Let's continue TOS

[johnnybear]

I'm not going to get into this thread and I'm only going to post that the original series is still my favourite Trek! The acting from the main cast and guest stars of the week was always tip top and the stories as relevant then as they are today! I understand the limits Gene Roddenberry's team had on them in view of special effects and the like and I still prefer what they did to the CGI nightmares of today! Each episode achieved what it set out to do and no one was really left out in the cold unlike todays US shows where each storyline is dragged out for months and padded to infinity! I'm sad that we didn't get a fourth season yes but what we do have of TOS can be rewatched forever and yes I have seen Plato's Stepchildren!
JB

 

[Warped9]

It’s not a popular opinion, but I like and see something worthwhile in “Plato’s Stepchildren.”


Fans have been “continuing” TOS for decades in some form or other through writing stories, building models, different kinds of artwork, analyzing episodes and various elements in them, rewatching episodes, making fan films, organizing and attending conventions. It’s all been an exercise in maintaining that enjoyment and excitement we experienced when first watching the show. And everyone brings their own slant to how they want to perpetuate it.

Regarding continuing TOS more officially—well as it’s already been mentioned upthread it is going to be dependent largely on how you want it to continue. How authentic do you want it to be or at least feel? What concessions are you willing to allow?

How are you realistically going to continue a fifty some year old production and still have it feel authentic? The first hurdle you face is that the majority of people who made what you desire to recreate are no longer around or at least no longer capable of doing what they did fifty years ago. And those in the driver’s seat of production today simply don’t have the same mindset and perspectives that went into creating the original, so how can they possibly recreate it?

This is where we come back to a production like Star Trek Continues. They came closer than anyone to recreating TOS, but even they couldn’t resist injecting their own degree of fannishness and 21st century perspectives into it.

 

[johnnybear]

Surely you can at appreciate Michael Dunn's Alexander at least.

Yes Michael Dunn was the saving grace of the episode but what happened to him after he left with Kirk, Spock & McCoy has been left to our imagination. Was it ever a fan based publication?
JB

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

https://memory-beta.fandom.com/wiki/Alexander_of_Platonius

 

[Lord Garth]

Gene Roddenberry was prone to burning himself out. It happened in TOS, it happened again in TNG, and it would've happened during the TOS Movies if control hadn't been yanked away from him so early on. When Gene Roddenberry gave NBC the ultimatum, "Move Star Trek back to a good time-slot or I walk!", I think he was looking for an out because he knew NBC would never listen to that.

Taking all that into account and looking at what would've happened if NBC hadn't moved TOS into the Death Slot: even if Gene Roddenberry got a second wind heading into the third season, it wouldn't have lasted, and he would've taken more of a back seat again, delegating more. It just wouldn't have gone to the point where he'd be out to lunch, working hard to get other work.

I think if TOS ran five seasons, you'd have the third season being more like the second season and the rest of the series being more like the second season. That's the middle ground after the series was "settled in" but before "the writing was on the wall". So TOS would've had a longer and deeper middle.

 

[johnnybear]

The main cast of the episode were quite good I have to admit. Liam Sullivan and Barbara Babcock were up to their usual standards of acting and even the story was okay. An alien race, pampered and insecure that can't even cure a scratch or are too idle to want McCoy to remain with them so as to save them from further mishaps. Their abominable treatment of alexander was well acted but there was something off with the show. William Shatner behaving as a horse under Platonian influence or Leonard Nimoy's Spanish Flamenco dancing were embarrassing to watch and how could you justify these scenes to a new fan? They were pretty much worse than the awful I, Mudd scene with the crew trying to outwit the android population. Viewing that back in 1981 in front of my parents was a cringe inducing moment too I can tell you!
JB

 

[Warped9]

I don’t have a hard time justifying how Kirk and Spock behaved. Game shows and reality TV are plenty of evidence of people making fools of themselves because the powers that be are exploiting them for their own reasons. Gladiatorial games were all about forcing people to put on a spectacle for the masses. The best those in the arena could hope for was getting out alive.

 

[plynch]

TOS S3 is just fine, and a return to weirder sf than planet of the hats S2. (Which is good Trek, mind ya!)

I think of all the reboots mentioned above, TMP is clearly the clearest reboot. The creator decides to make character, ship, aliens look, sound, even act different than in the 60s “action” (i.e. fist- and gunfights) series.

TNG is its own series, but set far enough ahead and with callbacks to original actors, Kelley, Nimoy, Lenard, it feels more in continuity to me than TMP. Which I like.

Lastly, the admittedly hagiographic biography, Creator, got the title right. GR created (and yes, did serve as producer), and then moved on. He seems to have been like today’s serial entrepreneurs in that sense. Where the Joy is in the thinking up and the establishing , but not really in the long term operating.

edit: may I point out that TOS IS essentially continuing in SNW, though the captain is named differently and a bit more casual or flip. Which is where ShatnerKirk would have ended up by 1972 anyway.

