Is there such a thing as too much worldbuilding?

[Unimatrix Q]

Thinking a bit about TNG, and how the sense of wonder totally vanished from the show as it progressed, i keep wondering if focusing on some of the species like the Klingons, the Borg and the Cardassians and giving away so much information about them during TNG's later years and in DS9 was the wrong decission.

I can understand and like this fact for DS9 but for TNG, it may have been better if the producers hadn't done this so much.

 

[XCV330]

there can be too much worldbuilding, but I don't think of its various flaws, that Trek can be accused of it. We still haven't even seen more than one toilet in 60 YEARS.

we don't know how federation democracy works, how the economy works. We know more about 24th century Klingons in some ways than humans. I think there was and is more focus on Klingons than I would have liked. I honestly don't find them interesting. But I would not accuse trek over over world building.

 

[Lord Garth]

If you spend 14 seasons in the same time and place (the Alpha Quadrant in the 2360s-2370s), a lot of World Building is going to come with it. That's why they sent VOY to the Delta Quadrant, set ENT so much closer to our time, and have DSC focus on time periods we haven't as much of (the mid-23rd Century) or haven't seen at all (the 32nd Century).

So by the time PIC came into the picture, we were once again not as familiar with the "world" TNG and DS9 built decades earlier.

 

[marlboro]

I know you can't get bogged down in minutiae in a 45 minute show, but sometimes little details can bring an alien race to life. If anything, Trek could use more worldbuilding. "The Sound of Thunder" is an episode that I recently watched that I think would have benefited from it.

 

[Qonundrum]

Thinking a bit about TNG, and how the sense of wonder totally vanished from the show as it progressed, i keep wondering if focusing on some of the species like the Klingons, the Borg and the Cardassians and giving away so much information about them during TNG's later years and in DS9 was the wrong decission.

I can understand and like this fact for DS9 but for TNG, it may have been better if the producers hadn't done this so much.

To answer the question: Yes. Most sci-fi knew of tome constraints and kept planets as having one civilization in one area, as opposed toi many differing ones - which would be far more likely.

Also, as more and more gets fleshed out, the risk of losing context and tripping over continuity CAN be an issue. Not always, especially for smaller things or things that the writers and/or audience forgets, or if a new trait is added and there's usually a good reason to do so to expand narrative and universe-building. To tell the audience one day that a human has two lungs is fine. Five stories or twenty five stories later and all of a sudden, said human now has three of them... it's as silly as setting up a narrative where humans have lungs and need to breathe oxygen and remind us of that in a story, but then near the story's end forget to remember that either for characters or life support systems showing that life support systems dispensing oxygen are turned on. The bigger the emphasis makes for a bigger narrative stumble. Do note that as the decades have gone by, audiences have become more sophisticated in this sort of continuity as it builds a deeper and more substantial narrative. Also note that we're not humans but are Arcturans watching a show that features a race called "humans".

After a point, the snowball crafted is so huge that some parts of continuity will simply not be remembered. It's a good reason to not start showing a franchise to a person in season six of its second or third spinoff then hightail it back to season one of the first show that spawned a million sequels...

...and at some point it's best to ditch the continuity and make a new show set in the future, with - if any - loose tie-ins and let the audience piece the narrative together. That's why some loathe prequels, of which many screw up answering questions while making a bunch more, of which are often so horrendously bad and/or basic...

But some people lived "Caprica" and "Enterprise" too. Each person in the audience has their own expectations and desires as a series goes on and on.

Even TWOK isn't the same feel as TOS and its makers sat through all 79 episodes to find both a narrative expansion AND a balance, as what worked in 1966 would not fly in 1982. Fast forward to, what, 680 episodes instead of 79 just for the sake of a prequel and/or sequel set in the same time period as the progenitor show? Erm, no, that's not going to happen either which way... never mind other influences such as societal mores and fads and target demographics and how those demographics might react compared to the same demographics of decades ago acting. (e.g. TOS was never aimed at kids but some kids liked it... or better yet, Star Wars - a cartoon like Jar Jar Binks was not needed in 1977. The most the original trilogy got was a burping frog in ROTJ (aka ANH-LRv1*). That Nickelodeon crap wasn't needed or wanted but younger demographics weren't looking for bodily function jokes as comic relief as such back then, which is not entirely the same situation today**...

* A New Hope - Loosely/Lame Remake version 1**
** but I digress...​

 

[The Wormhole]

If anything there's been too little worldbuilding in the Trek franchise, with an overwhelming majority of the content from the show's first forty years (barring DS9, but even that to a certain extent in the early years) focusing on one-off disposable aliens of the week who are never revisited again afterwards.

 

[Qonundrum]

If anything there's been too little worldbuilding in the Trek franchise, with an overwhelming majority of the content from the show's first forty years (barring DS9, but even that to a certain extent in the early years) focusing on one-off disposable aliens of the week who are never revisited again afterwards.

So many strange new worlds... and TV of the time was made so much differently back then. Which is ironic in a way as it would be a cost savings in regards to sets, props, and costuming. And, of course, the flip side to all this is "small universe syndrome" - which is almost thankfully worse when there's a galaxy chock full of disparate life forms rather than just hyperfocusing on two or three all the time) and after 6 to 8 years all of a sudden there's some big epic development involving improbabilities that tie everyone together as a goofball form of worldbuilding too.

