Discovered Wrangler on on GR's wiki page. I've heard of the Long Hunt of April Savage, but have never seen it. Saw Spectre when it was first broadcast. I think I have a copy somewhere.
Shared universe with other franchises
- Thread starter Laura Cynthia Chambers
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That does sound at least possible — and certainly it’s more inspiring to have rationalistic humans rebuild the world than to have it only happen because of the Vulcans. Oh well.
It would have been cool to have Genesis II in the viewing order for Trek History, for sure.
We've actually hinted at a Questor/Data connection in the Trek novels, insofar as we can get away with it. Jeffrey Lang's TNG novel Immortal Coil revealed that Flint from "Requiem for Methuselah" had mentored Noonien Soong under the alias Emil Vaslovik, which could be taken as implying that Flint chose the alias in honor of Questor's creator. When I featured Flint in my Enterprise: Rise of the Federation novels, I had him doing android research with a substance called bionic plasma (from Questor), which I suggested was the same thing as Voyager's bioneural circuitry. I also had Flint (who was using his Abramson alias at the time) state that he had met an android before. My assumption is that Flint learned robotics from Vaslovik and/or Questor, then passed along his knowledge to Ira Graves and Soong.
As for Genesis II/Planet Earth, I like to assume that's the alternate timeline where Gary Seven failed to prevent the proliferation of orbital nukes. The increased peril led to the development of the underground defense complexes seen in G2, and when the Eugenics Wars broke out in the '90s, they escalated into the full nuclear apocalypse in G2/PE's backstory. In this theory, the mutant subspecies seen in G2/PE are actually descended from Augment experiments rather than being the result of radiation as the movies assumed.
I don't try to reconcile Spectre with the Trek multiverse, though, since it's straight-up supernatural horror. If I wanted, I could handwave the supernatural entities there as aliens indistinguishable from magic, a la "Catspaw" or Megas-tu, but that would go against Roddenberry's goal for Spectre to be genuinely supernatural, rather than being the kind of thing where there turns out to be a rational explanation. I suppose there's no reason The Lieutenant couldn't potentially be in the Trek universe, though I've never seen it.
Well, it wasn't only because of the Vulcans. What they said in First Contact was, "You get to make first contact with an alien race, and after you do, everything begins to change... It unites humanity in a way no one ever thought possible when they realise they're not alone in the universe." So the Vulcans were only a catalyst, allowing humans to see themselves as one species and thus come together to rebuild their own world. It wasn't about the Vulcans specifically, just about the fact of first contact with aliens. After all, Enterprise made clear that the Vulcans had declined to help humanity advance too much because they feared our potential. So it follows that humanity had to do most of the work itself.
As for Genesis II/Planet Earth, I like to assume that's the alternate timeline where Gary Seven failed to prevent the proliferation of orbital nukes. The increased peril led to the development of the underground defense complexes seen in G2, and when the Eugenics Wars broke out in the '90s, they escalated into the full nuclear apocalypse in G2/PE's backstory. In this theory, the mutant subspecies seen in G2/PE are actually descended from Augment experiments rather than being the result of radiation as the movies assumed.
I don't try to reconcile Spectre with the Trek multiverse, though, since it's straight-up supernatural horror. If I wanted, I could handwave the supernatural entities there as aliens indistinguishable from magic, a la "Catspaw" or Megas-tu, but that would go against Roddenberry's goal for Spectre to be genuinely supernatural, rather than being the kind of thing where there turns out to be a rational explanation. I suppose there's no reason The Lieutenant couldn't potentially be in the Trek universe, though I've never seen it.
Well, it wasn't only because of the Vulcans. What they said in First Contact was, "You get to make first contact with an alien race, and after you do, everything begins to change... It unites humanity in a way no one ever thought possible when they realise they're not alone in the universe." So the Vulcans were only a catalyst, allowing humans to see themselves as one species and thus come together to rebuild their own world. It wasn't about the Vulcans specifically, just about the fact of first contact with aliens. After all, Enterprise made clear that the Vulcans had declined to help humanity advance too much because they feared our potential. So it follows that humanity had to do most of the work itself.
