Is it more important to you that Trek deepens lore, or explores new worlds?

I made the observation a few years ago that Star Trek started out as the Twilight Zone, but ended up as Lord of the Rings.

Star Trek with TOS was intended as a framework structure which would allow essentially any science fiction story to be told. TOS could almost be seen as a pseudo-anthology show, but having a stable core cast who recurred from week to week. These characters had stable personality traits, and developed their own quirks of dialogue and interaction, but generally speaking the plots were not informed by the characters, with Kirk for example standing in for any potential other heroic captain - because the purpose was to examine one science fiction scenario after another onscreen, not to tell us anything deep about the characters in question (usually).

As Trek grew in popularity however, it grew more self-referential. Much of this came out of the demands of fandom, who wanted more information about races like the Klingons and Romulans than existed onscreen. The expansion of canonical lore began as early as TAS, with many episodes focusing on expansion of existing lore - looking at Spock's childhood, visiting the Shore Leave planet, seeing Mudd and the Tribbles again, etc. TMP attempted to go somewhere new (even if the plot was a retread of a TOS episode), but TWOK reveled in being an expansion of existing lore, and was a smash success.

In the Berman era, Trek seemed like it continually attempted to set up new settings, but ultimately found that deepening of existing lore was popular. TNG attempted to largely go its own way in the first two seasons, but ultimately fell on the Romulans most often as recurring antagonists and did a lot with the Klingons, with the most well regarded movie (First Contact) clearly the most fankwanky movie in all of Trek. DS9 was a series which - save for the Dominion - was all about deepening lore already established in TOS and TNG (Bajorans, Cardassians, Ferengi, Klingons, etc). Voyager traveled to the Delta Quadrant, but was telling the same sort of stories as TNG, and really only found some measure of success once it brought the Borg in. Enterprise attempted to take the setting back in time, but was not well regarded until the fanwakny fourth season.

Kurtzman Trek is still too new to tell, but it feels like the same dynamic is manifesting itself, where initial attempts to do something new have floundered, with the series increasingly playing it more and more safe. The decision to have a Pike series which will apparently be mostly episodic is the strongest hint of this yet.

People often claim to say they want "strange new worlds" in Star Trek, but in practice the bulk of what's popular in a given new series is what is most directly referential to what came before. This could, admittedly, come down to the constraints of storytelling the Trekverse already has. VOY and ENT really struggled with creative original stories - despite a new setting in space and time - because every first contact scenario with a generic "planet of hats" humanoid alien race which is over in a week will just start to feel the same as time goes on.

Regardless, I'm curious what's more important for you guys. Do you think Trek is better as a framework to examine different sorts of stories? Or do you prefer finding out more about the already established universe? Hell, maybe it's something else entirely - like you're one of those nerds who cares about the ships or something. I'm all ears.

 

For Star Trek, lore should be a byproduct of exploring character and theme. It's fun, of course, to explore the details of the universe. However, I don't want to explore the universe for its own sake. I want characters who act and react on the basis of (as well as struggling with) their principles. Even DS9, which stuck hard to fewer narratives, was really drive by the characters and not a need to tell a grand epic. Indeed, even J. Michael Straczynski admitted that the bones of DS9 were the station and the characters (as opposed to Babylon 5, for which it was the story of opposing the Shadows).

 

I prefer that it deepens the lore. VOY proved to me that running into new aliens of the week doesn't guarantee new stories. I'd rather that stories build on top of each other and create something larger, rather than starting from scratch every week.

It's why I prefer DS9 over TNG/VOY. It's why prefer the TOS Movies over the other movies. And it's why I'll likely prefer DSC/PIC over SNW.

 

As much as I love world building (it's one of my favorite hobbies at the moment) I would love a mixture of both. I think Star Trek, especially originally, was an amazing framework to tell a variety of stories. Unfortunately, I think the episodic nature meant that some details were just left behind, like the variety of aliens in Journey to Babel, or the Kelvans journeying from outside the galaxy. TNG had a similar framework early on.

So, there are a lot of details that I think could be built upon.

 

I tend to think there's room for both, I wish CBS felt the same way.

 

Whether you do serialized or episodic, I firmly believe character-based writing is the only way to keep a series fresh in the longer term. I mean, fundamentally in episodic Trek there are only a handful of plots (ship is under threat of attack, crew member captured/dying, spatial anomaly hit, etc). The only thing that can make these stories fresh are the responses of the characters.

Indeed, while Trek has never done this (in part due to the "reset button" it would be cool to see a crew take on a given crisis and largely fail early on, and then take on a more-or-less identical crisis later on and succeed due to what they had learned about themselves over several years.

As I've said in the past, I think the more episodic feel of TOS really helped the galaxy seem like this big, wide empty place full of possibility in a way that all of the later series struggled with. In Berman Trek in particular, it sometimes felt like even races like the Cardassians, Klingons, and Romulans basically had 99% of their population on one planet, despite supposedly having these large empires - making it hard to believe the core area around the Federation was supposed to be a sizable portion of the galaxy.

 

I prefer it entertain me.