Then again, TOS often managed to redress the same wall and cave sets surprisingly easily, or at least better than some console sets that were clearly reused. A lot of those were just gray flats with hued gel lights anyway and it's admittedly impressive for the time, a little shadow detail and a different hue set at a different angle and *voila*: Easier to do than to take an extravagantly detail set and have to make it look completely different. TOS, in some ways, nailed it and there is no backhanded compliment to this.

Novels did seem to do more world-building but then having to go back and forth between all mediums to keep a semblance of consistency in continuity becomes its own albatross sanctuary as well... How to tie in enough of the strands to appease those much invested as well as keeping the gloss sufficient for those who don't want it all. That's a tall order.

Or would the point of visiting so many worlds would be to embrace the "in the moment", accept various glossed over backgrounds and think of post-episode whatevers on our own? Too much would have us potentially being in disagreement for x and/or z reasons and open endings allow us more fun too.

 

[Tenacity]

we don't know how federation democracy works, how the economy works.

Maybe for the better. By not spelling things out, you can watch the Star Trek you want to see, instead of the Star Trek than the writers intended. Which you might not enjoy as much.

focusing on one-off disposable aliens of the week who are never revisited again afterwards

Which I think in most cases is to be preferred.

Q would have been much better if we never saw him again after EaF. Same with the mirror universe after MM. Romulans completely dissappear after TOS. Voyager definately overused the Borg, DS9 the Dominion and the Klingons, Enterprise the Xindi.

TOS employed the Klingons and the Romulans each a limited number of times, and then moved on.

There's a time and place for visiting old friends, but not constantly.

 

[Beckerjr]

If anything there's been too little worldbuilding in the Trek franchise, with an overwhelming majority of the content from the show's first forty years (barring DS9, but even that to a certain extent in the early years) focusing on one-off disposable aliens of the week who are never revisited again afterwards.

This. I have no idea what Star Trek the original poster has been watching but the criticism of too much world building is the exact opposite of what I would ever think to say about the this IP. At least on TV and the movies. ST is littered with shallow, one dimensional aliens. Even ones like the Romulans that have been shown for decades now.

 

[Orphalesion]

I think we know vert little about the Star Trek universe outside of Starfleet. Sometimes it even feels we know more about how the Klingon civilians live in the 24th century as opposed to human civilians in the 24th (let alone the 23rd or 22nd) century.

Even with places like Bajor we know preciously little about geography, flora, fauna, language and such things. Granted that stuff is often better put into companion books and such, but we know very very little.
Heck Troi was a main character for 7 seasons and 4 movies and we know basically zilch about the Betazoids.
And of other species we often know even less.

 

[The Wormhole]

Q would have been much better if we never saw him again after EaF. Same with the mirror universe after MM. Romulans completely dissappear after TOS. Voyager definately overused the Borg, DS9 the Dominion and the Klingons, Enterprise the Xindi.

Completely disagree in full, but let's focus more on

There's a time and place for visiting old friends, but not constantly.

Given the majority of Star Trek is constantly reusing the same props, costumes, ship designs and matte paintings of alien cities, wouldn't it make more sense to have a few recurring alien species who get frequently revisited rather than a bunch of new guys who just happen to share ship, clothes, gear and architecture with each other. It sure as shit gets silly given how often we hear "alien ship does not match anything in our database" and it turns out to be the triangle ship everyone uses. "A completely new world, we're the first humans to visit" then cue up the Angel One city matte painting. With recurring alien races, there's a built in reason for recycling things that makes sense.

And it's not like all the various disposable aliens of the week really offer anything new. They're mostly humans with funny foreheads, or humans exactly. With the need to think up few new designs, they can at least come up with an interesting new look with the knowledge it will get reused throughout the season.

Besides, though space is vast, there's only a small percentage of planets on which life can evolve, an even smaller percentage of that in which sentient life can evolve. It makes a hell of a lot more sense that the majority of planets Starfleet ships are visiting are colony worlds of various races, as opposed to constantly a different planet every week that sentient life has evolved on.

 

[fireproof78]

Thinking a bit about TNG, and how the sense of wonder totally vanished from the show as it progressed, i keep wondering if focusing on some of the species like the Klingons, the Borg and the Cardassians and giving away so much information about them during TNG's later years and in DS9 was the wrong decission.

I disagree. I think less aliens of the week and more focus on existing aliens to make them more, well, alien, is exactly what Trek needs.

At some point in time you are sacrificing every ounce of believability for me in order to maintain a "sense of wonder." Sorry, discovering yet another unknown alien that we will no little about and will amount to nothing in the sense of grand scale becomes rather stale.

 

[at Quark's]

Too much worldbuilding?

Never had that feeling, at least not in the sense I sometimes experienced 'worldbuilding overload' when reading LOTR as a noob for the first time, and I still was thinking I was just reading a fantasy story ('why pages upon pages of landscape descriptions? Why all these stanzas from mythical times, or this long elaboration on what Gnurk the Terrible did a thousand years ago, what do they actually contribute?').

