How would you change or Re-Write TNG?

I’ve had similar thoughts in the past about how TNG could have been done better. The unfortunate truth is that it would not have happened the way you describe. Between Paramount wanting to continue making films with the TOS cast on the Enterprise-A, and Shatner & Nimoy being vehemently against a new tv show that did not focus on the TOS cast, the only way TNG could have happened was with a different crew on a different ship. The time period could have been better (as I mentioned previously, it could have take place only 20 years after TVH, not 70), but the TOS cast’s initial involvement would have been nonexistent (other than DeForest Kelley’s cameo.)

Now with that said, sure, we can have our fantasy world. In my fantasy TVH would have been the final film with the TOS cast. The Enterprise-A seen at the end of the film would have been a new ILM filming model of a new class of ship, and the production would segue into TNG, where the TOS cast would be phased out over the course of the first season and the new actors would take the center stage by season 2.

 

Well of course it our fantasy world; I assumed that was the thread description. Heh.

Our ideas aren't too far apart, to be honest. You are getting one full year of the TOS crew before phasing them out, which has a lot going for it. My version assumes that some of them will be too old and uninterested, and knowing that some of the TNG imported characters still need focus, I've kept McCoy and Spock out for special guest appearances as opposed to regulars at all. Shatner would be the lead as long as possible (and considering how long he still did network TV, getting him for the full run may not be unrealistic.) Doohan would be phased out quickly, while Chekov and Uhura would get some actual exposure. Sulu is off with his own ship, in my fantasy, I don't want the drama of Takei and Shatner together for the run of my what-if-TOSTNG.

 

I would play up the differences in this time from TOS’s more. I’d have the alliance with the Klingons further along, if not make them full Federation members.

I’d redo the Ferengi to be as sinister as they might. It’s been my experience that rich people are more the cause of human misery than foreign powers. Dramatize that. Including the helplessness to do anything about it, and yes throw in the military-industrial aspect of it too — foreign wars of conquest and all the messy complexities of them.

Troi could have been far more interesting than she was. Use her X-Man powers better, and learn how to write a psychologist FFS. She was brilliant in “Nepenthe.”

I would have done more with the Picard-Crusher relationship.

The futurism of the earlier seasons is overlooked because of the production values and writer issues. I would have kept Earth and the Federation more utopian and aspirational. More aliens to play with.

EDIT: oh and up the size of the ship. It’s in some ways a mobile starbase, designed to be away on 20-year missions. I would have introduced more large sets each season like Ten-Forward in S2. Stellar cartography, cetacean ops, main shuttle bay, the grand corridor and large public spaces from the Ed Whitefire blueprints… They could have gotten creative with how.

New space, new aliens. Q, Ferengi, Jarada, Breen, Borg, Talarians, Cardassians, Sheliak, Katarians, “Conspiracy” Parasites, and all the rest we never met, instead of hanging with the Klingons and Romulans (who I love) again. Also, “We are back.” Where did they go?!

 

There was an article in one of John Peel's Star Trek files (after STIII came out, but before IV), about a rumour of a new series (early whispers of TNG possibly, but long before anything was actually announced), and he put it down as a being set on Excelsior, with:
Sulu - Captain
Saavik - science officer
Chekov - first officer
Uhura - communications
Chapel - CMO
and with possible cameos from Kirk, Spock & McCoy in the pilot.

It all sounds like fan based, made up nonsense of course, based on the mummurings about a new series being made, but it could've been interesting to see, and to actually give the co-stars their own show and actually let them delvelop the characters a bit.

 

Just more aliens in the crew.

For the flagship of the Federation is was very much a homo sapiens only ship.

 

If I had the power...

• More recurring crew members, like Chief O'Brien; and more recurring civilians, like Guinan. This is something Deep Space 9 did really well, and with over 1000 people on board there's no reason why the Enterprise couldn't have recurring department heads etc.

