Things Trek in general could have done better?

Because it takes place in the 24th century, not 2010.

 

In who the gods destroy, Kirk spoke of a relatively resent event that made Spock and He "brothers." The Federation might have been a century old, but the organization coming together in any meaningful way could bave been only a decade or so prior to TOS.

 

I liked how DS9 went into politics, religion, darkness, and wars.

Gene Roddenbury, as much as I like him starting the whole thing, kept things back by restricting wars, (not really politics, but it wasn't mentioned,) some pessimism, and secular humanism as the dominant religious belief in the Federation.

 

I agree they took it a little far when they had things like six year olds studying calculus, but I disagree that man shouldn't have solved current social problems. Without that, there's no positive message for humanity, just a bunch of guys out in space. The show needed its philosophical identity to be special.

I'm also glad for TOS and TNG at least the focus of the episode was more the current adventure than any ongoing relationship drama.

I'll add more to what I said before about the show having more memory though. I'm watching Disaster thinking, "Shouldn't Troi know for a fact there are people alive in the drive section?" They really dialed up and down the usefulness of Troi's empathy depending on the episode.

 

Huh? Worf is the first and Klingon in Starfleet, and aside from B'Elanna, the only, given we don't know if she stayed in Starfleet after arriving home. What "others" do you speak of?

 

Bry_Sinclair said it first but I'm going to say it again because it always bugs the crap out of me. Better and more realistic depictions of women. I didn't have any problem with Seven of Nine or Deanna Troi's outfits when I was a teenager because of the obvious reasons, but now all I can think of whenever I see episodes of Voyager is how uncomfortable Jeri Ryan must have been wearing that getup week after week, what with the high heels and the corset underneath the catsuit. B'Elanna acted like a child who would throw a tantrum whenever she didn't get her way. Jennifer Lien was brought on as Kes because of her large bust following her pregnancy and was promptly fired when they shrank. The first female captain to be the main star of a series suffered from inconsistent writing making Janeway look insane. Deanna Troi wears nothing but leotards and a dress with a stupid cutout for hear cleavage for five seasons and doesn't get to do anything meaningful until TNG was almost over. Tasha Yar is created to capitalize on the success of Ripley and Vasquez from Aliens yet she's on a show that was deliberately setup under the idea that the Federation has no internal conflict and bows down to every single threat that comes their way rendering her completely useless. Tasha was pretty much just set dressing even more than Troi by way of hardly ever getting to speak. The only notes written about Dr. Crusher's character during creation was how she's Wesley's mother and the attraction she has to Picard. Nothing about her interests or goals. Just the relation she has to the men of the show.

This ties into my second issue which is the handling of romance on the shows. Both Crusher and Troi are stated to have an attraction for a fellow main character, but we as an audience know nothing will happen to motivate that relationship becoming something more than just close friends because the writers don't want to close off options for potential love interests. To me it gets even worse when they would have a romantic plot for a guest star because, again, we the audience know they'll be gone by the next episode never to be mentioned again (with only one or two exceptions). It makes the whole idea of having a romantic story utterly pointless. My absolute favorite example of this is Chakotay and Seven. They get together in the very last episode of Voyager with no build up or explanation. It's as if the writers didn't have enough to fill out this two-parter and had to give them something to do. To go along with that is how it took 50 years to finally get a depiction of a gay character after having Paramount promise it for years only to chicken out at the last minute. Here's hoping they hold to their promise on Discovery.

 

2 things in particular, and this isn't contingent on the next movie or Discovery simply because they haven't come out yet, and we don't know what they're packing:

1. More intentional, real world diversity. Yes, aliens are good, and we'll get more aliens. That's great. But I'm a big believer that one of the reasons why so many incarnations of Trek have been successful is because viewers can project themselves to the screen. Diversity plays a large role in that, but sometimes I feel like Trek legacy rests on its laurels of diversity in the 60s rather than being more proactive about it. That is, the crew of a starship can look just as diverse on the human side as any classroom, block, or urban neighborhood.

And this isn't to fault the series of the past either, or to say they did a bad job. Not at all. But even with Enterprise in the early 2000s, TV and the western world in general have become even more diverse since then. Queer people, multiracial people, racial minorities, adoptees (Worf's parents were so cute!) can have more representation beyond tokenism (characters who are minorities today, but are fully-realized characters, is the best way to defeat tokenism). The future of Trek shows should reflect the audiences watching them -- and the audiences Trek wants to reach. Trek advancing along with its audience will always be the right way to go. The question is what can Trek do better, and frankly, all of film and TV can do better in that regard, so it's not just relegated to Trek; but Trek can be the leader.

2. I'd love to see more grander scale Trek that questions existence, fills one with both wonder and dread at once, that makes exploration feel risky but worthwhile. Trek's done it a few times here and there, but in this age of movies like Interstellar and Arrival, I'd love to see this both on TV and the big screen.

For the most part, I'm a big fan of the Kelvinverse movies, and the shoot 'em ups are nice, but I do feel like that there's a way to meld the two forms together. I'm a fan of TMP though I think it's imperfect, for similar but opposite reasons. My favorite moment in The Final Frontier was for a brief moment, when the film captured that sense of brave worry before the ship went into the Galactic Barrier. Where No One Has Gone Before remains one of my all time faves, and that's a Season 1 TNG episode.

