Ron Moore on STXI - Capture the Spirit of the Original Series

[Brutal Strudel]

Whenever someone starts working on a Star Trek movie, we always hear they went back and watched all (or a lot of) the episodes. Maybe what they should do instead is read Hornblower. That will give them the feeling of being the representative of something bigger, out on the frontier, far from the control of, and power of, home, needing to make decisions and take actions on their own.

Newer Star Trek has been more like our current military, where decisions can be made at the Pentagon in real time.

TNG lifted "make it so" from Aubrey/Maturin but still lacked the Napoleonic je ne se quois we all pine (no pun intended) for.

 

[Eric Cheung]

The original series was much more science fiction oriented than any of the rest. Not technodrabble but stories written by real science fiction writers with imaginations geared toward science. Later incarnations became more fantasy world oriented, and the writers were more from the realm of fantasy novel writers.

There were still unknowns and ununderstandables out there, the galaxy was yet to be explored and the science fiction writers could take scientific ideas and theories and make a script out of them. The characters and their relationships lended themselves well to the script writing. Later Trek became a big fantasy world where alien cultures and governments were examined, emphasis was on diplomacy and disagreements. For me it resembled the fantasy world of Lord of the Rings with all these differing people, contrasting cultures and wars between different factions. Some people like a large fantasy world but I prefered the smaller, yet to be discovered, adventurous world offered by the old trek.

I think what you're describing, at least where later Trek is concerned, is "space opera," not fantasy. And I'd argue that VOY was pretty science-fiction oriented, perhaps to the detriment of serving the characters and the potentially epic journey. Each week was some exotic scientific concept but they didn't often have much to do with getting the ship home.

I agree with rich kolker, Trek writing newbies would do well to study Jack Aubrey and Horatio Hornblower. Even ENT had very high speed subspace communications, which I kind of wish they did without.