• Significant changes to the interior of the Enterprise-D. For the biggest starship we've ever seen its interiors seem remarkably modest, and even the official blueprints show it to be a maze of corridors and smallish rooms. The main changes I'd make are:

- Overhaul the bridge. The iconic horseshoe would remain, but I found the rest of the bridge all too often looked too bare – and then in Generations they went too far the other way and made it look cramped. Something like this would be better:



Or like this:



- Main engineering. The most powerful warp core ever built by Starfleet and it was a boiler in a corridor junction! I'd want engineering to be enormous. I'd want multiple Defiant-like warp cores in parallel, vaguely reminiscent of the original Enterprise's famous "pipe cathedral". For a ship the size of the Enterprise it made no sense that there's only one warp core when there's ample space for an auxiliary core or two, even if it does make the plumbing more complicated.

- The arboretum. It should also be huge. Make it an entire deck. Big enough to get lost in. Maybe have some people live there in actual "houses" or cabins.

• I'm in two minds about changing the exterior design of the Enterprise-D. On the one hand, I think the original Probert concept for the Enterprise-C, as realised by Tobias Richter, is the best-looking starship design of all time, and is more obviously descended from the Constitution and Excelsior than the Galaxy is:



...On the other hand, I've seen a lot of videos recently where the better lighting and more dynamic movement of the Enterprise-D that CGI allows makes it look a lot less frumpy than it mostly did in the show:





One thing I would change though – give the saucer (limited) warp capability. Say, a maximum speed of warp 5, from some tiny engines that are normally hidden when the saucer is docked with the stardrive section.

• I'd have a completely different pilot and first season.

EDIT: I'd change the uniforms too. Never liked either of the TNG designs, though the second one was better. Maybe start with the DS9/VOY jumpsuits before upgrading to the First Contact versions.

 

I would be terrible executive, but I would double-down on the weird. This is the 24th Century and humanity and technology should be nearly unrecognizable. Embrace it. Gene had some weird ideas. Embrace (some) of them. Instead, as time has been going on we've been getting shows having the crew act and live more and more like contemporary humans. Granted, most of these ideas would have to be tempered with budget/SFX constraints of the 80s/90s as with some of the mores of the time.

THE SHIP
The D is hilariously big. I never realized how much until after the show was over and dug into fan sites. It should be shown. Show the Main Shuttlebay, yes, it would be a matte painting or something. We only have so much space and budget on Stage 9 sooo...
THE BRIDGE - Open it up. This ship cavernous, it should feel that way. Combine the bridge with the Observation Lounge (have the big conference table in the rear of the bridge similar to on Enterprise). Have the Captain's Ready Room be another lounge that anyone can utilize for a sidebar, grab refreshments or be a place for visitors to hang out in so they aren't just awkwardly milling around.
MAIN ENGINEERING - Get rid of it. [Minds blown]. In the future, technology just works. There isn't a Chief Engineer main cast member, so we shouldn't be spending space and money on that part of the ship. Obviously it still exists on the ship, I'm just talking about having a standing set for it. Utilize the space to create larger sets.

THE CREW
These are 24th century officers who SHOULD both act differently and not be so snobs in regards to the 20th century (During 1st season TNG how they talked about the present was pretty cringe inducing sometimes. I get it, you're more evolved, show it, don't talk about it).
It really is weird how no one on the main cast ever really had more than a one-off relationship. You are living and working together in a flying city for years on end with a collection of other people who are the most exceptional in the fleet and no one ever gets to be more than casual friends? (unless you are O'Brien). Bring on the weirder ideas from Gene, the 'standard 1 year marriage contract'. People have serious relationships, and when they are done they are done. No drama or a HR issues.
Go weirder. Riker was supposed to chase after anything that moves (as long as it was a skirt, of course), but really the most adventurous he ever got was a woman in a bowl cut, really. Go further, 1987 might have imploded if he had a healthy relationship with another man, but that's what allegory is for. Push the boundaries. Have a relationship with an alien, and I don't mean a supermodel with spots or pointed ears, I mean something non-humanoid and hideous. Have a season long relationship with something like a Horta. Have it not be joke, everyone just accepts it as no big deal and it is treated as normal.
Betazoids are more open? Okay, so why would Troi actually bother wearing clothes in her own quarters? Obviously no nudity could be shown, but camera angles would have to adjust. Different species should act different.
Replicators and holograms are everywhere. So why does everyone's quarters look the same except for a different painting on the wall or a decoration on their table? These aren't hotel rooms. This is where officers and families have signed up for living for years. Riker's could look like a bachelor pad or an Alaskan cabin. Picard's could look like an old fashioned manor house. Worf's quarters should look like more than a fluffy hotel room with a weapon hanging on the wall; the dude is infatuated with Klingon cultured. It should have harsh red lighting and grates everywhere, his bed an uncomfortable metal slab with some sort of animal fur rug etc.

