Idea for a new anthology show

[Jedi Marso]

I've broken this off from the thread I originally posted it, because I think it's worthy of a discussion on its own merits.

While contemplating the matter of alternate timelines and paging through the old Trek starflight chronology, I was struck by an idea for a Trek show that embraces the Prime Timeline as an alternate one extrapolated from TOS and the expectations of the 1960's.

Namely, an anthology show in a similar vein of "From the Earth to the Moon", in which various cusp events that diverge significantly from our timeline are handled on a single or two-episode basis.

For instance, a limited series could handle the following occurrences, either documentary style or as a standard narrative like a typical TV episode of Trek:

1. The evolution of the space program from Apollo through the OV shuttle series (Including the launch of the Voyager probes, and the mysterious loss of Voyager-6)
2. The colonization of the moon and Mars, and the contributions of Jackson Roykirk
3. The Eugenics Wars of the 1990's
4. The Sleeper Ships, the secrecy surrounding them, and why the program failed
5. Strangers from the Sky (The secret tale of actual Vulcan first contact) Salute, M.W.B.
6. Col. Green, World War III, and the post-atomic horror
7. Earth's recovery and political unification after the holocaust
8. First Contact with Alpha Centauri
9. Zephram Cochrane and the advent of warp drive, and the first interstellar round-trip to Alpha Centauri.
10. Official Vulcan First Contact

Could be epic, right?

Of course, I forgot about Sean Christopher's Saturn mission and Rene Picard's Europa mission. Those would fall in the first third of the series, obviously.

 

[gweeps]

Great idea. Now we need Star Trek showrunners/producers who don't give a damn about ratings and want to tell an often serious multi-faceted history of how it all began.

 

[FederationHistorian]

So, basically like those startrek.com documentaries.

Sarek

https://ca.startrek.com/watch_video/sarek-of-vulcan-an-exclusive-video-documentary

Pon Farr

https://ca.startrek.com/watch_video/pon-farr-an-exclusive-video-documentary

The Bajoran Occupation

https://ca.startrek.com/watch_video/the-occupation-of-bajor-a-documentary

The Borg

https://ca.startrek.com/watch_video/doc-borgvideo-Part1-revised

https://ca.startrek.com/watch_video/doc-borgvideo-Part2

Behind the scenes: Designing Deep Space Nine

https://ca.startrek.com/watch_video/herman-zimmerman-on-designing-deep-space-nine

 

[Jedi Marso]

No, not quite like those. These would all be historical, and more along the lines of "From the Earth to the Moon." Docudramas more than documentaries.

 

[STEPhon IT]

I've broken this off from the thread I originally posted it, because I think it's worthy of a discussion on its own merits.

While contemplating the matter of alternate timelines and paging through the old Trek starflight chronology, I was struck by an idea for a Trek show that embraces the Prime Timeline as an alternate one extrapolated from TOS and the expectations of the 1960's.

Namely, an anthology show in a similar vein of "From the Earth to the Moon", in which various cusp events that diverge significantly from our timeline are handled on a single or two-episode basis.

For instance, a limited series could handle the following occurrences, either documentary style or as a standard narrative like a typical TV episode of Trek:

1. The evolution of the space program from Apollo through the OV shuttle series (Including the launch of the Voyager probes, and the mysterious loss of Voyager-6)
2. The colonization of the moon and Mars, and the contributions of Jackson Roykirk
3. The Eugenics Wars of the 1990's
4. The Sleeper Ships, the secrecy surrounding them, and why the program failed
5. Strangers from the Sky (The secret tale of actual Vulcan first contact) Salute, M.W.B.
6. Col. Green, World War III, and the post-atomic horror
7. Earth's recovery and political unification after the holocaust
8. First Contact with Alpha Centauri
9. Zephram Cochrane and the advent of warp drive, and the first interstellar round-trip to Alpha Centauri.
10. Official Vulcan First Contact

Could be epic, right?

Of course, I forgot about Sean Christopher's Saturn mission and Rene Picard's Europa mission. Those would fall in the first third of the series, obviously.

DISCO and STRANGE is embracing the Prime Timeline because IT IS the "Prime Timeline" in order for anthology to work, this series would have to be intertwined with TOS universe and ignoring the Prime Timeline nonsense... which was invented in the JJTrek movies.

