Would you go for this Trek idea?

[Temis the Vorta]

Basically the series focusus on this scientist with his ship jumping around through time trying to get back to his own time period but everytime he jumps he runs into trouble and when the timeline screws up he must put it right. More often than not he ends up going back through time and even ends up as far back as the 22nd century and even the time of the Iconians.

After a couple of times, wouldn't he get the hint and stop jumping? If this is Star Trek x Quantum Leap, the motivation has to be do-good-ism, otherwise there is no motive to keep jumping around.

Not that I want to see Star Trek x Quantum Leap anyway. Too gimmicky.

his evil counterpart manages to get a hold of the ships design and builds his own version which he uses to travel to 'our' universe to wreak havoc.

Maybe the first guy gets the tech under control after just a couple jumps, but since one was to the MU, the damage has been done. Having the evil guy jump around and wreak havok while the good guy chases him like Ahab chasing the whale could be fun...

All this chat about the plot, but none about the effects the plot has on the characters, or the characters for that matter, the series's tone, its dramatic focus. Trust me, there's a thousand fan proposals out there like this one (No offense intended).

The characters and their interactions and goals will make or break any premise. VOY had the best, most interesting premise of any Star Trek series and DS9 had the worst, and they couldn't even settle on what the show's premise was & had to change it mid-stream. DS9 was much better than VOY anyway because of the superior characters and how they were written (the VOY actors were okay, not slamming them at all).

So when we read premises in this forum, the question of whether the characters would be worthwhile is something that is hard to judge. Even character descriptions won't do it. Imagine how corny and trite Trip Tucker would have sounded on paper, yet embodied by Connor Trinneer, he's one of the best Star Trek characters ever. Even Garak might have sounded too much like he was imported from a spy drama and didn't belong in the Trekverse.

Characters develop the most due to stress, or conflict, even from mistakes. What could be more stressful then finding yourself 70,000 light-years from home?

The fact that the characters remained static despite that pressure (and the pressure is what helps make the premise so good) is why we complain about VOY. The premise should have resulted in great character evolution. Instead, we got a bunch of go-nowhere characters except for Janeway, who spun around in circles because the writers couldn't agree on how to write her and what her basic motivation was.

A show loses something to me when you have your characters doing what they do because they are being forced to by circumstances and not by choice.

So you dislike the great works of literature, such as Huckleberry Finn or Hamlet, which depict characters being thrust into circumstances that they didn't create and try to fight their way through them regardless? As badly as the VOY characters may have been written, they did try to do something about their circumstances. To call them mere victims is inaccurate; where the problem lay is in their inertia as characters for years on end, in situations that should have caused them to evolve.

 

[Herkimer Jitty]

There's a reason I can never again take a pitch for a time-travel based Trek series seriously ever again.

 

[Lightinspire]

And what about a bridge layout of holographic controls and panels..

 

[hellsgate]

I'd do the series as a romance gone awry. During the research into temporal stasis technology aboard the soon to be completed "U.S.S. Premonition", all hell breaks loose, causing several deaths. The scientist in-charge, wracked with guilt & remorse for the loss of his soul-mate tries to play "God" & instead winds up with his own "Butterfly Effect" scenarios that keep getting away from him to a certain extent.

 

[Search4]

You are all too young. They called it The Time Tunnel. Sorry not buying this version.

I believe Land of the Giants is still available.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

You are all too young.

Uh-oh. Does this mean we have to get off your lawn?

 

[Dukhat]

You are all too young. They called it The Time Tunnel. Sorry not buying this version.

I believe Land of the Giants is still available.

I'm pretty sure that the OP has already forgotten about his idea, since he hadn't posted anything more about it for a month.

 

[USS KG5]

Why make this idea into Trek at all? Looks like you have some creativity here so why try and shoehorn this into the trek universe just so you can sometimes see Romulans, why not try writing this up as a piece of original fiction.

I would suggest however that the point of science-fiction is that it uses technology to drive the story and create new storytelling possibilities. The technology is not an end in itself, you need to use it to tell stories about your characters.

There is no point in trying to tell a story purely about made-up technology, it would be boring.

 

[trikster35]

This sounds like a combination of Quantum Leap and Dr Who.......I like it
!!!

 

[ngc7293]

The ship is over kill. It does everything. It protects the Scientist from everything and it has a super weapon.

Also, this sounds more like Sliders than Quantum Leap.

What all the shows did to make them work was to give the main character a side kick.

Also this reminds me of that Voyager episode where that bumbling time traveling scientist, I think got his own ship highjacked.

OOPS! didn't notice the date of the OP. I wouldn't have posted on something two years old.