Trek’s biggest missed opportunities

[Farscape One]

Good thread idea. I've got a couple right off the bat.

1. VOYAGER having the Starfleet/Maquis conflict resolved after only a couple episodes. Not saying it should last for years, but at least a full season can be mined from the idea.

2. TNG... not bringing back Pulaski. Even if not as a regular, at least an appearance or two. "Ethics" is an obvious choice for a reappearance.

3. ENTERPRISE... not having more of the Tellarites. While we started to scratch the surface with them later in the series' run, they still got only a little bit of a spotlight. They did a wonderful job with the Andorians, and I feel that if they got a season 5, we could have seen more of the other founding member of the Federation.

 

[somebuddyX]

Not making Planet of the Titans.
The Search for Spock backpedaling a lot of TWOK instead of being more solid in it's own right.
TNG's first season being too soft and hamstrung by Gene Roddenberry's vision to get more down and dirty early on and flaking on it's premise.
Voyager flaking on it's premise.
Enterprise not being more focused early on and not realising that TV audiences had moved on and it needed to adapt with the times.
Insurrection being watered down from early treatments.
Into Darkness not being more an original story.
The Kelvin films costing way too much money.
Not having at least one gay character somewhere before Discovery. It's just wild that people were against it or it wasn't on anyone's radar or whatever. Even the Starfleet Academy comic had gay characters like Yoshi Mishima and the book had Jayme Miranda and that was the 90s.

 

[Ottens]

In "Voyager" instead of Janeway having been the Captain all along, she should have been first officer and the Captain gets killed. Then there could have been an extra depth to command and people's acceptance/questioning of it.

I get your point, but on balance I disagree. That would have made the first female captain less impactful, if she's gotten the job by "accident".

 

[Lord Garth]

During the 1993-'94 season of Star Trek, they should've had a full-on TNG/DS9 Crossover Special on TV.

Something more than what "Birthright, Part I" did the previous season. A story that fully integrates both crews as the Deep Space Nine and Enteprise crews have to solve something. Yes, I know they did it in comic book form, but something that we could've seen on screen.

 

[Orphalesion]

Not introducing a replacement female character for Tasha Yar right there in season 2 or 3. It was just goofy that after Yar's death all the female main characters on TNG were gentle care-givers.
Just call up the runner-ups for the Yar character from Season 1 and introduce a new more action-oriented female character.

 

[Forbin]

A very specific scene:
When Geordi meets Leah Brahms for real, and they make friends at the end of the episode, and Geordi asks her out. The line I was hoping to hear from my socially aware Star Trek was,
"Geordi, Im sorry, I thought you knew... I'm gay."
But NOOOooooo, they weren't brave enough. Or the writer was too conventional to think that way.

 

[flandry84]

TNG became so staid and slow,so more physical action.
And the really poor TNG movies...yeesh!So much money spent but does anybody outside the production “bubble”ever actually read through the script?

 

[Orphalesion]

A very specific scene:
When Geordi meets Leah Brahms for real, and they make friends at the end of the episode, and Geordi asks her out. The line I was hoping to hear from my socially aware Star Trek was,
"Geordi, Im sorry, I thought you knew... I'm gay."
But NOOOooooo, they weren't brave enough. Or the writer was too conventional to think that way.

Agreed I suggested that in one of those "how would you change the episode"threads, that Leah would reveal she's married...to another woman.
It would also have saved us from that awkward idea that Geordi and Leah are married in the All Good Things future.

 

[1001001]

STAR TREK: GENERATIONS, not exploring and fleshing out the mysteries of Guinan and her people including the villain by making the movie a Borg story where Soran was looking for salvation.

It should have been Edith Keeler or Gillian Taylor in the Nexus with Kirk.

It should have been Beverly with Picard.

 

[Ray Hardgrit]

Here's a few:

We didn't really get any ingenious and satisfying crossovers, just occasional cameos.

We didn't get a Kelvin timeline movie which brought back the Romulan commander from Balance of Terror in a reality where he could have called Kirk friend.

The first half of Discovery season 3 kept setting up a new status quo for the characters and ship, over and over again. It kept promising stories and then skipping to the end, and now it's too late to tell them.

No Mirror Picard or Janeway.

 

[Richard S. Ta]

I’d add another voice to those who feel it shouldn’t have taken more than half a century for Star Trek to have an openly gay character.

That should have happened in TNG and if not there, surely ISB was forward thinking enough to make it happen on DS9… but no.

I’m glad we have Stamets and Culber now, but it shouldn’t have taken that long.

 

[Ottens]

Absolutely agree - Star Trek was way too late introducing gay characters.

In general, I would have liked to see more of the "free love" spirit Gene Roddenberry wrote about in his TMP novelization. Multiple gender identities, poly- and multi-amorous relationships... We got hints at it, for example in the Trill, but on the whole Star Trek under Rick Berman's helm played it way too safe on this front too.

 

[Orphalesion]

but on the whole Star Trek under Rick Berman's helm played it way too safe on this front too.

Worse than just "playing it save". Apparently there was going to be a same-sex couple in the background of the scene in Offspring where Guinan explained what love is to Lal, and one of the producers had them removed.
I suspect there was a bit of homophobia going on. It's probably no coincidence that the only "same sex" kiss in 90s Trek was between two completely feminine, physically attractive women who weren't homosexual anyway, just following a quirk in their alien biology.

Really, the best we got was that one Gamma Quadrant alien acting like it was no big deal when she found Quark and Pel (then still disguised as a man) making out (and even that scene had Quark reacting with revulsion).

