Star Trek Has Become Too Dependent On Time Travel

[MarianLH]

Just how many time travel stories have there been in Star Trek. And how many equal too many or "dependent". Even ENT, which included time travel as part of its design didn't do straight up time travel that often.

I did some number crunching awhile back for a post in the Trek XI forum. You can read the original post here. My primary source was Ex Astris Scientia's time travel page.

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.

When I mentioned to a non-Trekkie friend that Trek XI would contain Trek's #1 most overused cliche, time travel was his first guess.

In the post I linked to above I quoted the opening lines of the filksong "Let's Do The Time Plot Again", by Tom Smith. The most telling line is "What was done uniquely/now is practically weekly". It doesn't matter that some time travel eps are good, or that time travel in abstract is not a bad plot device. The problem is overuse, not what they overused.


Marian

 

[Samuel T. Cogley]

UPN demanded that Enterprise have something futuristic. The 22nd Century wasn't futuristic enough for the network.

Not quite. Braga had been wanting to do an entirely time-travel based Star Trek show. Sort of an anthology that would jump around to any period that he found interesting.

When the decision was made to do a prequel to TOS, the "Temporal Cold War" was Braga's attempt to keep his time-travel series around as a component of the new show.

I think you might have some things backwards. A time travel series was never in the cards. The Temporal Cold War wasn't conceived until after they had written their initial drafts of "Broken Bow" and UPN came to them and they wanted more "future stuff" (meaning stuff from beyond the 22nd century).

Now, after that, Braga has said that he thinks the TCW could have been a series all on its own, but it was never pitched as a Trek series.

It may (or may never) have been in the cards. It may (or may never) have been pitched, but Braga wanted to do an all time-travel Star Trek series. Instead of "Enterprise." Before "Enterprise."

I'd dig up the interviews if the whole thing didn't bore me to tears.

We'll just have to agree to disagree until one of us (or someone else) digs up some proof.

 

[Broccoli]

Not quite. Braga had been wanting to do an entirely time-travel based Star Trek show. Sort of an anthology that would jump around to any period that he found interesting.

When the decision was made to do a prequel to TOS, the "Temporal Cold War" was Braga's attempt to keep his time-travel series around as a component of the new show.

I think you might have some things backwards. A time travel series was never in the cards. The Temporal Cold War wasn't conceived until after they had written their initial drafts of "Broken Bow" and UPN came to them and they wanted more "future stuff" (meaning stuff from beyond the 22nd century).

Now, after that, Braga has said that he thinks the TCW could have been a series all on its own, but it was never pitched as a Trek series.

It may (or may never) have been in the cards. It may (or may never) have been pitched, but Braga wanted to do an all time-travel Star Trek series. Instead of "Enterprise." Before "Enterprise."

I'd dig up the interviews if the whole thing didn't bore me to tears.

We'll just have to agree to disagree until one of us (or someone else) digs up some proof.

I'm not saying your wrong. I'm just going on the stuff I have encountered. The info that I got came from the "Broken Bow" DVD commentary by Braga and Berman. Maybe he has said things differently in different interviews. I guess it makes no difference in the end.

 

[Samuel T. Cogley]

I'm not saying your wrong. I'm just going on the stuff I have encountered. The info that I got came from the "Broken Bow" DVD commentary by Braga and Berman. Maybe he has said things differently in different interviews. I guess it makes no difference in the end.

Yeah, and I'm just going on memory from interviews I read years ago. I could have sworn it was Berman being interviewed. He had said that Braga had an idea where they could just jump all over the Star Trek universe and tell whatever stories they wanted. (And this sounded very believable to me, as a Braga idea). I think there was even going to be a regular crew of some sort of temporal travellers (but I may be remembering this incorrectly), and they would spend one or more episodes in each setting and then move on to something else.

The way I remember it, the TCW was a concession to Braga for his not getting what he wanted at the time.

It doesn't make sense to me that the studio would push for a prequel setting and then turn right around and say that there weren't enough futuristic elements in it. But I'm not saying you are wrong, either.

"Enterprise" and the TCW were never a good fit, but that could be for any number of reasons.

 

[Broccoli]

I'm not saying your wrong. I'm just going on the stuff I have encountered. The info that I got came from the "Broken Bow" DVD commentary by Braga and Berman. Maybe he has said things differently in different interviews. I guess it makes no difference in the end.

Yeah, and I'm just going on memory from interviews I read years ago. I could have sworn it was Berman being interviewed. He had said that Braga had an idea where they could just jump all over the Star Trek universe and tell whatever stories they wanted. (And this sounded very believable to me, as a Braga idea). I think there was even going to be a regular crew of some sort of temporal travellers (but I may be remembering this incorrectly), and they would spend one or more episodes in each setting and then move on to something else.

The way I remember it, the TCW was a concession to Braga for his not getting what he wanted at the time.

It doesn't make sense to me that the studio would push for a prequel setting and then turn right around and say that there weren't enough futuristic elements in it. But I'm not saying you are wrong, either.