THE WORLD -
The Ferengi - If the Federation really are the post-scarcity anti-capitalists, it makes total sense for the Ferengi to be enemy. But they need to be threat. Model them after the East India Trading Company. Not so much just the one race, but an anti-Federation of many others not adhering to the Federation's ideals. Ferengi, Orions etc. working together. They want a deal or a planet? It won't be 3 Ferengi from shuttle acting like coked up gerbils. It'll be a Daimon with a Marauder as powerful as a Galaxy-class starship warning that a hundred more are on the way. They play for keeps and they can buy allies quickly if need be. These guys were a huge missed opportunity.
GEOGRAPHY - This might be a challenge for the writers, but so what. At the beginning of show establish the geography of the Federation and Galaxy. How many worlds are there. How long does it take to get from one end of the Federation to the other. Where are the borders of the various other empires? And stick with it. Maybe that means the Romulans are off the table for a few seasons because the ship is on the other side of the Federation. Maybe for a season it will be all about Earth and core worlds. MAybe for a season it will be truly exploring the unknown of going beyond the borders and not having to deal with colony resupplies or medicine shipments for once.

 

See, I liked some of the spareness of the crew quarters. It suggested an elegant, maybe even ascetic, people of the mind. Same with the overall design of the ship. I thought the Stargazer on PIC was the gaudiest piece of dreck I’d seen in a long time. How do you work in that environment?

The D was about comfort and contemplation. You were free to be your best self. That inspired me.

With bigger budgets they could have done larger sets more frequently, but I’d caution against littering every corner with workstations. The idea was that fewer people were necessary to run the ship, and the stations at the back of the bridge were often superfluous — I mean, the chairs disappeared into the wall instead of being fixed, like those for stations that were always occupied.

I like the idea of the Ferengi being in cahoots with other less-idealistic powers. Frankly, not everyone’s got it takes to be in the Federation, and they’re probably both bitter and pragmatic about it. (Probably also more brutal with reformists pointing to the UFP and saying why not us — maybe heavily propagandist, painting the Federation as effete and sinister.) But yeah, maybe the Ferengi, the Orions, Breen, and others are far friendlier with each other than they would be if it weren’t for the UFP.

 

It might be good to have main engineering when enemy attacks and there's damage on the ship especially with propulsion.

 

This is it exactly. Whenever I think of my problems with the physical look and design of TNG in general and the Enterprise-D in particular, it comes down to there being nothing on screen that really conveys the scale of the Enterprise-D. From the size of the interiors we see it might as well be a souped-up Constitution-class that's been covered in beige carpet. Voyager, ostensibly a much smaller ship, has a bigger set for EVERYTHING. A bigger bridge, a bigger ready room, a bigger main engineering, bigger cargo bays and shuttlebays. About the only thing that isn't bigger on Voyager is that the mess hall is definitely smaller than Ten Forward.

That's kind of the opposite extreme of what I was going for with my idea that a massive starship should have a massive engine room, but it's also an idea that occurred to me as well – going to the opposite extreme. Roddenberry had the idea of "technology unchained" in the 24th century. Each one of the Enterprise-D's nacelles has a larger volume than the entire Constitution-class Enterprise in TOS. By the 24th century why shouldn't they each be a self-contained engine unit with an integrated warp core and antimatter supply? (This was Matt Jeffries' original intent for how starships worked, by the way.) Why not have a chief engineer running round in a holodeck interface controlling remote drones to fix issues or adjust the ship? SNW has shown us that starships had capable maintenance robots in the 23rd century; and we already have that TNG episode where Geordi is experimenting with that virtual reality probe. Hell, SeaQuest DSV of all things was already doing this in the 90s with its artificial reality probe sequences, and as touched on and then completely ignored in TNG: "Interface" this is a role that Geordi would be uniquely suited for. I'm on a TNG rewatch right now and it's really obvious that they keep sending Geordi to the bridge just to include him in ensemble scenes and he "transfers engineering control" to the aft console bank anyway, rather than staying in main engineering.

