TOS view on the 24th Century

[Crewman47]

Afaik TOS only did about two time travel stories, and both were set in the past, but what if they did an episode that was set a hundred years in the future, eg 2360's, what do you think it would look like using the available SFX and technology used at the time. I'd imagine that the view of the 24th century from the POV of TOS would be different with regard to ship technology and design and maybe the whole politics of Starfleet compared to what we eventually get with TNG.

But then we have to consider if this episode had been done how would it affect Canon once TNG got made, would the producers have to stick to what was previously established in that one episode or could we still get the Ent-D as we saw her and everything else we had in the TNG era?

Any thoughts?

 

[Timo]

I'm not sure TOS writers would have seen any value in "future" stories. The whole show was about the future to begin with, after all. And there was something of an implication that our heroes were the sort of folks who were accustomed to the future - people for whom outer space was all in the day's work. The grandfathers of these people had already plied the stars in search of new life and civilizations; their grandkids would no doubt continue their work, nothing special about that.

Yet if TOS had done an episode about, say, the children of Kirk, this would be so iconic to Star Trek that any "future spinoff" (in both senses of the expression) would have to acknowledge the foray into the 24th century. Sure, they changed Khan's folks from "ethnicals" to "Aryans" for ST2, but they didn't alter the character or history of Khan even when it might have made sense to simplify things for the movie audiences. A TV show would have even less grounds for dramatic independence - it would milk the TOS precedent to the utmost, rather than try and ignore it.

Just offset the "future" by a decade or so, and you could have cool uniforms and VFX (by the standards of the contemporary audience) in place of the original campy ones (by those same standards) - just as happened with TMP vs. TOS, or ST2 vs. TMP.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Crewman47]

80 views on this question and only 1 reply. I would've thought that a question like this would have generated more of a converstion than this. Is there anything in the wording or the way I've asked it that cuases it to be ignored as such or is it just that uninteresting to be discussed.

Please help me here so that I can avoid making topics like this again or at least put them down in such a way top make them interesting.

 

[Cranston]

I agree with Timo. I think it's important to note that Star Trek didn't really *have* such a sense of historical sweep until The Next Generation. In other words, TOS was simply "the future" (with some time depth suggested by "The Menagerie"). So the very idea of there being such fundamentally different eras in the Trek universe was mostly an artifact of Roddenberry's decision to set his new TV series 100 years after the first.

Also, of course, the reason TOS folks kept visiting the 20th century (even in TVH) was because it was so much cheaper than visiting the future, or the more-distant past.

But still, it's an interesting question. It would be interesting to see how whatever ideas a hypothetical TOS visit to the 24th century would have been integrated into TNG.

 

[Lieut. Arex]

Timo said:

Yet if TOS had done an episode about, say, the children of Kirk, this would be so iconic to Star Trek that any "future spinoff" (in both senses of the expression) would have to acknowledge the foray into the 24th century.

I disagree. The producers might, but by no means would they "have to". GR himself felt no obligation to the details of the original show when it came to crafting TNG, starting with the revised Third World War introduced in "Encounter at Farpoint", the economics of the future, etc. The broad strokes were acknowledged to be certain, but if it served their story or aesthetic purposes (Romulan ridges), the old went right out. That's been the case throughout modern Trek, even revising itself over time.

 

[aridas sofia]

I feel rather certain of one thing -- if the makers of TOS had tackled an episode set in their Trek's future, it wouldn't have been beholden to what they had done. No slavish attachment to details of 23rd century technology, "progressed" to some stylized form. That stuff hadn't become "iconic" yet. I think they would acknowledge the possibility that their future might be as unrecognizable to them as our technology would be to someone from the 19th century.

There is a clue to this -- when choosing a suitable predecessor to the original Enterprise, Roddenberry selected Jefferies' "ringship" design. Oblivious to the change in form? Or wanting to show something as dramatic as the technological evolution from this to this?

 

[Lieut. Arex]

Oh, I agree. They would have made it as different from the show's regular look as $180,000 would allow. Lot's of borrowed props. I wonder if they could have gotten that big sphere from the C-57D's control center?

One reason I think they may have never gone this route, aside from the fact ST wasn't a time travel show, is that GR wasn't interested in telling stories about what humanity might become, but rather about the process, the struggle of becoming, growing as a species. That's a big distinction between ST and TNG, VOY, and to a lesser degree, DS9. Not grasping that was a major mis-step on the ENT producers' part, hand-waving past the process in a single line by Trip at the dinner table.