"Enterprise" and the TCW were never a good fit, but that could be for any number of reasons.

Again, that's what they said. That the network wanted more "future stuff" (the prequel was B&B's idea). Some reports have that the initial idea for Enterprise was that the first season would be set entirely on Earth as the ship is being built and that, as they refined the idea, B&B were going to omit a few Star Trek staples, such as the transporter (which the network later demanded they put in). If this was the case, then I can see the network pushing for more "Star Trek" stuff to be in the show.

I don't see why B&B would outright lie about it on the commentary (the reason why the TCW was included).

But, who knows about those strange Hollywood types.

 

[Red Ranger]

People,

Some interesting opinions. I tend to agree with the OP, but only to a limited degree.

You could make a stronger case if more of the eps had to do with time travel. But time travel is a staple of science fiction, so it makes sense that it will figure in a series mainly devoted to space travel.

And it's been a staple of ST since the first season of TOS. I feel there have been many excellent time travel eps throughout all the series, and a few not-so-great ones.

I think one of the oddest ones, and one not many people cite, is the TNG ep where a Picard from just six hours in the future appears in a shuttlecraft, whose logs indicate the Enterprise will be destroyed in a matter of hours. To me, what I liked about that is usually, when someone travels in time, it's many years forward or backward from their starting point. it was refreshing to see an ep where the starting point was merely hours removed.

I actually like the Temporal Cold War and wish it could be tied into the other series. I don't know if a series of novels is in the works or has already been written but that would be a nice crossover series.

And a TCW/time travel show would be quite interesting, perhaps restricted to the 22nd through 25th centuries. It could be established that time ships have regular patrol corridors, and that this ship patrols those time periods.

Red Ranger

 

[Samuel T. Cogley]

I'm not saying your wrong. I'm just going on the stuff I have encountered. The info that I got came from the "Broken Bow" DVD commentary by Braga and Berman. Maybe he has said things differently in different interviews. I guess it makes no difference in the end.

Yeah, and I'm just going on memory from interviews I read years ago. I could have sworn it was Berman being interviewed. He had said that Braga had an idea where they could just jump all over the Star Trek universe and tell whatever stories they wanted. (And this sounded very believable to me, as a Braga idea). I think there was even going to be a regular crew of some sort of temporal travellers (but I may be remembering this incorrectly), and they would spend one or more episodes in each setting and then move on to something else.

The way I remember it, the TCW was a concession to Braga for his not getting what he wanted at the time.

It doesn't make sense to me that the studio would push for a prequel setting and then turn right around and say that there weren't enough futuristic elements in it. But I'm not saying you are wrong, either.

"Enterprise" and the TCW were never a good fit, but that could be for any number of reasons.

Again, that's what they said. That the network wanted more "future stuff" (the prequel was B&B's idea). Some reports have that the initial idea for Enterprise was that the first season would be set entirely on Earth as the ship is being built and that, as they refined the idea, B&B were going to omit a few Star Trek staples, such as the transporter (which the network later demanded they put in). If this was the case, then I can see the network pushing for more "Star Trek" stuff to be in the show.

I don't see why B&B would outright lie about it on the commentary (the reason why the TCW was included).

But, who knows about those strange Hollywood types.

Well, I do remember the suits supposedly wanting things like the transporter (in other words, the "staples" of Trek), but that's entirely different from wanting things even further into the future then the already futuristic Star Trek setting. Am I wording that in a way that makes sense?

It's one thing to say, "Hey, we want transporters and photon torpedos. The usual Star Trek stuff." It's quite another to say, "Okay, we know this is a prequel, but we want stuff from hundreds of years beyond even the most futuristic settings we've seen so far on DS9 and Voyager." Is the latter what they said? Expressly?

Because that just makes no sense at all.

 

[All Seeing Eye]

I don't mind time travel so long as it's not done crappy, I like time travel episodes that actually work out correctly without there being a paradox. An example of a time travel ep I hated was the DS9 episode where Molly falls through a time portal, at the end of the episode the older molly went back through but went back further in time and found her younger self where she decided to send her younger self back home, this was a paradox since if young molly went home the older molly would never have existed and thus could never have sent her younger self back.
I HATE PARADOXES!!!

Same goes for VOY: Dark Frontier, I loved the episode but the paradoxical element completely ruins it for me.

 

[Carpe Occasio]

I don't mind time travel so long as it's not done crappy, I like time travel episodes that actually work out correctly without there being a paradox. An example of a time travel ep I hated was the DS9 episode where Molly falls through a time portal, at the end of the episode the older molly went back through but went back further in time and found her younger self where she decided to send her younger self back home, this was a paradox since if young molly went home the older molly would never have existed and thus could never have sent her younger self back.
I HATE PARADOXES!!!

Same goes for VOY: Dark Frontier, I loved the episode but the paradoxical element completely ruins it for me.

Right, why does there always have to be a paradox? I liked the way they handled it in the Voyager series finale. Janeway goes back in time to meet herself on Voyager and interacts with herself. No same matter in the same space & time, end of the universe paradox.