Game Changing Premises which were Dropped

[YARN]

Some big episodes set up other episodes and movies. The Enterprise accidentally discovers time travel using "fly around the sun" effect and it gets reused. Other big episodes, however, are let behind.

Warp speed damages the fabric of space-time (an allegory for today's environmental pollution)? Interesting idea, but one which is only visited in one episode.

Or consider that it is known that if you send ESP sensitives beyond the galactic barrier you create people with superpowers. Could this be the reason that the Q are nervous about humans? Are they this close to gaining superpowers? Isn't it strange that we never hear about Starfleet investigating this matter further? I mean, a quick trip across the Galactic barrier and you've got supermen. Dangerous or not, this kind of big news. I mean, if you were up against it, and had to choose suffering a Gary Mitchell or total Borg-assimilation, why not?

Other examples?

 

[BillJ]

Some big episodes set up other episodes and movies. The Enterprise accidentally discovers time travel using "fly around the sun" effect and it gets reused. Other big episodes, however, are let behind.

Warp speed damages the fabric of space-time (an allegory for today's environmental pollution)? Interesting idea, but one which is only visited in one episode.

Or consider that it is known that if you send ESP sensitives beyond the galactic barrier you create people with superpowers. Could this be the reason that the Q are nervous about humans? Are they this close to gaining superpowers? Isn't it strange that we never hear about Starfleet investigating this matter further? I mean, a quick trip across the Galactic barrier and you've got supermen. Dangerous or not, this kind of big news. I mean, if you were up against it, and had to choose suffering a Gary Mitchell or total Borg-assimilation, why not?

Other examples?

Well the Valiant lost six crewmen crossing the barrier and the Enterprise lost nine. If the complement is 430 and only eleven people were susceptible to the barrier and only two gained anything from it. It comes up that less than one half of one percent would develop anything close to what Mitchell and Dehner did, you essentially surrender humanity to whoever survives.

Picard's assimilation by the Borg should've been a game changer.

 

[Timo]

We have to consider the long term, though. Warp was not found out to damage the texture of space until after centuries of human warping, and thousands if not millions of years of warping by cultures familiar to the Federation; things aren't going to change overnight in that respect. Similarly, the Borg have been inconveniencing the galaxy for hundreds of millennia, despite occasionally assimilating a Locutus or thirty thousand; even if one gets away every millenium or so, apparently this does not yet collapse the Collective.

The gaining of superpowers was often explored in TOS and TNG, and it was indicated that humans are too wary of the entire concept to consider the practical applications. DS0 further indicated that this phobia stems from the Eugenics Wars, creating a sort of thematic continuity that sort of explains why e.g. kironide didn't become a game-changer.

Another often visited Trek theme is eternal life or eternal youth. Yet it seems to be a pursuit for driven individuals, not something mankind of the future would desperately seek. They already have Dr. Crusher, after all: their bodies are as healthy and virile as they want, and if Picard is bald and easily out of breath, that is apparently by his personal choice.

TOS also preempts many superweapon plotlines with "Enterprise Incident" where military secrets are so explicitly belittled by our heroes. Temporary upper hand comes and goes, and neither heroes or villains can build their longterm plans on gaining that. Again, only driven individuals (read: villains of the week) benefit from the newest military developments.

None of this should be taken to mean that Trek shouldn't revisit old premises more often, at least on the level of namedrops. Getting a second glimpse at the Iconian teleporters in DS9 was an absolute delight, for example, even if VOY carefully steered away from them for obvious reasons.

Also, revisiting some of the older transporter tricks would probably have made Trek more palatable than the tendency to dream up all-new ones...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[YARN]

Here's another one in "A Wink of An Eye" they synthesize potion which can turn ANYONE into THE FLASH! People who can literally dodge phaser fire!

Being accelerated has the downside that any cellular damage means death, but Kirk and Spock both engaged in a lot of physical activity while accelerated with no side-effects afterward - AND!! After you're done with a crisis you can simply take a potion to slow down again (thereby sidestepping the problem of cell damage).

And yet we never hear of any of this again - even though there are countless times in future Trek stories when such abilities would have saved lives in times of crisis.

 

[Timo]

Stargate played with the same idea; their rationale for dropping the tech was along the lines of "supermen=threat", too. But they did keep a closetful of useful tech at hand, and did return to past solutions whenever they made sense (or invented excuses, sometimes convoluted ones, for why these solutions no longer would work).

Kironide and Scalosian water should definitely be stored shipboard in some quantity - in a safe locked by the twin codes of the CO and the XO!

The "Turnabout Intruder" identity swap seemed like a handy technology to have, too. Trek has tried to avoid defining how the society views things like possession, transfer of identity, or sharing of consciousness. Perhaps the UFP is very careful to suppress all those technologies that blur the identity of the individual?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Rom's Sehlat]

Actually, assigning a small contingent of officers or soldiers to each ship with their own supply of accelerato sounds like a good idea. They can be part of the security team, running manual security sweeps fairly often. So the recruits for this team need to be able to perform routine, boring tasks as well as be super-beefy, as they will probably be the first to ID baddies if not engage them.

