^I've heard a number of people -- myself included -- say the same thing about the titles.
Star Trek/Planet of the Apes crossover
- Thread starter Khan 2.0
- Start date
Well, the third is supposed to be called "Sunset of the Planet of the Apes."
I just heard about this. I can't wait for it. Even though crossovers can be a mixed bag.
The plot itself is definitely classic Star Trek. The Federation and the Klingons battling over a technologically primitive world. Now, how they explain the origins of the Planet of the Apes is problematic. Especially since it's so vital to the Apes franchise backstory.
The plot itself is definitely classic Star Trek. The Federation and the Klingons battling over a technologically primitive world. Now, how they explain the origins of the Planet of the Apes is problematic. Especially since it's so vital to the Apes franchise backstory.
They are going to have to win me over with this one. It's going to need to be very good for me to care about this. I like Apes and Star Trek is brilliant of course, but see no need to mix the two.
I love intercompany crossovers, but Star Trek and Planet of the Apes is a bad choice, in my opinion. Star Trek, Doctor Who, the Marvel Universe and the DC Universe all have hundreds of alien races and the concept of parallel universes, so those realities can fit together. Planet of the Apes doesn't have any of that. It's a post-apocalyptic world where Taylor and Brent are the only sentient humans left in existence. It doesn't matter if the Planet of the Apes is introduced as a parallel Earth or a duplicate Earth, the existence of a powerful, utopian human civilization and a bunch of near-human aliens will ruin the entire point of Planet of the Apes.
Star Trek Infestation is another example of a crossover that didn't work thematically. The only way they made it work at all is by cutting off Kirk and co. from the Enterprise. But the landing party still wasn't in any real danger. They could've killed every single zombie on that planet if they wanted to, but Kirk insisted that no one shoot, in the hope that the zombies could be cured. As if that wasn't unbalanced enough, the landing party found a bunch of friendly robots that were willing to help them deal with the zombies. Any Star Trek/Aliens crossover would have the same problem.
Has anyone read the Planet of the Apes/Alien Nation crossover comic from the early 90s?
Star Trek Infestation is another example of a crossover that didn't work thematically. The only way they made it work at all is by cutting off Kirk and co. from the Enterprise. But the landing party still wasn't in any real danger. They could've killed every single zombie on that planet if they wanted to, but Kirk insisted that no one shoot, in the hope that the zombies could be cured. As if that wasn't unbalanced enough, the landing party found a bunch of friendly robots that were willing to help them deal with the zombies. Any Star Trek/Aliens crossover would have the same problem.
Has anyone read the Planet of the Apes/Alien Nation crossover comic from the early 90s?
Though I am looking forward to this, I actually think that Doctor Who/Planet of the Apes would be a more natural fit. Materializing on a future world run by apes seems like exactly the kind of thing that would happen to the Doctor.
Plus you could get Apes vs. Ogrons!
This sounds like a completely incompatible idea, but as a fan of both I must have it 
This sounds like a completely incompatible idea, but as a fan of both I must have it
I thought it was incompatible, but then I remembered Miri's Planet -- an exact duplicate of Earth.
What if the Planet of the Apes is another Earth duplicate? Finding a planet like that is exactly the kind of thing that would happen to Kirk's Enterprise.
The situation on the planet could raise all sorts of ethical and philosophical questions for Kirk and his crew. Do they have a right to intervene? Which Earth is the real Earth and which is the duplicate?
Well that idea, frankly, was a horrifically stupid and incomprehensible story idea on the part of TOS's crew. Christopher's recent DTI: Forgotten History gives an actual explanation: that Miri's Earth was the Earth of a parallel quantum reality that had been accidentally transported to the prime reality by a subspace anomaly.This sounds like a completely incompatible idea, but as a fan of both I must have it
I thought it was incompatible, but then I remembered Miri's Planet -- an exact duplicate of Earth.
This crossover story has to feature some kind of inter-reality phenomenon or something like Assimilation2. If not, then I just give up on IDW.
Well that idea, frankly, was a horrifically stupid and incomprehensible story idea on the part of TOS's crew. Christopher's recent DTI: Forgotten History gives an actual explanation: that Miri's Earth was the Earth of a parallel quantum reality that had been accidentally transported to the prime reality by a subspace anomaly.This sounds like a completely incompatible idea, but as a fan of both I must have it
I thought it was incompatible, but then I remembered Miri's Planet -- an exact duplicate of Earth.
That seems... misguided to me.
It would be like trying to explain why the Mars of Ray Bradbury and Philip K. Dick has a breathable atmosphere and can support human life without domes and terraforming. We know that Mars can't, but when you read their works that's simply not an issue. Mars is inhabitable as is, and that's all that needs to be said.