 

[Jedi Marso]

Maybe I wasn't clear in the OP- the idea of this show is to embrace the idea of Star Trek's 'past history' deriving from it's 1960 roots- you can toss out the word 'timeline' completely if you want. The idea is to embrace the original ideas and not push 'past' events farther and farther into the future (The Eugenics Wars being a classic example) because we have 'caught up' timewise in the real world without those events happening- they are fiction and were never going to happen.

So this anthology show would embrace, as it were, the history of the future (past) of the Trek-verse as it was conceived in the 1960's when TOS aired. In effect, this would make a 'TOS-era' show, in a strange way.

 

[Owain Taggart]

I'd love a Captain's Table anthology series, and I know there were rumours about one awhile back. That'd be a nice way of getting lots of variety and interesting stories as one-offs. One idea I've had in doing this is having someone like Guinan (who's already somewhat of a symbol of time ) be the owner of a multi-dimensional bar accessible from any period, then have the bar entry and the Captain telling their story to her as a bookend.

 

[somebuddyX]

I thought about something similar, like a Trek version of "For All Mankind" called something like UESPA or some other Star Trek quote about space exploration probably. I only had the vaguest ideas but I just imagined the sleeper ships as part of normal tech that got superseded. I don't see them doing that as a TV show but I think it would be fun to do that as a Myriad Universes comic or something, like how you had "The Star Wars" graphic novel by Dark Horse alongside all the normal "Star Wars" comics they did. Trek even had a go with things like the Waypoint comics or Deviations or even Harlan Ellison's "City on the Edge of Forever". One of the things I liked about the "Khan" comic that was spun-off "Into Darkness" is that it used the DY-100 and Eugenics Wars as part of history and tried to extrapolate reasonable ways they could have occurred but didn't feel like they had to exist in our version of history.

 

[Qonundrum]

I've broken this off from the thread I originally posted it, because I think it's worthy of a discussion on its own merits.

While contemplating the matter of alternate timelines and paging through the old Trek starflight chronology, I was struck by an idea for a Trek show that embraces the Prime Timeline as an alternate one extrapolated from TOS and the expectations of the 1960's.

Namely, an anthology show in a similar vein of "From the Earth to the Moon", in which various cusp events that diverge significantly from our timeline are handled on a single or two-episode basis.

For instance, a limited series could handle the following occurrences, either documentary style or as a standard narrative like a typical TV episode of Trek:

1. The evolution of the space program from Apollo through the OV shuttle series (Including the launch of the Voyager probes, and the mysterious loss of Voyager-6)

Prequels generally try to fill in canonical/continuity gaps and more often than not add more to the problems they think they're resolving. At least filmmakers opted against the Academy movie for ST6, but ENT didn't do much and neither has any show that has been a prequel that's claimed to be set in the same timelines as TOS/TNG/DS9/VOY/ENT.

2. The colonization of the moon and Mars, and the contributions of Jackson Roykirk

Ditto.

3. The Eugenics Wars of the 1990's

Ditto, noting that these prequels are usually aimed at fans - casuals less likely care about the nuances, and when screwing up on nuances the fans will care. For more, see ENT...

4. The Sleeper Ships, the secrecy surrounding them, and why the program failed

Ditto

5. Strangers from the Sky (The secret tale of actual Vulcan first contact) Salute, M.W.B.
6. Col. Green, World War III, and the post-atomic horror
7. Earth's recovery and political unification after the holocaust
8. First Contact with Alpha Centauri
9. Zephram Cochrane and the advent of warp drive, and the first interstellar round-trip to Alpha Centauri.
10. Official Vulcan First Contact

Ditto, ditto, ditto, ditto, ditto.

Could be epic, right?

On the contrary...

Of course, I forgot about Sean Christopher's Saturn mission and Rene Picard's Europa mission. Those would fall in the first third of the series, obviously.

Naah. Trying to take a scripted line or two from an old episode and balloon that out into a 2 hour movie or 26-hour season of episodes (well, 10 hours now it seems but the underlying point is the same) generally doesn't do all that much. Caprica, Solo, Rogue One (despite what did work) still made bigger mistakes and franchise fatigue was already sky high in some of those cases... either by the audience or the scriptmakers or both or neither or other.