 

[Flinkman47]

What was the deal with Voyager necels retracting before warp? Was that related to the issue with damaging the fabric of space? Or am I remembering that wrong?

One thing that was never really dealt with for me in DS9 is

Spoiler

When Worf kills Gowron, I know it was considered a Klingon affair, but you can't have SF officers killing people like that!

 

[YARN]

Actually, assigning a small contingent of officers or soldiers to each ship with their own supply of accelerato sounds like a good idea. They can be part of the security team, running manual security sweeps fairly often. So the recruits for this team need to be able to perform routine, boring tasks as well as be super-beefy, as they will probably be the first to ID baddies if not engage them.

If not for everyday tasks, when you here these words

"Security alert. Intruder on deck..."

it sure would be nice to have some accelerated security guards to intercept the intruder before any damage is done.

 

[YARN]

And what about Plato's Stepchildren?

They've got telekenesis on tap.

 

[Myasishchev]

Here's another one in "A Wink of An Eye" they synthesize potion which can turn ANYONE into THE FLASH! People who can literally dodge phaser fire!

Being accelerated has the downside that any cellular damage means death, but Kirk and Spock both engaged in a lot of physical activity while accelerated with no side-effects afterward - AND!! After you're done with a crisis you can simply take a potion to slow down again (thereby sidestepping the problem of cell damage).

And yet we never hear of any of this again - even though there are countless times in future Trek stories when such abilities would have saved lives in times of crisis.

Well, the real reason it was never re-used is probably that the Scalosian chemical treatment was stupid, but I can see why no one would want it: it's not exactly like the Flash.

The Flashes seem to be able to experience time basically however they want, despite being able to run real fast and get lots of crap done. Whereas "Blink" was a slightly more "realistic" take on superspeed, in that once you get superspeed, you are effectively trapped for hours or days or weeks or months in the prison of a horrible, virtually static universe, with only fellow chemical-drinkers for company. It doesn't sound like a plum deal.

But, yeah, the really weird one is that they don't use time travel to solve more problems, although this gets solved once they finally did away with their weird "fix the timeline by interfering in it even more" paradigm and shifted to a MWI approach of time travel in Trek 11. Prior to that, major wars should've been really weird ("Sisko closed the wormhole? We must send the Jem'Hadar back in time, before he closed it!" "Captain, they went back in time before we closed the wormhole!" "Then we better go back in time before they went back in time and close the wormhole!" "Curses! We must go back in time before they went back in time before we went back in time!" And so on. ).

 

[Herkimer Jitty]

"They went back in time before we closed the wormhole!" "Then we better go back in time before they went back in time and close the wormhole!" "They went forward in time to before us going back in time to close the wormhole, after we went back in time to close the wormhole, and they tried to stop us from closing the wormhole, but we went back to before that, which leads us to the present." "Well, that explains how I got this tatoo."

 

[Silvercrest]

But, yeah, the really weird one is that they don't use time travel to solve more problems, although this gets solved once they finally did away with their weird "fix the timeline by interfering in it even more" paradigm and shifted to a MWI approach of time travel in Trek 11. Prior to that, major wars should've been really weird ("Sisko closed the wormhole? We must send the Jem'Hadar back in time, before he closed it!" "Captain, they went back in time before we closed the wormhole!" "Then we better go back in time before they went back in time and close the wormhole!" "Curses! We must go back in time before they went back in time before we went back in time!" And so on. ).

That's what actually happened. They went through every possibility, permutation, and variation, changing the timeline every time. The only one we saw was the last one, the one where (somewhat improbably) no one thought of doing it. That's the only way the timeline would ever stabilize.

 

[datalogan]

I always thought the few times they used really long-range transporters (like Bloodlines and new Star Trek movie, in addition to Assignment: Earth and The Gamesters of Triskelion) were problematic. But they are exceptions and quickly swept under the rug.

 

[milo bloom]

When I first saw the title of the thread, I was thinking more along the lines of meta events, such as the premises of Voyager and Enterprise. Concepts that could have really changed the way they tell Star Trek stories. And both concepts pretty much squandered.

 

[antiquityscion]

How about the illness Data caught in Naked Now?

An android catching a disease?

 

[Flying Spaghetti Monster]

I thought the Baryon Sweep should have been used as a weapon.

Swipe a ship with it, you kill all the crew.. but the ship still works perfectly!

 

[Rom's Sehlat]

I got the idea the baryon sweep was a big procedure that involved a dry-dock-like infrastructure to accomplish. If you could drag a drydock up to an enemy ship, you probably wouldn't need whatever you could catch up to...

 

[sonak]

the achievement of warp 10 in Voyager, with the minor negative side effects of that achievement fixable by the Holodoctor.


Ummm.... writers? You just gave Voyager the ability to go anywhere in the galaxy.

 

[BillJ]

the achievement of warp 10 in Voyager, with the minor negative side effects of that achievement fixable by the Holodoctor.


Ummm.... writers? You just gave Voyager the ability to go anywhere in the galaxy.

 

[RAMA]

the achievement of warp 10 in Voyager, with the minor negative side effects of that achievement fixable by the Holodoctor.


Ummm.... writers? You just gave Voyager the ability to go anywhere in the galaxy.

Don't remind us...