The Trek road not taken

[sonak]

Spock should have stayed dead after TWoK.

I agree.
I like Spock and he is my most favourite character, but when someone is dead, he should stay dead. Death should be definitive, not a temporary state.
I've seen a Troi episode, where she had to pass a test. It's point was, that she should be able to send a friend to death. (Let be the fact real Geordi would do, what should be done).
Then I started to think about the end of TWOK. Everyone in the engineering knew what should be done, everybody knew what will hapen if nobody does it, but nobody did it. Like they were waiting for someone (Spock) to walk in, fix the engine and die. It quite ruins the movie for me.
I like Scotty, but his death would be right in this case. Or they should have killed Saavik instead- her character was abandoned in the fourth movie anyway. I know the backstory, but...still...

I think the idea was that as McCoy says "no human could survive that" and Spock says "as you are so fond of pointing out, I am not human."

A mere human might not have been able to survive long enough under the intense radiation in that room to fix the engines. Spock, having abilities beyond that of a human, was able to endure long enough to do what needed to be done. I guess Saavik could have done that too, but (1) she might not have had the know how, and (2) I think Spock would rather have risked himself than a much younger protege.

 

[Ziriath]

Do not think a half-Vulcan would last there longer, than a human in a protective suit. In case of high doses of radiation, all lifeforms are equal.

 

[C.E. Evans]

Picard dying/remaining Locutus in "The Best of Both Worlds, part II" and Riker taking over as Enterprise captain from that point forward.

Picard staying as Locutus and being killed?

The "/" means "or" in this case.

No... that would've been tragic.

Characters die/go away, even popular and heroic ones.

Frakes could never have pulled it off. The series would've tanked.

I disagree. I think Frakes did a great job as captain in "The Best of Both Worlds, part II."

 

[YARN]

Picard dying/remaining Locutus in "The Best of Both Worlds, part II" and Riker taking over as Enterprise captain from that point forward.

Picard staying as Locutus and being killed? No... that would've been tragic. Frakes could never have pulled it off. The series would've tanked.

Then have Locutus kill Riker. Get someone like Bruce Greenwood to be the replacement.

 

[Keith1701]

There have been many moments I wish TPTB had chosen to do something different in Trek. Some big things, some not so big. A couple that still bug me are:


That the Klingon in Yesterday's Enterprise who hails the Ent-D ISN'T Worf. (I read they thought of it too late but Dorn wasn't around or something)

Valeris isn't Saavik in ST VI. I just wish she was, and understand all the reasons she wasn't.

Making ENT a real prequel in look and feel to TOS.

Letting Shatner 'write' and direct ST V. While contractually obligated, I wish they hadn't let him participate in the writing and directing of the same film. One would have been bad, but both killed any momentum the TOS film franchise had after IV was so big.

These are just a few of mine, but I would love to read other people's pet peeves that could have/should have been, but weren't

Making ENT a real prequel in look and feel to TOS, I must agree with this one. ENT could have looked more like a prequel than it looked and sounded like during it's 4 seasons.

 

[Keith1701]

Spock should have stayed dead after TWoK.

I agree.
I like Spock and he is my most favourite character, but when someone is dead, he should stay dead. Death should be definitive, not a temporary state.
I've seen a Troi episode, where she had to pass a test. It's point was, that she should be able to send a friend to death. (Let be the fact real Geordi would do, what should be done).
Then I started to think about the end of TWOK. Everyone in the engineering knew what should be done, everybody knew what will hapen if nobody does it, but nobody did it. Like they were waiting for someone (Spock) to walk in, fix the engine and die. It quite ruins the movie for me.
I like Scotty, but his death would be right in this case. Or they should have killed Saavik instead- her character was abandoned in the fourth movie anyway. I know the backstory, but...still...

good points.......

 

[F. King Daniel]

They really should have brought Saavik bavk for TNG. It was kinda frustrating to see Robin Curtis playing a generic Romulan spy in "Gambit" when they could have used her as Saavik in another episode. Maybe we could have even met Spock's son or daughter....

 

[Arpy]

They should have introduced us to Kirk's Little Green Men from Alpha Centauri as the 5th Federation founding world. The less humanoid the better.

 

[Forbin]

Having the Irena character in "The Way to Eden" be McCoy's daughter, as originally planned, would have been far more interesting.

 

[Arpy]

No Borg Queen in FC. Monarchs aren't scary anymore, whereas alienation and conformity - they're what the Borg are all about.