 

[Nebusj]

I would've liked to have seen a future-of-the-series episode on The Original Series, because I think they would have managed to come up with a far-future look that would be really strange and somehow compelling too. Plus it would have done all sorts of fun havoc on the sequel shows, which would be great to watch.

I was disappointed when The Next Generation started that the sensors were still tricorders, the weapons were still phasers and photon torpedoes, the transporters were still the transporters ... where's the fundamentally new stuff? And since I accepted the Animated Series, the holodeck wasn't anything so hot either. I'm sure that a 24-th century Original Series episode would have introduced gadgets as weird and not obviously explicable as ... well, like the Kelvan belts of powergaming, or other mysterious objects of great power and un-obvious user interfaces.

But the fundamental problem with it is what story would you tell? Why do you need a future-of-the-future when you already have a perfectly good future? If you want to put in a super-future tech, why not make it part of the show? So it would be challenging to write a story where this made sense, and no, Voyager's encounters with 29th or whatever century stuff and Archer's harassment by Daniels do not make sense.

 

[The Old Mixer]

^When TNG was first coming out, Roddenberry said that he'd deliberately kept the technology similar, to emphasize that they'd advanced socially moreso than technologically.

 

[Ronald Held]

If everything advanced that much, then what would be the association between TOS and TNG?

 

[aridas sofia]

Nebusj said:
I would've liked to have seen a future-of-the-series episode on The Original Series, because I think they would have managed to come up with a far-future look that would be really strange and somehow compelling too. Plus it would have done all sorts of fun havoc on the sequel shows, which would be great to watch.

I was disappointed when The Next Generation started that the sensors were still tricorders, the weapons were still phasers and photon torpedoes, the transporters were still the transporters ... where's the fundamentally new stuff? And since I accepted the Animated Series, the holodeck wasn't anything so hot either. I'm sure that a 24-th century Original Series episode would have introduced gadgets as weird and not obviously explicable as ... well, like the Kelvan belts of powergaming, or other mysterious objects of great power and un-obvious user interfaces.

But the fundamental problem with it is what story would you tell? Why do you need a future-of-the-future when you already have a perfectly good future? If you want to put in a super-future tech, why not make it part of the show? So it would be challenging to write a story where this made sense, and no, Voyager's encounters with 29th or whatever century stuff and Archer's harassment by Daniels do not make sense.

Absolutely. In many ways, everything after TOS smells of the "arrested society" syndrome that Spock suspected on Organia. A society that reached a certain level and then just... stopped. A few tweaks here and there, a few advances, but when Scotty beamed aboard the 1701-D he it wasn't completely alien to him. That is hard to imagine for a society encountering and absorbing the accumulated knowledge of whole civilizations every day.

In many ways this shows the weakness of the whole Star Trek concept. OTOH a show set very early in the age of interstellar exploration, with ships wholly isolated from one another and their home, could believably depict their own future as more alien than anything they would discover on other planets.

 

[Holytomato]

"a show set very early in the age of interstellar exploration,"

What!?

 

[Wingsley]

There are a couple of ways of looking at this question.

Here's one:

Let's consider the paradox created by TNG's "Yesterday's Enterprise". What if Capt. Kirk and/or his Enterprise had moved forward in time, just as Capt. Garrett's Enterprise-C has done? Imagine the STAR TREK Universe of the late 23rd century without either the 1701 Enterprise or Capt. Kirk. Could someone else have saved Earth from V'ger? Would there have been another refit Connie step forward to get the job done?

 

[Anwar]

Rick Berman said that if he had known they'd be making TNG movies abck when they did "Yesterday's Enterprise", the first one wouldn't have been "Generations", it would've been a movie version of "YE" with the Enterprise-A and not the Ent-C.

 

[UssGlenn]

That would have been great. The only question is wether or not to have the memories of the Enterprise-D crew change or have them protected like in First Contact so the two familiar crews can interact.

 

[Praetor]

Unquestionably, have them protected so the two can interact. Where's the fun in anything else?

 

[Anwar]

Part of what made YE great were all the differences between the regular Ent-D and the Battleship Ent-D, as well as the crew. The amount of detail gone into how everything was different is taggering, I pick up new stuff all the time.

So while some would think it's cheap to have the interaction be between the original crew and the altered TNG crew, I think it would still work.