 

[publiusr]

'Mirror Darkly and 'Tribblations are TOS-worthy.

 

[Commishsleer]

TOS S3 is just fine, and a return to weirder sf than planet of the hats S2. (Which is good Trek, mind ya!)

I think of all the reboots mentioned above, TMP is clearly the clearest reboot. The creator decides to make character, ship, aliens look, sound, even act different than in the 60s “action” (i.e. fist- and gunfights) series.

TNG is its own series, but set far enough ahead and with callbacks to original actors, Kelley, Nimoy, Lenard, it feels more in continuity to me than TMP. Which I like.

Lastly, the admittedly hagiographic biography, Creator, got the title right. GR created (and yes, did serve as producer), and then moved on. He seems to have been like today’s serial entrepreneurs in that sense. Where the Joy is in the thinking up and the establishing , but not really in the long term operating.

edit: may I point out that TOS IS essentially continuing in SNW, though the captain is named differently and a bit more casual or flip. Which is where ShatnerKirk would have ended up by 1972 anyway.

So Pike's a different guy in SNW. No more ooohh what is a woman doing on my bridge or I think I might enjoy being an Orion Slave Trader. And thank goodness for that.!
If they remade TNG again I think they would take the sexism out of that too?

 

[Pauln6]

Let's just give Helen Noel a spin off.

 

[plynch]

Love that post following the one right before!

I don't like sexism (a lot) but to harp on Trek being of its time is just . . . I dunno, it's early and I haven't had all my coffee yet. 50 years from now they'll see stuff in our media that we don't, and hate it or hate us. Maybe eating meat. Maybe burning hydrocarbons, maybe something else.

 

[Warped9]

50 years from now they'll see stuff in our media that we don't, and hate it or hate us. Maybe eating meat. Maybe burning hydrocarbons, maybe something else.

Human beings are very much into the here-and-now and often can’t see the long view. Societies, like individual, evolve. We all have stuff we wish we hadn’t said or done when we were younger. It didn’t make us a bad person then.

In many respects I don’t see our contemporary society as enlightened and aware as some like to think it is. More specifically some individuals aren’t as enlightened as they think they are.

 

[Forbin]

This is where we come back to a production like Star Trek Continues. They came closer than anyone to recreating TOS, but even they couldn’t resist injecting their own degree of fannishness and 21st century perspectives into it.

Yeah, I was disappointed in their last few episodes. The finale seemed little more than checking off boxes.

 

[Warped9]

Yeah, I was disappointed in their last few episodes. The finale seemed little more than checking off boxes.

At some point I would like to revisit STC because there was a lot in it I liked. But I have to say every time some post TOS reference was dropped in I lost a bit more enthusiasm for it. In the end it felt more like connecting-the-dots and ever less like stories we could have seen back in the day but didn’t.

I loved them having Erin Gray as a Starfleet Commodore—that was something we could have and should have seen in TOS given Number One had already established a woman could be in the chain of command. But then in the very same episode they undermined the whole thing by saying the Federation agreed to bar women commanding a ship in Starfleet to appease the chauvinistic Tellarites. They essentially validated Janice Lester’s extreme bitterness rather than affirm her as a nutbar who took Kirk’s personal rejection of her as a blanket rejection by Starfleet of women in command.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

So her persecution complex was revealed to have a basis in truth? Why couldn't they just have said, "fine, you don't have to deal with them then." Were the Tellarites so important that the concession was seen as worth it?

 

[Warped9]

So her persecution complex was revealed to have a basis in truth? Why couldn't they just have said, "fine, you don't have to deal with them then." Were the Tellarites so important that the concession was seen as worth it?

Who knows? But it struck me as really going against Star Trek’s, and TOS,’ message of inclusiveness. It also meant Number One, despite having been second-in-command, could never command her own ship, which seems to go against what Roddenberry was implying in “The Cage” from the very beginning.

This essential point, in my opinion, undermined the entire STC episode “Embrace The Winds.” They set up Commander Garrett as a competent officer with something of an edgy side to her, something worth exploring, then rejected her attaining command of a Constitution-class starship simply because the Tellarites wouldn’t allow it.

I found it mind-bogglingly stupid.

 

[TIN_MAN]

Would it have been better, I wonder, if STC and the like had went their own way and made up their own future continuity instead of dropping in TNG references?

 

[plynch]

yes

 

[Warped9]

Would it have been better, I wonder, if STC and the like had went their own way and made up their own future continuity instead of dropping in TNG references?

Unquestionably. They could simply have avoided injecting anything blatantly contradictory with later series without having to do post TOS callouts.

Another issue, more a quibble, was injecting terminology that simply didn’t exist when TOS was made. For example: nanotech and other TNG era technobbable. It just sounded so out of place.

It came down to episodes coming across as very polished fanfic where the writer is trying to show how well versed they are in Trek lore and continuity.