 

[Oddish]

NEXT GENERATION: Not coming up with a better last movie than that piece of crap, "Nemesis". Only good things in that movie were the wedding and Janeway's cameo.

DS9: No eighth season. TNG was pretty much out of gas, and VOY was staggering by S7 as well. But there was life in DS9, especially with the war over, a new Dax to explore, and Bajor still needing to join the Federation. Maybe even some Maquis remnants like Ro and Riker to find out about. Failing an eighth season, a TV miniseries might have been a good compromise.

VOYAGER: Arghh, do I have to choose just one? How about listening to Rick Berman. He nixed a lot of things that would have given the show its own identity: character development, Starfleet-Maquis tensions, "someone gotta be duh ensign", the list is long and varied. For you advocates out there, I think he also nixed Kate Mulgrew's move to get a gay character on the show.

ENTERPRISE: Aside from not getting that fifth season with Jeffrey Combs as a main cast member, you mean? How about the inclusion of transporters and photon torpedoes? They could have made it a story of transitioning from current tech to Trek tech, instead they just made it more of the same.

 

[JoaquinSlowly]

I was skeptical of the idea of a lot of legacy characters in Strange New Worlds, but ‪‪I’ve started to warm to the idea in specific instances, as it makes my answer to this question moot.

That is to say, answer to this question is mostly “giving Uhura a spotlight/real development,” which seems likely to be addressed by her appearing as a Cadet and a SNW cast member.

Being that it’s set before TOS, it won’t be able to tackle one of Trek’s most egregious missed opportunities/mistakes, dealing with the fallout of Uhura undergoing a mind-wipe in The Changeling that was never undone and having to relearn everything, and how that would’ve impacted every aspect of her life.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

There are a few big missed opportunities for me:

1) Not giving Robert Justman the reins for TOS season three and doing whatever it took to hang on to folks like Gene Coon, Dorothy Fontana, David Gerrold, Marc Daniels, and Joseph Pevney.

2) Not waiting until they had a KILLER script for TMP before they started shooting. As it is, we have an epic-looking shaggy dog story that's ultimately an interesting failure.

3) The subsequent TOS movies not following up on and backing away from the new characters introduced in TWOK. David Marcus was killed off in STIII, Saavik was made much less interesting and then swiftly written out in the next movie. We could've seen Kirk and company mentoring a true next generation over the course of the movie series. Instead, they just went back to the status quo of the TV show.

4) Not being more daring in the initial years of TNG. Really, there should have been a gay character among the new crew right from the word "go." That would've still been groundbreaking in 1987, and it's the sort of thing Trek should've been doing all along. It would've been nice if they'd produced David Gerrold's script "Blood and Fire" as well.

5) I wish they'd built the proposed full-scale replica of the USS Enterprise on the Las Vegas strip in the early 90s. That would've been something to see.

6) I wish they could've fulfilled the promise of "What You Leave Behind" and had Ben Sisko return in some fashion. But I've never gotten the impression that Avery Brooks was at all interested in returning to Trek.

7) As others on the thread have noted, VOY and ENT are the kings of missed opportunities and unfulfilled potential. Whenever they had the chance to do something different, they shied away from it in favor of playing it safe and sticking to the TNG formula as closely as possible. It got wearisome.

8) I wish we'd gotten that fourth Kelvinverse movie featuring a time travel story where Kirk meets with his father George Kirk. That would've been cool.

9) Not getting behind the proposed Quentin Tarantino film. I don't know how it would've turned out, but it would've been something to see a true auteur do a Trek film (Something we haven't gotten since Robert Wise did TMP). Whatever else it might've been, I bet it would've been unlike any version of Trek we'd ever seen before.

10) Letting Bryan Fuller and Nicholas Meyer go from Star Trek: Discovery. (Paramount is also apparently sitting on a script for a three hour Ceti Alpha V miniseries by Meyer, which seems dumb.)

 

[FormerLurker]

TNG was pretty much out of gas, and VOY was staggering by S7 as well.

This was because of the writers having been doing the show for so long. They were burnt out on TNG, and then went immediately to VOY, where they were told to tell the same stories, but with a new cast. Much as I like the VOY cast, the next seven years should have been seven more years of TNG, with all new writers. Let the old ones move on, or over to DS9. If the TNG cast wants to move on, bring in the VOY cast to replace them on TNG, like would happen in a real navy. There's a thought; have Janeway be the first female captain to lead a show, and she's captain of the Enterprise.

 

[oberth]

True, and the two factions Starfleet and Maquis all made friends way to easy the first eps.
Uneasy tension for the necessary alliance should have lasted much longer, with the Maquis retaining more of their identity, the payoff becoming a crew/family would have meant more.

and maybe killing off (a real killing not some bad coincidence*) some supossed to be bridge officers (e.g. pilot survivors) in the first couple of episodes; that might have stirred the pot a bit (chance of a revenge killing in season 2)

---

* that obviously means starfleet wants to throw perps into the brig, maquis want them hung

During the 1993-'94 season of Star Trek, they should've had a full-on TNG/DS9 Crossover Special on TV.

with the history of sisko and picard how about a friendly fire event? nearly avoided of course (let's say about 50 redshirts gone)

... with a cliff-hanger when both sides are opening up

 

[Ottens]

That is to say, answer to this question is mostly “giving Uhura a spotlight/real development,” which seems likely to be addressed by her appearing as a Cadet and a SNW cast member.

Which reminds me of another missed opportunity: underutilizing Uhura on TOS.

 

[oberth]

the missed of course a tos episode where they time travel into the civil war and meet this guy