Your ideas: Star Trek IV but no whales.

[Set Harth]

FC (8)? They blow up the Borg's interplexing beacon to keep them (supposedly) for calling their hive to Earth. Boom!

How is that the climax?

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

Maybe they take the Bounty on a mission to Klingon space with Vulcan ships?

 

[Aragorn]

Star Trek IV: The Search for David

McCoy dies at the end, setting up...

Star Trek V: The Search for Bones

 

[MeltedMetalGlob]

They could totally do the exact same plot for 4, without the whales- and it would still have that 80's feel and still be Trek.

Check this out:

I mean, they're fugitives anyway. Why not use time-travel to escape to where no one's looking for them?

The movie continues as is until this fateful moment:

They go back and we get to have another "Kirk outwits an alien intelligence" moment, except this time it's a rap battle!

So with apologies to the 80's band Newcleus, here we go:

And we end up pretty much with the same ending, more or less:

 

[AntonyF]

same plot but instead of whales it's monkeys.

Imagine the probe travelling through space with lots of monkey noises. This is the winner. I would accept sea gulls.

 

[CoveTom]

Imagine the probe travelling through space with lots of monkey noises. This is the winner. I would accept sea gulls.

Space Monkeys®

Imagine the marketing tie-in possibilities.

 

[Oddish]

Or cats. Cats make everything cooler.

 

[JamesRye]

How about this.

The crew are returning home in the captured BOP, when they approach Earth, they find the Klingons are massing for an attack out of fear that the Federation are stockpiling Genesis torpedoes to wipe them out. With Starfleet on the ropes, Kirk and his crew infiltrate the Klingon attack force somehow (maybe they disguise themselves as Klingons) Somehow Kirk and his crew make peace with the Klingons despite his son being a casualty in TSFS. So we're kind of jumping from TSFS to VI.

But then IV is pretty a pretty perfect film IMHO.

 

[Riley]

Regardless of whales/time travel, this was always going to be a light movie that needed to exonerate the crew and get them back to their mission.

That said, I can't think of a more popular species in terms of conservation during the 80s. I have a feeling if such a story were done today, the species needing to be repopulated would be the honeybee.

 

[publiusr]

Imagine the probe travelling through space with lots of monkey noises. This is the winner. I would accept sea gulls.

I like Tears For Fears better

 

[MeltedMetalGlob]

I would accept sea gulls.

THAT is a splendid idea.
I mean, going with that angle would preclude the whole "going back in time" trope.

No need whatsoever to calculate a slingshot trajectory.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

I have a feeling if such a story were done today, the species needing to be repopulated would be the honeybee.

Size and accommodations-wise, it'd be loads easier to steal and sustain a beehive from some field somewhere than wrangle massive captive whales. You'd still have the "recharge the ship" angle, however; maybe more crew members could work on that.

 

[Peach Wookiee]

Regardless of whales/time travel, this was always going to be a light movie that needed to exonerate the crew and get them back to their mission.

That said, I can't think of a more popular species in terms of conservation during the 80s. I have a feeling if such a story were done today, the species needing to be repopulated would be the honeybee.

Would Chekov be allergic to bee stings?

 

[Qonundrum]

The development on TNG began in early 1986. Even if Star Trek IV only grossed $70-80 million, along the lines of its two predecessors, Paramount would still have gone forward with the series.

Cool!

Patrick Stewart in his memoir writes that due to the Writer's Guild strike Paramount almost cancelled the series, so perhaps a warier Paramount might have been faster to pull the plug after 13-16 episodes.

Yikes!! I wonder what made them opt to not pull the plug. Season 2 is a tighter and vast improvement, but I wonder what kept them from ending the show. Season 1 did became the highest rated syndicated series by the end, which is even more impressive given how uneven the season was in terms of scripts and reception at the time-- I knew season 1 could be... uneven... but it really did have some stinkers especially in its first half. But Datalore, Angel One, 11001001, and Too Short a Season are eps 13-16. What follows them are generally more consistently higher quality, but episode 8 ain't that great and it's a miracle that the show didn't get axed when "Justice" was handed in...

 

[Allyn Gibson]

Yikes!! I wonder what made them opt to not pull the plug.

Here's what Stewart writes in Make It So:

The strike did indeed drag on, all the way into August 1988, and we came closer to being canceled than most people realize. During our hiatus, Paramount invited me to attend a TV convention in Cannes.... Sheila [Stewart's then wife] joined me, and for a moment, all was right in the world.

[Stewart talks about dinner with a US Navy officer who watched the show]

[At] a subsequent dinner with some senior Paramount people, one of them confided to me in hushed tones that The Next Generation's cancellation was all but certain. Right then I did not feel unduly disappointed. In the weeks since I had returned to England, I had resumed many of my old routines, and it had all been a bit of a dream, those days in Southern California.

But no more than a few days after we got back from Cannes, the strike came to an end, and Steve Dontanville was on the phone telling me that I was due back at Paramount in ten days.

My guess? Paramount had sets and actors under contract. They also had a few scripts from the 70s and the aborted Phase II they could rework in a jiff. After a six month strike where no writing was being done, that put NextGen a leg up over a lot of other shows.

Rereading this, I wonder if the WGA strike actually saved NextGen.