Edited for grammar.

 

It could have been a nice idea to acknowledge more, even sometimes emphasize that there were a lot of civilians on board, probably a lot more civilians than officers (500 or 800 civilians to the 500-200 officers), how they interacted with and saw themselves relative to the crew.

 

Interesting swerve.

And I can't shake the thought of you, in an alternate universe, typing the exact same post proposing alternate character assignments that were exactly what we got.

 

I would have liked to see something like this, but Uhura's role would need to be expanded beyond sitting at her station and announcing 'hailing frequencies open.' Every episode. Given her skills as a linguist and communications specialist, make her a true 'First Contact' officer with a vital role in establishing relations with new alien civilizations.

Or, make her the exec and make Chekov the security/tactical officer.

 

EC Henry did a video on how many 1000 people is for the size of the actual ship, and it’s tiny. You could cram hundreds of thousands in there in an emergency evac situation. I think that further speaks to the luxury and futurism of it. Heck look at the E on SNW now, how large and well appointed the quarters are. We’re not a generation growing up in the shadow of WWII and rationing and and tiny submarine spaces. We imagine the distant future to be big, dazzling, and exquisite. And with replicators and antimatter energy, why not?

Or just give her an episode or storyline, like they did with all members of the cast in later series. Do an episode in which the rest of the command crew is incapacitated and she needs to take over, or a romantic episode with her and an alien, or her having to return home for an emergency, etc.

Even as Miss Hailing Frequencies Open, there could’ve been an episode in which the comm system is fried but crucial to saving the day, and she’s the one who has to fix it. Or come up with another way to communicate something.

Or what if she and Spock spend long nights together (lol JJ) having to translate an alien tablet or something, and she’s the one who figures it out…“To serve man”…!

 

Seconded. It's pure fantasy that "it just works", if not what's even beneath that (so in Trek it would work since there has always been a sense of technical parts and bits.) Usually shows are created knowing how much should go into technobabble or make it complete fantasy, using other means to attract and keep viewers. Even "Blake's 7" had "auto-repair systems", which technical systems that Avon fiddled with constantly despite it all, but before I digress...

But technology, not matter how far advanced, still succumbs to the pesky laws of physics, entropy, Mr Frownyface who didn't drink his jug of coffee yet in the morning, and so on. Parts simple do and need replacing. Unknowns require fabrication of new solutions since there's no parts store or extended warranty service nearby, especially given the size of outer space and such... which is probably why even TOS onward had a chief engineer. I hope...

And since AI as we currently know it is not sentient, and can't be since it only responds to known criteria, a series of robotic systems can only go so far. Even if remote controlled from a distance by some human where the automated device no longer has options, then what? Nope, people are needed at some juncture. So the next time one reads up on some real life thing, like open heart surgery done some 3950 miles away by remote interface, now add in doing said work across, say 25.8 trillion miles and hope that the wireless connection used is just a teensy bit more robust... oh dear...

 

As long as there are human made parts on a ship or what might the tech be, there's always the possibilirty it might not work as it should.

 

^ not when you have three redundant fully independent AI’s checking in confirming everything.

 

I thought a lot of "The Neutral Zone," including Picard's dislike of the resuscitations, at least subconsciously, but probably deliberately, echoed "Space Seed" and how badly those events turned out.

 

It's rare, but it happens. Take the Bernoulli family for example, several prominent mathematicians / phycisists over the course of 150 years (doesn't of course mean that each and every member of that family was).

 

Something worth considering...

In "The Inner Light", Picard has an extraordinary life-altering event, in the form of 30 or 40 years (subjectively) living another life. Despite this extreme mental and emotional alteration, he resumes commanding the Enterprise like nothing happened.

In "Rascals", nothing about Picard's mental capacity is diminished. But he is quickly bullied into ceding command to Riker simply because he looks like a 13-year-old kid.

I mean... what gives?