What makes a Captain?

[Johnny]

Maybe this classes as future, i don't know, it's certainly something that I'd like to see..different.

and since I'm here, I might aswell start!

I'm always dissapointed by how the Captain's of each ship seem stereotypically 'captainesq'. What i mean is that you know when they're going to dissobey orders, or if they're going to go on a one-man killing spree. I wonder what would happen if they put in a completely unpredictable character into the role? i find that the 'everyone gets along' kind of relationships between crew start to get a bit grating, and maybe a bit of 'grating' between the crew might just presentmore of a depth of character and oportunities to present more complex story lines.
I don't mean that the captain hates his first officer, or visa versa, but more than just a slightly differing viewpoint would be interesting.
I think more thought could have been put into characters backgrounds before even considering them as a viable part of the crew. A Captain should be unique, not only in his/her personality but also in his/her way of percieving the world, where that position they hold influences them in a way that is unexpected.
Maybe more character advancement is what I want? There is so much room where characters can advance in Star Trek, but yet there's a want to keep every lead character alive...and maybe looking back that may have resulted in the 'ya know they're gonna survive in the end' kind of episodes...

 

[C.E. Evans]

That's what happens when you sign actors to multi-year contracts or running contracts designed to last the entire run of a series, no matter how long it is. You know they'll be back every week.

But with a few exceptions, most notably DS9 because of its very premise, Trek is generally built upon on standalone episodes in which there's a new adventure every week. The focus of the stories are more upon resolving the conflict of the week instead of developing a character from strength to strength. Sure, some characters definitely grew and evolved in TNG, VOY, and even ENT, but not that many, IMO. There might also be some truth that most characters are defined more by their job descriptions than anything else...

 

[Temis the Vorta]

i find that the 'everyone gets along' kind of relationships between crew start to get a bit grating, and maybe a bit of 'grating' between the crew might just presentmore of a depth of character and oportunities to present more complex story lines.

Check out DS9. You sound like someone who's seen TNG and gotten frustrated by its limitations. DS9 is the show for you.

There are many TV shows nowadays that manage to kill of major cast members - Lost and Heroes for instance. So contracts can be written to give writers the option (and I suspect part of the motive behind the unusually large casts for those shows is to give the writers a lot of latitude in this regard).

The biggest inhibiting factor is that certain characters become fan favorites and if the character dies, the ratings drop, and it is very rare for any show to have strong enough ratings that they can be cavalier about ratings. And you can usually figure out who these characters are, especially if you participate in grading threads here.

However, if you want to see main cast members die, once again, and not spoiling anything...watch DS9.

 

[Kegek]

The static crew is certainly better than some alternatives. Take B5; which had significant cast turnover throughout its run. Most of the time, characters were replaced by... thinly veiled rewrites of themselves. That's dramatically unsatisfying, it feels cheap and contrived. I've only vaguely watched the first Stargate, but that show seemed to have a similar principle as regards its rotating cast.

A genuinely fluid environment, where characters are replaced by fresh characters who add a new dynamic rather than reiterating a variation of an old one, could be interesting, however.

 

[Sharr Khan]

The static crew is certainly better than some alternatives. Take B5; which had significant cast turnover throughout its run. Most of the time, characters were replaced by... thinly veiled rewrites of themselves.

Maybe in the case of Sinclair - all the rest had either served their purpose or moved on. This is what made B5 seem real compared to Star Trek.

Talia Winters was a complete different character then Lyta.
G'Kar's aides... well I figured all Narn women were that way.

Ivanov was nothing like Takishima

Sharr

 

[Kegek]

Sharr Khan said:
Maybe in the case of Sinclair - all the rest had either served their purpose or moved on. This is what made B5 seem real compared to Star Trek.

With the exception of Keeler (and Kosh, if you count him as a main character), there wasn't a single character written off the show because JMS wanted the character gone. There were always problems of some sort involving the actor. The only cases of a genuinely new character added who adds a different perspective on the dynamic are Keeler and Cole. Even Zack Allen was a replacement of an earlier aide of Garibaldi whose name escapes me at the moment.

Talia Winters was a complete different character then Lyta.

Nope. She's a psi cop who ultimately becomes disloyal (or would have had her arc continued). She got part of Lyra's arc, she also got a little bit of Takashima's arc (who was the character originally to have a dormant psi corp personality), and when Lyta came back she got a bit of Ivanova's arc (as regards the Byron romance). JMS does occasionally cross circuits between the rotating characters to make them feel a bit more distinct, but frankly it doesn't work.

Ivanov was nothing like Takishima

Let's see. She has that weird JMS-style humour, and she illegally grows coffee in the hydroponics garden. That's not a lot, but we didn't get to know Takashima very well.