 

As a recent convert to Star Trek, I love the community that goes with it. There is such a large legacy to it and there is gaps in the mythology of the series, so to speak, that can be explored and discussed in the series which for myself is as enjoyable and interesting as it is as watching the episodes of the series. That is what being a fan is about. If anything can be done to enlarge the fanbase of the franchise then that can't be a bad thing.

It is hard to say what can be done to do this, whether it is to enlarge or deepen the franchise. If you look at other franchises like Star Wars and Marvel, it is very commercialised but it is in everybody's consciousness. You go into any supermarket or clothes store and there are merchandise from those two franchises. It may be the case of trying to reboot the movie franchise of summer blockbusters in the hope of continuing to have quality TV shows?

An alternative is throwing a metaphorical grenade into the franchise and creating a new mythology much like what grow up around the Riddick movie character. Whether that can be done at this moment of time where the movie industry is in a bad state due to the pandemic or on TV where it seems there is a thought out plan to continue the franchise is another thing as it would be too much of a risk.

 

I'd think that you can do both pretty easily in a medium like Star Trek.

 

I think CBS does feel the same way, and that's why we're getting Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

 

Will it actually be "Strange New Worlds" or worlds we've visited in other shows?

 

All I can say is, it's being advertised as a modern version of the TOS/TNG formula of episodic, optimistic stories about exploring unknown worlds, and I don't think that they'd be saying that if it weren't their intent. DIS and PIC are both hugely successful shows, so if they only wanted to do more of the "lore expansion" stuff I think they'd just say that. Remember, CBS's goal is to have at least one Star Trek show streaming new episodes all year long, so if they're smart they're gonna go for a variety of formats in order to keep the audience from getting overwhelmed or sick of it all.

 

This has also been a creative group that bathes in nostalgia. This week the Enterprise will go to Ardana, then Sarpeidon the next, then Cestus III, then Gamma Trianguli VI another week and so on...

We'll have to wait and see.

 

I would love fandom to buy more than nostalgia.

That said, seeing Cestus III would be cool.

 

Like in TOS we knew the Federation had conferences, was composed of multiple races, had a starfleet, had court martials, had colonies, so on and so on. It felt a little wild-westy at times, and apparently people also surkised the fleet was kind of small (wasn't there a fleet register in the court martial episode however) and that Kirk was far away from Earth - and did we ever visit the Federation core besides Vulcan? The TOS crew went back to old Earth plenty of times but only in the movies did they get to 'Modern' Earth, right? There were Orion Pirates and Klingons and Tholians and Gorn and Romulans. Merchants like Mudd mucked about.

A show like SNW could expand a lot on the Federation of the 23rd century. See a middle world with elections, civilian life, that stuff.

 

While I think it's possible to see Strange New Worlds as being about broadening, rather than deepening, Trek lore, it's important to keep in mind the three leads of the series are characters with a storied history in Trek, along with being played by actors from Discovery's second season. And we've already had people on this forum hoping that we see a young Kirk for crissakes! So even if the plots of the week avoid going places we have already seen (I don't think the writers will be able to help themselves about keeping L'Rell out though, TBH) the fan pressure to fill in backstory from TOS will be significant.

I think it's arguable that with the time jump Discovery will be much better suited to avoid fanwank lorebuilding in Season 3. However, in the little bit we've already seen, we see Trill, Andorians, Cardassians, and Lurians, suggesting they really aren't that interested in exploring what a time skip like this means (though it could admittedly just be the trailer).

 

I have been watching Star Trek since a baby in the Sixties.

I am so sick of self referential crap. "More Spock!"

Please no.

Please?

I'm all for SNW only because I think it might be the quasi-anthology series I like. Y'know, like, oh . . . Star Trek?

Things just haven't been the same since Gene's vision!

jk

 

Deepens the lore. Let's get to know the races and planets that have already been featured, rather than keep going to new planets populated by quasi-humans with bumpy foreheads every week.

Incidentally, I think something like Lower Decks could work as a serious live action series. Have a show about a ship that does the follow-up check-ups of the planets the front-line explorers check out first. Then they can spend an entire season's arc developing and fleshing out a single planet.

Though that leads to something else I've never understood. People are always up on their soapboxes about Star Trek is all about exploration. Yet, we only ever get single part stories about exploration. All the two parters are usually action-adventure episodes, and the season long arcs are about war and/or the galactic apocalypse.

 

I was really bored once and I went through all the episodes of TOS and TNG and marked off what their basic "mission premise" was. It was somewhere around 20% that were actually about the almighty "exploration." Most of the stories Star Trek has traditionally told are rescue missions/distress calls, time travel hijinks, colony check-ups, diplomacy/ errands-of-the-state, standard patrol, and frontier police operations.

Fans love their rose colored glasses about the days when Star Trek was all about exploring space. But, it was simply never true.

 

I'm not convinced this has to be a bad thing, though. Most of the Trek novels written over the last 15 years have been heavily plotted toward expanding lore and re-visiting characters or locales from the core television series, and some of those stories are really good and worthwhile.