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Characters as ancestors of those the actors would later play in Trek, or is that unnecessary?
I don't think I'd care for that as a serious exercise. Although in my TOS novel The Face of the Unknown, as an in-joke, I had Kirk say his ancestors included a Moon base commander and a Venus explorer, referencing Shatner roles in Airplane II and The Outer Limits. My original, longer draft of the scene mentioned ancestors including the owner of a law firm (Boston Legal), a police officer (T.J. Hooker), and a clerk at the Nuremberg Trials (Judgment at Nuremberg), but I decided that was belaboring the joke.
You didn't consider mentioning in a medical scene that there were rumors of mental instability in his family tree? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightmare_at_20,000_Feet
William Tiberius Rice as an ancestor of Gary Mitchell? Did Frank Poole have any kids?
Not necessarily a direct ancestor - cousin or great, etc nephew. Some family traits dominate.
It still does. The last we saw of DSV, it was set in 2032, and the UEO was collapsing and war was on the horizon. That could nicely lead into WW III, and the timeline proceeds from there. Everything fits, even Dagwood and the other Daggers (as varient Augments).
As for "weird pulp sci-fi"...lets just say that Trek is not innocent on that front. *evil*
I don't believe that anything in Trek was as stupid as season 2 of SQDSV.
Although you could draw a line from SQ's Darwin to Trek's Cetacean Ops. It's funny -- I remember a lot of people scoffing at the show's portrayal of communication with dolphins as one of its most fanciful elements, but I knew enough about the science to know it was actually one of its most plausible elements. (Although why they'd program their speech synthesizer to sound like Frank Welker doing a squeaky dolphin voice is another matter.)
I think the dolphin-communication complaints may have been more about its treacly portrayal than its possibility. (“Darwin LOVES Bridger!”)
No, a lot of people were unaware of the intelligence of cetaceans, or disbelieved the evidence. I've heard similar skepticism or mockery about Cetacean Ops over the years.
That’s too bad — they’re only one of several animal types that seem clearly on at least an approachable spectrum of sapience with us.
Well, science is more aware of that now than when SeaQuest was made, and I think the public is more aware of it too.
S2 was nothing BUT repackaged Trek tropes.
Here's just the first 8 eps. I could have kept going, but I think these make the point:
Eps 1 &2 “Daggers” – genetic ubermensch
Ep 3 “The Fear that Follows” – aliens take over members of crew.
Ep 4 “Sympathy for the Deep” – scientist’s experiment causes trouble.
Ep 5 “Vapors” – drug addiction, anti-aging
Ep 6 “Playtime” – time travel shenanigans, society that has lost the ability to progress
Ep 7 “The Sincerest Form of Flattery” AI warship runs amok, causing chaos
Ep 8 “By Any Other Name” – genetic engineering run amok
Well s***, now I want to watch season 2. I don't think it made it through the first season as a kid.
Didn't everyone know about whale and dolphin intelligence by then? Isn't that why Star Trek 4 existed?
Didn't everyone know about whale and dolphin intelligence by then? Isn't that why Star Trek 4 existed?
The difference isn’t the topics (which are all perfectly valid sf ones), it’s in how cheesily they were handled. No one can say that Trek is cheeseless, of course, but SeaQuest was… a bit more cheesy.
Season 2 of SQ was a lot more cheesy. Season 1 aspired to be a hard-SF show making plausible projections of future technology, but at the end of the season they threw that out and did a ghost episode and an alien episode, and season 2 went all-out into Irwin Allen absurdity. It became a completely different show and a betrayal of what the creators had intended. Which, sadly, is what usually happens to TV shows that start out aspiring to scientific plausibility, Star Trek among them, since the percentage of TV producers who care about credibility is quite low, so a credible show that changes showrunners is liable to get dumber.
Just compare the early pre-show publicity background setting material released online for Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda with how the series developed, especially after the first season!
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