What story elements would you remove or just forget exist from canon?
- Thread starter Citiprime
- Start date
I remember when I first watch ST (TOS and AOS) I was trying to guess how far in the future it was and I guessed 1000 years.
It wasn't really fixed in the beginning. The Squire of Gothos implies it being around the 27th century, for example. In retrospect, setting it in the more distant future than the 23rd century might have been a good idea, but then again, in the 60's it was just a TV show and they wouldn't have imagined a fandom being obsessed with making it all 'fit' alive and kicking in the 2020's ...
Oh lordy yes! That was all so lame. The producers' brains couldn't handle the whole concept of making a prequel era not have the same equipment and story crutches as they were used to from the other shows.
^ It wasn't the producers' fault. They didn't want any of those things either! The network made them do it.
I would add LDS and PRO with SNW, to be honest. Until SNW came along, those two were the best shows on the air at the time.
Precisely why UPN suits were the true villains of VGR and ENT.
I would forget all TOS historic references from 1969 thru ~2069. Either this one hundred year span was lost to their record history (EMP damage to all electronic files after Earth transferred all records and books to electronic media) or nothing of historic note occurred. Don't give precise dates of the Eugenics War but say it was about 200 years ago. Sleeper ships became obsolete in 2118 and not 2018 (which could be linked to the discovery of the warp drive plus several years/decades to develop it for actual ship flight). Nomad was launched in 2102 and not in 2002. Etc.
The James Blish novelization of "Miri" actually did imply that the setting was quite a few centuries further on, although I'm not sure he specified the 27th. If I remember correctly, he did postulate some future history that involved the establishment of colonies, some sort of uprising, and certain colonies becoming lost afterward. (And established that Miri's planet was simply a lost colony ... his version totally ignored the whole "duplicate Earth" business.)
With only 200 years of FTL travel and ~150 years of establishing colonies, it's hard to picture how there was enough time for them to become "lost" at all.
It's a tiny detail, but it still nags at me - I'd nix that the Borg had never assimilated Romulans before the crew that became The Disordered. Not only does it make no sense given the Borg depredations along the Neutral Zone, but it's so unnecessary. The Zhat Vash are a secret sect within a secretive organization; what were the odds that the Borg would run across one randomly? I'd just say the Borg had never encountered ZV before, or left it as unexplained until someone put two and two together.
I know it's needed in order to facilitate the shows but, the universal translator drives me absolutely nuts. How are we hearing everyone speak English, do they all have the universal translator installed in their auditory cortex? It was one of those things like spacesuits that I think Enterprise was so much more logical about. At least they needed a polyglot like Hoshi to input some amount of data to get it to work. And they had multiple languages, cultures and species for the Xindi. While a federation-style socially cohesive planet is comforting for a future world, I think it was unrealistic. The idea that there is one language or culture per planet is unnecessarily oversimplified.
I would remove the Ferengi as currently designed. I remember getting the impression from early articles before TNG came out that the Ferengi would be much smaller marsupials (who really were cannibalistic, and actively monkeylike in manner—naked, climbing all over, etc—more distinctly nonhuman.) I’d be interested in that, if it could be done believably with today’s VFX. And I’d certainly get rid of all trace of the Laws of Acquisition, and make the Great River their cultural focus instead.
I know, I know. Enterprise managed to introduce a lot more complexity, though, in terms of alien species and languages, maybe it was just the times of the earlier series.
The Great Material Continuum, described by Nog in DS9:
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Great_Material_Continuum
Oh, I was thinking of another episode. Thank you.
Enterprise tried but was less successful and was inconsistent.
TOS and TNG did fine without it.
I think that's because Blish considered his Trek adaptations to be part of his Cities in Flight universe, or at least drew on the CiF backstory.