Did TNG's Early Scope Shrink?

[trevanian]

their desire was to get back to the flavor of TOS where the ship and crew were completely on their own without a Starfleet Command to call for backup,

You know whenever I hear someone describe TOS as "the ship and crew were completely on their own without a Starfleet Command to call for backup" I honestly have to wonder if that person or persons has ever watched TOS, because that was not really the case.

It most certainly was the case. How many times were they able to call in reinforcements, outside of ERRAND OF MERCY (which is one where the showdown was already coming before the show started?) Usually the Enterprise WAS the reinforcement in response to a call if they were local.

But you have plenty of shows like RETURN TO TOMORROW and I believe SAVAGE CURTAIN where they are operating weeks away from Starfleet, even by radio. That is the frontier, and that is the aspect ModernTrek really lost (even though according to their guide it was still only a sliver of the galaxy that had been explored -- instead of TOS' 4% it was 11 or 17% wasn't it?), especially with their ships seemingly outclassing most would-be opponents.

The premise of the show has been called near-anthology, because you could do all kinds of shows; but if you lost the frontier aspect, you lost the principal hook. It's like when you go from the old west to the horseless carriage ... you have a short time of extreme interest when the old generation has to try to adapt to the new more boring ways, and then you have a much less interesting area in terms of drama (at least till world wars start.) That's why the biggest miss in Trek history (outside perhaps of Lil Enterprise and not really SHOWING how we bootstrapped our way up after ww3) is not doing the era the movies were entering, the end of century, when you would have the real transition from TOS to TNG begin happening.

 

[jpv2000]

You know whenever I hear someone describe TOS as "the ship and crew were completely on their own without a Starfleet Command to call for backup" I honestly have to wonder if that person or persons has ever watched TOS, because that was not really the case.

In fact they frequently running into other Starfleet vessels and stations. And if they weren't doing that they were visiting federation member planets and colonies, or had dealings with federation officials.

Frequently, yes, but not constantly. There were other episodes that were predicated on the ship being isolated, having to wait weeks even for a response from Starfleet Command, so that Kirk had to be the one making decisions that could make the difference between war and peace. "Balance of Terror" is a prime example. The point isn't that TOS was always like that -- the point is that it could be like that, could tell that kind of story in a way that TNG rarely could.

Those type of episodes are among my favorites of the series.

 

[Workbee]

Absolutely. Also the TOS crew didn't have 'direct' communication with Starfleet command, and on several occasions part of the drama is that it could take days for Kirk's communiques to get to them and a further few days for a response to make its way back to the Enterprise, in which time Kirk still needs to deal with the problem at hand.

For some reason, it seemed that whenever they were out of direct contact with Starfleet, the response time was always three weeks. Well, not constantly, but a figure of three weeks or more was specifically cited in "Return to Tomorrow," "The Enterprise Incident," and even TAS: "The Time Trap."

TNG wasn't trying to be TOS. They were set during two different eras of the Federation.

In TOS, space was still quite unexplored and they were alone very often.

In TNG, the Federation has grown in considerable size and it had become more about keeping the peace.

Well, yes, that's the whole point -- that TNG wasn't like TOS because it was in a more civilized era. That's why the producers of the later shows wanted to do something that was more like TOS again -- first with VGR, isolating the ship on the other end of the galaxy, then with ENT, going back to the beginning where Archer's crew were completely on their own with no possibility of calling in backup. They wanted to recapture the frontier flavor that they felt TNG had lost. (Although, as discussed, this ran up against UPN's desire to make the shows as TNG-like as possible.)

And here we come back around to the initial topic of the thread, because TNG itself was originally meant to be way out on the uncharted frontier and rarely returning to explored space, but that idea was abandoned almost as soon as the pilot was over, and it instead ended up being defined by its portrait of a tamed, settled civilization where the frontier had once been.

Couldn't have put it better myself. Now I see why you are the writer.

 

[Lance]

Absolutely. Also the TOS crew didn't have 'direct' communication with Starfleet command, and on several occasions part of the drama is that it could take days for Kirk's communiques to get to them and a further few days for a response to make its way back to the Enterprise, in which time Kirk still needs to deal with the problem at hand.

For some reason, it seemed that whenever they were out of direct contact with Starfleet, the response time was always three weeks. Well, not constantly, but a figure of three weeks or more was specifically cited in "Return to Tomorrow", "The Enterprise Incident" and even TAS: "The Time Trap".

Now that is interesting. That does make one wonder if even the Constituion Class Enterprise was often no more than a certain distance from Federation space? If the three week thing is a measure of how far away they are from 'home'.

Of course, Roddenberry always said he didn't like the idea of the Enterprise reporting in to home or visiting Earth. It's somewhat ironic that most of the TOS movies revolved around trips back and forth from Earth, rather than anything resembling "exploring strange new worlds".

 

[Christopher]

For some reason, it seemed that whenever they were out of direct contact with Starfleet, the response time was always three weeks. Well, not constantly, but a figure of three weeks or more was specifically cited in "Return to Tomorrow", "The Enterprise Incident" and even TAS: "The Time Trap".

Now that is interesting. That does make one wonder if even the Constituion Class Enterprise was often no more than a certain distance from Federation space? If the three week thing is a measure of how far away they are from 'home'.

I don't take it as anything more than a coincidence. These were episodes written in different seasons by different people, and somehow they all gravitated toward three weeks as a suitable delay.