Y'know we've had too many fucking stories about starships going to other planets and finding some mystery or threat. Let go a whole season and several movies without that. such an overused plot.
Petition Alert. No More Star Trek Time Travel Stories!
- Thread starter Patrickivan
- Start date
Perhaps you are right. STAR TREK shouldn't involve space flight at all. They shouldn't explore the final frontier- they shouldn't seek out new life and new civilizations.
They should change the name to "Star Watching". And Star Trek was too happy, and positive. It should be darker, meaner, and have more wars. I'll call it Star BAttles for now on.
If I want time travel, there's Dr Who, Quantum Leap, that new show about a guy who jumps around in time, Star Trek Enterprise...
THough the question remains. If time travel hasn't been done to death, and this movie is indeed a hit, then can a really good second time travel movie be acceptable? If one, why not two? Come on- give me a reasonable answer.
[/QUOTE]So's pretty much every sci-fi device.
[/QUOTE]
Read some more SF.
We have already had two time travel Trek movies (3 if you count Generations). Doing something different is the way forward, and I hope, will promote the creation of a quality, linear story rather than one that relies on gimmickry. The non-Trekkies in the audience won't be impressed by confusing or overly-reverential time travel either, is my feeling. Flashbacks are different, although again Enterprise did a fair amount of that sort of thing (young captain inspired by dad) in Broken Bow.
[/QUOTE]
Read some more SF.
We have already had two time travel Trek movies (3 if you count Generations). Doing something different is the way forward, and I hope, will promote the creation of a quality, linear story rather than one that relies on gimmickry. The non-Trekkies in the audience won't be impressed by confusing or overly-reverential time travel either, is my feeling. Flashbacks are different, although again Enterprise did a fair amount of that sort of thing (young captain inspired by dad) in Broken Bow.
DS9?
I'll point out again that when I told my non-Trekkie friend that the new movie would include Trek's #1 cliche, his first guess was time travel.
What's really scary is that Tom wrote his song back in 1995. There was already time plot fatigue more than ten years ago. DS9 had "Little Green Men" that year, and Voyager did three in its first season, two of them back to back ("Parallax" and "Time and Again", the latter a pretty heavy-handed ripoff of "Yesterday's Enterprise", at least in the third act). I remember "Time and Again" because that was the first time I had the "not this shit again" reaction.
Then came "Year of Hell", "Relativity", "Things Past", "Time's Orphan", "Future's End", "Timeless", "Endgame", First Contact, and the entire temporal fucking cold war, and that's not at all a complete list.
After all that, is it really so unreasonable that some people are a little tired of time travel plots?
I did some number crunching. TOS had 5 time travel episodes out of 79, or one for every 15.8 episodes. DS9 had the fewest relative to the total number of episodes (9 out of 173, or one for every 19.2 episodes). TNG had 12 out of 176 episodes, or one for every 14.6 episodes.
VOY had 13 out of 168, or one for every 12.9 episodes. ENT was the worst, with more than one episode in ten being a time travel episode (10 out of 97, one for every 9.7 episodes). That's not counting ones where the TCW was only mentioned in dialogue. Excepting the anomalous DS9, there's a consistent increase in the percentage of time travel episodes from series to series.
In addition to being rude, Jack Bauer's post is doubly wrong in that 1) space exploration is part of the show's basic premise, while time travel isn't, and 2) there actually haven't been all that many "strange new world" episodes in latter day Trek. A quick glance at ENT's fourth season shows:
Time travel to WWII Earth
Contemporary Earth for a retread of TNG's "Family"
Three episodes of Eugenics Wars continuity porn
Three episodes on Vulcan
A transporter accident episode
An "alien superbeing messes around with humanity" episode
Three episodes of Human/Vulcan/Andorian/Tellarite politics, with a side of Romulan continuity porn
Klingonses!
An "aliens take over the ship" episode
Back to Earth for Colonel Green continuity porn
A mirror universe episode
A holodeck episode
Number of Strange New Worlds deliberately visited for the purposes of space exploration: zero. Not one in the entire season.
If we stretch the definition of "Strange New Worlds" far enough, VOY's final season has a couple of qualifying episodes in "Drive" and "The Void", but the same can't be said for the other 22.
While some of these episodes may arguably be decent Trek TV, they do disprove Jack Bauer's claim that there's been too much exploring of Strange New Worlds lately.
Marian
What's really scary is that Tom wrote his song back in 1995. There was already time plot fatigue more than ten years ago. DS9 had "Little Green Men" that year, and Voyager did three in its first season, two of them back to back ("Parallax" and "Time and Again", the latter a pretty heavy-handed ripoff of "Yesterday's Enterprise", at least in the third act). I remember "Time and Again" because that was the first time I had the "not this shit again" reaction.
Then came "Year of Hell", "Relativity", "Things Past", "Time's Orphan", "Future's End", "Timeless", "Endgame", First Contact, and the entire temporal fucking cold war, and that's not at all a complete list.
After all that, is it really so unreasonable that some people are a little tired of time travel plots?
I did some number crunching. TOS had 5 time travel episodes out of 79, or one for every 15.8 episodes. DS9 had the fewest relative to the total number of episodes (9 out of 173, or one for every 19.2 episodes). TNG had 12 out of 176 episodes, or one for every 14.6 episodes.
VOY had 13 out of 168, or one for every 12.9 episodes. ENT was the worst, with more than one episode in ten being a time travel episode (10 out of 97, one for every 9.7 episodes). That's not counting ones where the TCW was only mentioned in dialogue. Excepting the anomalous DS9, there's a consistent increase in the percentage of time travel episodes from series to series.
In addition to being rude, Jack Bauer's post is doubly wrong in that 1) space exploration is part of the show's basic premise, while time travel isn't, and 2) there actually haven't been all that many "strange new world" episodes in latter day Trek. A quick glance at ENT's fourth season shows:
Time travel to WWII Earth
Contemporary Earth for a retread of TNG's "Family"
Three episodes of Eugenics Wars continuity porn
Three episodes on Vulcan
A transporter accident episode
An "alien superbeing messes around with humanity" episode
Three episodes of Human/Vulcan/Andorian/Tellarite politics, with a side of Romulan continuity porn
Klingonses!
An "aliens take over the ship" episode
Back to Earth for Colonel Green continuity porn
A mirror universe episode
A holodeck episode
Number of Strange New Worlds deliberately visited for the purposes of space exploration: zero. Not one in the entire season.
If we stretch the definition of "Strange New Worlds" far enough, VOY's final season has a couple of qualifying episodes in "Drive" and "The Void", but the same can't be said for the other 22.
While some of these episodes may arguably be decent Trek TV, they do disprove Jack Bauer's claim that there's been too much exploring of Strange New Worlds lately.
Marian