This isn't to say that the characters individually were bad; I do like some of them (but not Talia or Ivanova) - but as a whole, B5 was a show that maintained a non-fluid dramatic environment through a bit of narrative trickery.

 

[Cary L. Brown]

Johnny said:
Maybe this classes as future, i don't know, it's certainly something that I'd like to see..different.

and since I'm here, I might aswell start!

I'm always dissapointed by how the Captain's of each ship seem stereotypically 'captainesq'. What i mean is that you know when they're going to dissobey orders, or if they're going to go on a one-man killing spree. I wonder what would happen if they put in a completely unpredictable character into the role? i find that the 'everyone gets along' kind of relationships between crew start to get a bit grating, and maybe a bit of 'grating' between the crew might just presentmore of a depth of character and oportunities to present more complex story lines.
I don't mean that the captain hates his first officer, or visa versa, but more than just a slightly differing viewpoint would be interesting.
I think more thought could have been put into characters backgrounds before even considering them as a viable part of the crew. A Captain should be unique, not only in his/her personality but also in his/her way of percieving the world, where that position they hold influences them in a way that is unexpected.
Maybe more character advancement is what I want? There is so much room where characters can advance in Star Trek, but yet there's a want to keep every lead character alive...and maybe looking back that may have resulted in the 'ya know they're gonna survive in the end' kind of episodes...

If that's the sort of thing you're intersted in (and, to be blunt, I like that sort of thing too), you might want to try reading through Peter David's "New Frontier" novels (they're all tied together, so you need to start at teh beginning). McKenzie Calhoun is exactly the sort of "unpredictable" Captain you're talking about here.

 

[Cary L. Brown]

Sharr Khan said:

The static crew is certainly better than some alternatives. Take B5; which had significant cast turnover throughout its run. Most of the time, characters were replaced by... thinly veiled rewrites of themselves.

Maybe in the case of Sinclair - all the rest had either served their purpose or moved on. This is what made B5 seem real compared to Star Trek.

Talia Winters was a complete different character then Lyta.
G'Kar's aides... well I figured all Narn women were that way.

Ivanov was nothing like Takishima

Sharr

It's also worth pointing out that Sinclair's arc ALWAYS had him leaving eventually. He was NOT going to be in the series from beginning 'til end.

When the decision for him to leave was made (always described as a "mutual agreement" as far as I'm aware) it was about a year before he was originally going to be pulled. So they had to rewrite one character into two. Instead of one Earth-force officer who'd come in, end up leading the Rangers, then step in and be in-charge when Sinclair left, they split that character into two... Sheridan and Marcus. The idea that Sheridan would leave, being swept back in time on B4... that was ALWAYS part of the storyline. It just got "reshuffled" a bit due to his leaving a year before he was supposed to go.

 

[Kegek]

Cary L. Brown said:
It's also worth pointing out that Sinclair's arc ALWAYS had him leaving eventually. He was NOT going to be in the series from beginning 'til end.

IIRC, his departure was intended to be in the fifth season, at the end of the series - in the finale, twenty years in the future. Why do you think he looks so old in his brief flash-forward in 'Babylon Squared'? They explained it away with some technobabble in 'War Without End', but that was the original reason.

 

[Johnny]

Temis the Vorta said:
However, if you want to see main cast members die, once again, and not spoiling anything...watch DS9.

I realise that main characters have been killed off in trek, and there was definitly more emotional resinance in ds9 afterwards than in tng. but i still find it to be 'all in a days work'. I'd love to see more characters blubbering away in a corner after the death of a friend, to me that seems more real. i know they're starfleet, but they're still human.

I think I'm just looking for all the naf epidodes to be scrubbed from anything that comes next, or for someone to change the writing style as it's very set in stone. I just don't want them to screw anything up.

Alwell, B5 with the development of characters and the easy way with which they changed, altered or wrote them out, made me think why doesn't trek do that, maybe that might help them choose the best storys for that character before they go. And even with SG1 and the way it's technology progressed over the series, still helped with movement in the storyline, even if characters weren't being expelled every day! The best example I can find is in All Good Things... The bit where Picard asks data if they've got a certain kind of scanner onboard, and he replies 'no'. It just showed me that advancement happens through star trek too, but I wash they'd bring in back references more often, it helps bring out a bigger picture.

The biggest move I think they took in ds9 is when they lost the station to the cardassians...they could have made that last soooo much longer.
And the war in deep space 9, a friend of mine said; "The federation is in the biggest war since the klingons, and the ds9 crew go around saving holograms from gangsters!"
Maybe there's some resinance in that...it's a pity it's one of my favourite episodes.