Warped9
- Start date
Actually, they were still cadets, but whatever their technical status it basically seems to me that you're splitting hairs to evade the point, which is that ST09 drew heavily on the Academy Years concept.
With a little creativity, it seems to me that an Academy series wouldn't have to be any of these things, but you do a good job of listing all the things I certainly fear from the concept. Still, if CBS went in this direction, I think there's plenty of drama (and comedy, please) that could be extracted from a coming of age story in a sf setting without becoming melodramatic or unbelievably putting the characters front and center every week. You'd need a good creative team, excellent casting, and the right network (i.e. not the CW, which seems to eat up the chosen one crap) to make it work, though.
Scotty and Spock were not cadets at any point of the film, McCoy had a Lieutenant Commander braid, Sulu was a Lieutenant, Checkov was an Ensign.
The only people refered to as cadets were Kirk and Uhura, and Uhura was also refered to as a Lieutenant with Kirk also having an onscreen graphic refering to him as a Lieutenant meaning they stoped being cadets.
So how exactly are they cadets.
Neither Next Gen nor Voyager split characters into good/evil halves via the transporter. Nor did they swap with their Mirror Universe counterparts. TOS and DS9 did those.
No argument there.
I did another post where I pointed out that complex societies, unless they are far more alien than we can imagine, simply cannot exist without some kind of economy. Kirk says "we don't use money" but he really means "we don't use cash." Picard pontificates about how humanity has "evolved" past greed, but Beverly still had to pay for that hideous piece of cloth she bought at Farpoint Station. When Picard and Ro went undercover, Ro had to remind him that since she was posing as a hooker, he had to pretend to negotiate her price and pay her in cash so their enemies wouldn't get suspicious. DS9 obviously has money, and the Voyager ship's economy ran on replicator rations and bartering holodeck privileges. Tom ran a betting pool that even Janeway participated in.A part of the problem, in terms of the plot of the show, that I have with no money (and also a limitless replicator too) is that it makes things way too easy.
Having money introduces complexity into the world we're watching on screen.
Without money there is no trade (or little) in the Federation, no little private freighters by the tens of thousands everywhere, no pirates to be protected from, no competition between Federation Members, no businesses as businesses, to names a few things the show would get from clearly having money as a consideration in the background story.
Grey's Anatomy was about medical students (they weren't fully-fledged doctors yet). Fame was about the High School for the Performing Arts; it ran several seasons, and added/dropped characters when cast members quit, got fired, died, etc. Sometimes they killed characters off (ie. Bruno's father, who died of a heart attack and therefore making it necessary for Bruno to drop out of school because he couldn't afford the tuition, or Nicole, who died in a drunk driving accident). Some characters graduated/got married. Never could figure out why Danny Amatullo spent the entire series as a student, though.
Can't forget The Paper Chase, with 4 seasons.
I hear you. I should most accurately have listed them as the likeliest possibilities, since those are the most profitable tropes and would be the biggest temptations for anyone doing the concept. Anything more sophisticated could certainly be better, but I suspect would also be a much harder sell.
You come in here with minds full of mush,
but you leave as Starfleet officers.
Yet Picard's own officers took their weekly poker game very seriously.
And when Picard joined them one time, someone had to stake him some chips so that he could play.
Nonsense. A market (which, applied as generally as possible, refers to everything which exists between producer and consumer) is only possible where producer and consumer are separate groups of people. For most of human history, this has not been the case. Merchant classes have been around for a few thousand years with items to barter, and there was some trade between the early city-states, but until the industrial revolution, nearly everyone on earth produced what they themselves consumed. Once you remove the wedge that exists between producer and consumer -- by, say, inventing replicators and having unlimited energy -- there isn't any possibility of a world with money. That is, unless a few powerful people are hoarding all the energy and replicator technology -- but that hardly seems in keeping with Roddenberry's evolved humans.
Trek has definitely been inconsistent over the years on this point, mostly because we're products of the industrial age and it's hard for us to imagine a world with no money.
But TNG and Voyager were continuations of the TOS universe, hence it seeming odd when they attempted to portray themselves as they did with such cartoony silliness in their backstory (not that it's bad, I think Trek is best when it embraces it's fantastic side)
I think this is what I miss most when watching much of Modern Trek. There was a weird and wild side to the universe during TOS and early-TNG that seemed to be eliminated as Berman and Piller consolidated their control over the franchise.
I agree. I can't understand why this ever comes up.
They went to school.... and graduated...
Spock was the first Vulcan to graduate SFA...
...and Kirk beat the Kobayashi Maru test... (already covered)
Next please...
Doesn't it make sense that the Vulcan captain of the Intrepid would have graduated before Spock?
He had already achieve Captain's rank and position while Spock was still a lowly Lt. Commander.
And there might have been many other Vulcans preceding both of them.
Source?
IIRC, Bennett's idea was to use the Academy concept to recast the aging actors and restart the franchise with a defacto reboot. By the end of the Academy movie, young Kirk and Spock would be on the Enterprise beginning the five year mission, which would lead to a new series of films.
And who exactly would "they" be?
Hopefully not Kirk and Spock again, I doubt they went to the academy at the same time, and if you meant the entire TOS team it's certain they weren't all there at the same time.
A Star Trek: Academy cast would need to create new characters for the cadet corp. Although it might be interesting to have a twenty-something Lt Kirk as one of the instructors in a occasion appearance.
But not too often.
Last edited:
T'Girl said:
Not necessarily. Not everyone follows the same career path or trajectory. An officer specializing in sciences may not receive the same opportunities for promotion that an officer on the command track would--precisely because officers in the command division are being groomed for positions of greater authority and responsibility.
People trained in specific areas (science, medicine, engineering, etc) might ultimately achieve the rank of captain, but their primary responsibilities don't have to involve commanding a ship or a group of officers. Spock reached the rank of captain sometime prior to 2285, but his primary responsibility in that role was teaching a group of cadets at Starfleet Academy.
Aside from when Kirk was off the ship or otherwise not available, we never saw Spock commanding the Enterprise on his own for official missions.
--Sran
Maybe not in TOS, but in a new Smallville-inspired cadet series and continuity, they could be. Just about anyone else seen or mentioned during the era could be part of it. They could even resurrect Alan Dean Foster's old "Kirk has a Klingon exchange roommate" story from his old TAS adaptations.
I don't want to see Wang in a reboot.
Similar threads