There's a strand of science fiction from the Golden Age through to the early 1960s that simply hand waved away issues like that. The writer wasn't concerned about creating a situation that could withstand scientific scrutiny. Trying to rationalize the irrational post-facto misses the point. Scientific realism was sacrificed on the altar of storytelling. What mattered was the story; the science (or lack thereof) was simply the trappings to get at the story.
That's why Greg Benford failed so spectacularly with Foundation's Fear. In trying to write a Foundation novel that was scientifically accurate, he ended up writing something that was very much not a Foundation novel. He was working from a flawed premise, and the result, though fine by Benford's standards, was deeply flawed.
I can't speak to Forgotten History -- I've not read it -- so I don't know if the execution of the rationalization of Miri's World as described succeeds or fails. Star Trek arose out of the pulp sci-fi tradition that eschewed realism in favor of storytelling. I don't know that its awkward elements as seen from a modern, scientific point-of-view, need to be rationalized.
*shrug*
It's not just a science problem with "Miri," though, it's a story problem. They introduce this huge mystery -- a duplicate Earth -- and then do nothing with it. It's just an excuse to use the Culver City backlot as an alien planet. It's awful story structure, building the early part of the episode around a question and then forgetting the question in favor of a completely different story. Although the implication is pretty clear that the planet's history was exactly like Earth's up until the life prolongation virus killed all the adults -- and ran in sync as well, since the ruins were 1960s-era and the experiments had happened three centuries before. That's what got me thinking that it worked better as an alternate-timeline Earth. Then it wouldn't be so totally random and pointless.
(Honestly, given how much Roddenberry depended on the parallel-Earth idea to make his show affordable, I sometimes think he would've been better off pitching something like Sliders, so that the parallel histories would actually grow organically out of the premise rather than being so awkwardly grafted onto a series nominally about space travel.)
Anyway, I didn't include Miri's planet in Forgotten History for the sake of explaining it, because I hate "Miri" and I was happy to just ignore it and pretend it never happened. But I wanted to do something with an alternate timeline as a major part of the novel, and in looking for possibilities, I remembered having idly mused that Miri's world could've been an alternate-timeline Earth that somehow jumped the tracks, and that inspired a far more interesting idea, effectively a stealth Myriad Universes premise: What would galactic history have been like in a timeline where humanity effectively ceased to exist in the 1960s? Where there was no Jonathan Archer to bring about peace between Vulcan and Andoria or to discover the Kir'Shara, and no Amanda Grayson to give birth to Spock? (Sort of a counterpoint to The Tears of Eridanus, which depicts an interstellar community that has humans but lacks Vulcans.) That idea was so interesting to me that I was even willing to grit my teeth and acknowledge the existence of "Miri," although I kept my references to it to an absolute minimum and focused more on the alternate history of other worlds and the ramifications of the universe-jumping mechanism I devised (which I actually cribbed from an unsold Voyager episode pitch). So "Miri" was just the catalyst for the real story.
(Honestly, given how much Roddenberry depended on the parallel-Earth idea to make his show affordable, I sometimes think he would've been better off pitching something like Sliders, so that the parallel histories would actually grow organically out of the premise rather than being so awkwardly grafted onto a series nominally about space travel.)
Anyway, I didn't include Miri's planet in Forgotten History for the sake of explaining it, because I hate "Miri" and I was happy to just ignore it and pretend it never happened. But I wanted to do something with an alternate timeline as a major part of the novel, and in looking for possibilities, I remembered having idly mused that Miri's world could've been an alternate-timeline Earth that somehow jumped the tracks, and that inspired a far more interesting idea, effectively a stealth Myriad Universes premise: What would galactic history have been like in a timeline where humanity effectively ceased to exist in the 1960s? Where there was no Jonathan Archer to bring about peace between Vulcan and Andoria or to discover the Kir'Shara, and no Amanda Grayson to give birth to Spock? (Sort of a counterpoint to The Tears of Eridanus, which depicts an interstellar community that has humans but lacks Vulcans.) That idea was so interesting to me that I was even willing to grit my teeth and acknowledge the existence of "Miri," although I kept my references to it to an absolute minimum and focused more on the alternate history of other worlds and the ramifications of the universe-jumping mechanism I devised (which I actually cribbed from an unsold Voyager episode pitch). So "Miri" was just the catalyst for the real story.
Worked for me! 
The canonical aliens on the Merchantman were Valkris (a female Klingon spy), and a rubbery-fish-faced guy. He also appeared in the DC comic. The other guy was human.
For the ST III novelization, Vonda McIntyre used a relative(?) of the felinoid Snnanagfashtalli ("The Entropy Effect) on the Merchantman: Farrendahl.
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