 

[sonak]

No Borg Queen in FC. Monarchs aren't scary anymore, whereas alienation and conformity - they're what the Borg are all about.

yeah, wasn't this a suit-imposed idea for FC? Pretty dumb, because faceless enemies are much scarier than ones led by just another dictator.

That scene in BOBW where Picard is just talking to one giant, disembodied collective intelligence is one of the creepiest and most effective scenes in Trek.

 

[bullethead]

I wish they had done something different for the plot of Star Trek: Generations. The concept of having the TOS characters hand things off to the TNG crew was dumb, but it would've been cool if they had been able to make an adventure that drew them together. Michael Jan Friedman's novel Crossover (which came out after Generations) would've been a pretty good basis for the movie (and the Ent-B sequence at the beginning of Generations could've been saved and served as an extra bit of character motivation for McCoy and Scotty as they went through their parts of the plot).

 

[ChristopherPike]

Just remake "Yesterday's Enterprise", on an epic scale... it damn well didn't stop The Motion Picture basically remaking "The Changeling" with a dash of "The Immunity Syndrome" thrown in, to add scale to the danger. Not that that TNG TV show wasn't exciting back then, compared to the norm - changing the bridge, bringing the lighting down, two Enterprises, talk of a battle with the Romulans in the past and Klingons in the present. Amazingly epic for a 45 minute episode. But I'm talking about using very inch of the silver screen on a classic meeting between the Enterprises A and D.

Heck, should do that now... with the NX-01 coming right at the Abramsverse one, from out of a time warp. Some cast members on either side not making through til the final reel.

 

[CommanderRaytas]

I wish that DS9 had remained true to its premise and focused on rebuilding Bajor and exploration of the GQ rather than becoming a war show in its later seasons.

Good God, no. Who gives a damn about Bajor? Also, that would have meant no Weyoun and no Damar, and I can't have any of that, now, can I?

I wish that they'd never have made the wormhole aliens literal Gods and Sisko a demigod.

Agreed. Behold the powers of Deus ex Machina and character assassination!

 

[Arpy]

^Well then why have Bajor at all? Just tell a tale about a distant Federation outpost and the more interesting Cardassians and Dominion.

But I agree with sonak, and personally think that it was hackneyed them doing a raygun WWII rather than making the original premise work. Like introducing Seven rather than making Kes & Co. more interesting.

 

[Atticus]

But I agree with sonak, and personally think that it was hackneyed them doing a raygun WWII rather than making the original premise work. Like introducing Seven rather than making Kes & Co. more interesting.

Agree 100% on both these points

 

[Judy Waxhorn]

I wish they would have made space more dangerous.

Instead of people surviving by some cliched plot-device or whathaveyou... Kill off characters on a regular basis.

Oh hey look they killed Worf... Now we have to deal with that... AND integrate his replacement. Do we try to make said replacement feel like one of the team (maybe the first couple of times... twice max) but after the third or forth we now have an outsider trying to be part of the surviving "core" team and not being accepted.

More like real life than "thank god a timely injection of medicbabble and a trip through the technobabbler was able to put Humpty Dumpty back together again."

 

[JiNX-01]

I wish they hadn't killed off Trip in ENT. I know the show was ending, which made it all the more upsetting. They could've let us believe he's off living a happy life somewhere. It was upsetting. So unnecessary.

And it was lame all around: The "rescue mission" was lame. B&B's self-congratulatory TNG worship was lame. And Trip's death was lame.

 

[plynch]

I wish they would have made space more dangerous.

Instead of people surviving by some cliched plot-device or whathaveyou... Kill off characters on a regular basis.

Oh hey look they killed Worf... Now we have to deal with that... AND integrate his replacement. Do we try to make said replacement feel like one of the team (maybe the first couple of times... twice max) but after the third or forth we now have an outsider trying to be part of the surviving "core" team and not being accepted.

More like real life than "thank god a timely injection of medicbabble and a trip through the technobabbler was able to put Humpty Dumpty back together again."

That's why I like Tasha's and Jadzia's deaths. How early starts this tradition of everything-ends-well, after all? I can think of Spock's eyelids in OpAnnihilate. BermanTrek was inheriting a storytelling framework handed off really from the 1960s. Episodic, where each ep is basically a reset. They grew from that slowly, esp. In DS9.

 

[CommanderRaytas]

^Well then why have Bajor at all? Just tell a tale about a distant Federation outpost and the more interesting Cardassians and Dominion.

Now here's a thought. I tend to ignore most Bajoran-centred episodes, anyway.