In fact, I think I would have enjoyed slightly more of it. After all, we still don't know that much about life within the Federation outside of Starfleet, or of what we see of Klingons is actually what the bulk of their citizens do (highly unlikely), etc.

As for the gradual disappearance of the feeling of wonder, I agree with that, but I'm not sure if worldbuilding can be faulted for that as the root cause. I think the cause of that was producers gradually establishing for themselves which formulae "worked" and which not, taking less risks as the process went along. On the one hand, it ensured a more consistent quality of the show (some S1 or S2 lows were pretty low), at the cost of losing that wonder. That heavier focus on worldbuilding may have been a consequence though of that choice to stay with what apparently went down well ('let's do another Klingon show this season!'), but I don't think it's necessarily a "one negates the other" deal. With very careful writing it should be possible to and gradually deck out a broader image of the Alpha Quadrant and retain that sense of wonder, though it might be quite difficult to pull off. On the other hand, it's probably not difficult to write an episode that has neither.

 

[Unimatrix Q]

When looking at Starfleet and the Federation during the later Berman era, maybe it isn't too much worldbuilding but the wrong kind of it.

During the early years of TNG everything was fresh and futuristic and you really could feel that 100 years had passed since TOS. Humanity really had changed, even if the arrogance of the crew was a bit too much sometimes.

Piller may have dialed back these aspects too much and the characters may have behaved too much like contemporary people during the later 24th century Trek.

 

[Orphalesion]

I think the only negative thing they did with the world building in TNG (and generally 90s Trek) is that they focused waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay to much on the Klingons. Like they were shoved into every series and we always had to hear about their stupid rituals and stupid traditions and disgusting food and their politics and their houses and blah blah blah blah blah.
I don't care if the Klingon Empire lives or dies, honestly.

 

[fireproof78]

During the early years of TNG everything was fresh and futuristic and you really could feel that 100 years had passed since TOS. Humanity really had changed, even if the arrogance of the crew was a bit too much sometimes.

Is that the show or is that a product of becoming familiar?

 

[Shawnster]

I think part of the sense of wonder came with how large the galaxy felt in TOS. All we knew was a small portion. Kirk's Enterprise felt like it was on the edge of the frontier and far away from the hustle and bustle of the core worlds.

I'm in the camp that Trek could have done more to world build what was established. I feel like Trek kept adding to the galaxy instead of expanding on what was already established. Kirk said "we're on a thousand worlds and spreading out." That's 1,000 settings right there. How many of those did we see? We're 53 years after the TV premiere and we only now have had a focus put on the Romulans. While we have great development with the Cardassians, I think the Romulans could have worked just a well in DS-9 and serve to develop the initial Star Trek villain species.

Star Trek is bloated with under developed civilization. How much do we really know about the Andorians? Or the Deltans? Klingons and Cardassians are more developed than Vulcans.

I would have much favored using an established species instead of constantly giving us new species. There are plenty of episode where we have an "alien of the week" that is seen once then never again. Was it really necessary to give us a new species? Did the fact they were a never before televised species contribute to the story? Instead of constantly giving us something new, I wish they would have developed what we already had.

Star Trek's bloat isn't because of too much world building. It's more like bloatware on a computer. They just kept adding to it instead of streamlining with each upgrade.

 

[The Wormhole]

During the early years of TNG everything was fresh and futuristic and you really could feel that 100 years had passed since TOS. Humanity really had changed, even if the arrogance of the crew was a bit too much sometimes.

Piller may have dialed back these aspects too much and the characters may have behaved too much like contemporary people during the later 24th century Trek.

If anything, TNG tried too hard with the futurism in the first season. The common cold was cured, people were no longer supposed to get headaches, young children took calculus in school. I personally was glad things got dialled back in the later years and the other 24th century shows.

But then again, I'm also not bothered by the fact the characters on Picard wear contemporary clothing. Likewise the characters on Ron Moore's BSG.

 

[Nightdiamond]

I think they need more of it. Like, we still don't know whether humans use money or not.

Without that extra background info, it's hard to understand why humans do strange things like commit crimes to make a living or decide to live far away on a colony on the Cardassian border, where they claim to ink out a living, when it is often claimed they don't have to.

If money is used, it would make sense. But it stated that humans don't use money, so their behavior doesn't make sense.

We also often don't know who their president is, how their economy works, if people still vote, what passes for entertainment, if those workers on Utopia Planitia was working for pay or for free etc.

The world building around humans and other things was so weak, that when they did show the slightest unusual thing, fans begin to talk.

I was almost fascinated when they showed

Spoiler

Raffi living in a trailer and smoking weed

simply because it was different and they never really showed anything that detailed on the show.

This is why I tend to think Star Wars has Trek beat in that area. World building is actually fun -- it adds more dimension to the story.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Star Trek is bloated with under developed civilization. How much do we really know about the Andorians? Or the Deltans? Klingons and Cardassians are more developed than Vulcans.

Enterprise covered Vulcans and Andorians, Discovery has had tons of Vulcan stuff too.