 

Exactly. That was one aspect I meant when I mentioned internal consistency. I was watching Threshold (yeah, I know, I put it off for weeks) today and there was the scene where they needed to transport Paris from the dining area to sickbay. They were unable to lock onto his bioreadings to beam him. Yet, in other episodes, they make it clear to lock on to the comm badge and beam the target. Paris was wearing is com badge. Either they forgot this feature existed or should have written the scene differently.

Sorry, I wasn't clear in my point. I meant that while Worf (forgot about B'Elanna) was in Starfleet there were other Klingons in the galaxy. We even saw those Klingons. This did not change the fact that Worf (until B'Elanna showed up) was unique to the Star Trek universe. We could have seen other androids or had other androids mentioned or acknowledged and still have had Data be a unique character. The Andromeda Galaxy androids did not know how to respond to emotion, Reyna could not handle emotion, the Mudd robots were limited in processing ability and had to coordinate or network. Data's positronic brain made him special. He didn't have emotions until his chip, but he seemed to process them just fine after.

 

I don't think this was a problem or an oversight. It was an integral part of her character that she act this way. It was the depiction of her half-Klingon nature that she never got under control and constantly got her in trouble. Had she been full Klingon, she might have been able to handle it better.

 

That would imply the showrunners had an idea of where to take the character from the outset while all the evidence indicates otherwise. When Ronald D. Moore was brought onto production after DS9 he asked he asked for information to write B'Elanna. Their answer was that they had no idea and Moore left the show only a couple of weeks later. There was also how she acted completely unprofessional in her job by picking fights in Engineering, not caring about herself to the point of almost killing herself with no thought about leaving the ship with no Chief Engineer, and complains about how rude people are by yelling at and insulting them. That's not to say this was a problem only pertaining to her, though. Status Quo is God on Voyager leading to no one having a consistent story or growth.

 

They should take more risks. They play it too safe sometimes, especially in later Trek. More character evolution or arcs would be nice. Sometimes, they get too Anvilicious. Overall, its still a great franchise.

 

Many bigger things have been said already, so I'll put it to something small that could be fit into filler dialogue: more shading of the world. That is, don't just describe any planet or species as monolithic, but mention that something or other is a dominant trait. Or better, a currently-dominant trait.

For example, rather than describe Vulcans rating the elimination of emotion as the highest virtue instead say it's considered in the West Continent provinces to be the most impressive achievement. Or rather than say Romulans as treacherous conspirators talk about how ``ever since the Revolutions of '78'' high office-holders on Romulus have had to watch their backs closely.

Most of this would be little throwaway lines, the equivalent of when someone lists the great playwrights and two of them are Andorian. But the goal would be to build in the notion that planets and cultures aren't monolithic, not today, and not over time. It wouldn't make much difference in plots. It would just add to the verisimilitude that everything is always changing, and the audience should remember that.

 

Definitively resolving the Bashirian-Sloanian dilemma are our principles sacrosanct or must they be defended by unprincipled means? DS9, VOY(more than is given credit), and ENT all tried their hands at this.

Parallel universes, crazy time and space anomalies and so on-a lot of that was interesting but wasn't really considered beyond one or two episodes of which it was involved.

 

That would involve a lot of conscious worldbuilding and that isn't something you can do on a tv show.

 

KORRIS: I did not know there were Klingons serving on human Starfleet vessels.
WORF: As far as I know, I am the only one.

This in no way suggest that Worf is the first, or that Klingons aren't assigned to non-Human Starfleet starships. In fact, it really doesn't even say that there aren't Klingons on other Human Starfleet starships, only that Worf doesn't know of any.

Or is there a reference I don't recall?

A passing line of dialog is all that it would take.

 

Off the top of my head, In Rightful Heir we learn that a vision of Kahless telling Worf he would do something no other Klingon would do is what motivated him to join Starfleet. And then there's this bit from DS9 Rules of Engagement:

Worf is the first and only Klingon serving in Starfleet, or at least would have been classified as the only one before Starfleet became aware of Voyager and B'Elanna. Hell, this is one of the things background material on Worf almost always points out, how is this even in doubt?

 

That's not even the biggest problem with Threshold in this regard. So, going warp 10 makes you evolve super fast, okay. Going warp 9.99999 doesn't. They didn't even bother to give some throwaway reason Voyager couldn't take Paris' engine to get home in days and just not quite reach 10.

Trek writers were incredibly reckless about introducing things into the universe that would break the balance of the universe if anyone remembered they existed.

 

And yet so many people on here complain that there should have been more character conflict between Maquis and Starfleet crew. When this angsty Anakin behavior shows up on screen, it's seen(and rightly so) as unprofessional. Well...B'elanna can be unprofessional.

She also has a character arc. So does Tom. They also have one together that was planned from before the show started! The doctor also has an arc. Seven has an arc. Neelix even has an arc.

We're you expecting every character on the show to each have their own personal epic scale hero's journey?

You say characters are written inconsistently...I say prove it. And even you can find something that seems inconsistent about a characters personality, prove that those supposed inconsistencies aren't found also in TNG, DS9, and ENT. All of these shows shared writers, directors, and producers.

Lastly, I can think of one person with twice the angst of B'elanna Torres. His initials are RDM

 

Actually, none of the writers or producers who worked on DS9 went over to Enterprise, and Berman and Braga were the only ones from TNG involved with Enterprise.