What with the three JJ-Trek films, all the Enterprise discussion on the occasion of its anniversary, the questionable future of Discovery, and the ongoing trainwreck that is Axanar, I've been finding myself pondering: What makes good Trek good Trek -- or, even less frequently, what makes good Trek enjoyable to anyone watching? I've watched anything and everything from TOS up to the new films with friends who are Trek fans, friends who aren't, friends who like the new stuff better than the old, or vice versa, or like each for their own merits, and so forth.
So.
This post was spurred by a couple comments I just read in the thread on Star Trek: Beyond.
What made the good bits of TOS, TNG, DS9, and VOY good were when they were about the characters, not the science. I have always cringed inwardly (and sometimes outwardly) when the technobabble starts flowing fast and furious to solve the problem. More time and dialogue needed to be spent on the characters' coming up with the solution, and less on talking out loud the method they'd use to implement it. One of the good points Gene brought up back in the day was that Kirk didn't take time to explain how a phaser worked -- he just picked it up and used it. The audience is smart -- they can figure out the rest from context.
It's good for scientific plausibility to be involved. It makes things feel more real. TOS consulted with Isaac Asimov and the Rand Corporation, among others. The TNG era saw consultation with physicists, astronomers, mathematicians, etc. All well and good, but the stories shouldn't dwell on that. Trek is about the human condition, not a science lecture.
When done right, the science is there in the background, but the foreground is Our Heroes working together to overcome The Situation. There might be some preliminary disagreement on the approach to take, but ultimately the Captain says "this is how we're going to do it" and they do. As professionals. Conflict between the characters can be appropriate when it's Starfleet vs. alien or Starfleet vs. civilian, or in a "less-evolved" present-day series/movie, but in Trek, among the main characters, it's weak. Lazy writing. I've said elsewhere that, for all the problems the writers' strike caused, the second season of TNG is my favorite out of that series. Meanwhile, Ron Moore praised the season 3+ portion as "when it really got good". Yes, there are good episodes through the latter five seasons of the series, but about as many that I find infinitely rewatchable as in season 2 alone.
This is, I think, because season two was when the actors started getting their characters, the writers (despite the massive turnover and dysfunctionality at the senior levels) had a handle on the characters, and we got some good character growth, some good exploration, and it was largely what in gaming terms would be PvE -- player-versus-environment. The conflict largely came from without, and Our Heroes would band together to overcome it. The interpersonal conflict Ron Moore liked is what we'd call PvP -- player-versus player. The conflict comes more from within, seeing Our Heroes at odds over what the right course of action is, who gets to make the call, etc. It can fly in other properties, but is bad for Trek. Sure, Our Heroes can disagree -- but they can do it professionally and still have it be interesting and engaging and exciting.
So... For a new Trek series (and I say series, because, while it's gorgeous to look at on the big screen, Trek needs longform storytelling that movies don't provide -- not even episodic stuff like Star Wars), the most important thing anyone behind it needs to sort out is where the conflict is going to come from. Enterprise, I think, would have been better without the Vulcan antagonism. Starfleet had only been created about twenty years before from all the various Human system fleets. I'm sure there's still some strong feelings about that. And then, all such considerations are suddenly rendered obsolete when we run into the Romulans, and all the people who had been decrying Starfleet as empire-building the day before would now rally behind it for protection. Even with all the anachronistic elements, I would still have found that more engaging than the bickering and sniping and Temporal Cold War and such.
Axanar was going to be dealing with skirmishes with the Klingons in the 2250s-ish. Discovery might do the same (if the time period's right). Before things settled in for a long, cold war. The Romulans went from being enemies pre-Founding to sporadic adversaries in TOS to allies in the movies. Then there was the Tomed Incident in 2311, that cost thousands of lives and the Romulans sealed their border for half a century. That Incident has been addressed in the novels, but in a fairly unsatisfying way. There are a lot of Prime-timeline things that have been referred to but never seen that would be ripe for development.
• The "disastrous" first contact with the Klingons around 2220 that led to "decades of war". Lead-up, contact, aftermath. I imagine there's much drama potential there. All the way up to the First Battle of Axanar and the "Axanar Peace Mission" in the 2250s that a young James Kirk participated in.
• The evolution of the relationship with the Romulans between TOS and TFF. What happened with the Romulan Commander Our Heroes captured? Did she see we weren't the boogeymen their propegandists painted us as, and when released back to her people told them so? Maybe that was how Spock found Saavik, and when the three powers collaborated to found the joint colony on Nimbus III. So what led to the breakdown of relations to the point of the Tomed Incident?
• The entire first half of the 24th century. The Klingons fighting the Romulans (Narendra III and the loss of the Enterprise-C, Khitomer and the loss of Worf's family, etc.), the Tzenkethi War, the Cardassian War, the Talarian Conflict. The loss of the Excelsior, the loss of the Enterprise-B... There's a lot there.
• Something comfortably post-Voyager, but what? And when? At the end of DS9, Odo went back to his people as a sort of ambassador from the Solids, to show them, by his first-hand experiences via the Great Link, that they had more potential than whomever the Changelings had encountered early on that had impelled them to their philosophy of mistrust and conquest. Maybe some years on, we receive a distress call from him. Some former subject races saw the Dominion's defeat at the hands of the Alpha Quadrant powers as an exploitable weakness and now rebellion has erupted in the Gamma Quadrant. Starfleet sends an expeditionary force to assist. Story ensues. One possibility. Or maybe...
...This reminded me of one of the things as we got into the DS9/VOY era. The Intrepid class is capable of sustained warp 9.975 travel. That's a massive improvement over the capabilities of TOS, and even TNG. Add in quantum-slipstream and transwarp and whatnot, and the galaxy gets a lot smaller. I'd toyed with the idea way back then of "what happens if something takes that away?"... Something Happens (weapon, natural phenomenon, cosmic event, whatever) that renders subspace basically inaccessible over a largish chunk of space. Ships within that region are stranded. Anyone trying to fly in gets yanked out of warp on the fringes. Anyone plipping in via wormhole finds themselves stuck. And so forth. FTL communications don't work, FTL-boosted computers run sluggishly at best, and like that. Maybe pick up a couple generations on from the Event. The crew of a smallish ship was surveying a planet and decided to make it permanent. They've made regular trips up to the ship to maintain it in a low-power mode and see if the situation has changed. And then, one day, the fog lifts (so to speak) and their grandchildren strike out to see what they can find.
Equal measures whodunnit as they try to figure out what happened and to what extent, and the personal journeys as they try to live up to the their birthright with only what their families and the ship's computer could teach them. Not exactly the Academy, but it had to do. Only low-warp trips viable at first. The effect hasn't cleared, just lessened. They find derelict ships, stations that have been abandoned, pockets of survivors, etc. Could get back to real unknown territory sorts of stories, with a bit of suspense thrown in for zest.
So now we find ourselves here. With Axanar dead in the water thanks to A.P.'s ego, with Discovery looking iffy at best, with a fourth JJ-verse film a coin-toss... But mostly with repeated demonstration from the rights-holders that they don't grok the I.P. CBS doesn't get Trek, and never has. They passed on it in the early '60s and gave us Lost In Space instead, which was what they thought Gene was pitching to them. Paramount doesn't get Trek. They've just been fortunate enough to have people in creative positions on the shows and movies who got it right more often than not until fairly late in the game. Heck, even Gene didn't get Trek. His conception of what Trek was changed drastically from the '60s to the '80s. So who "gets" it? Who should get it? Maybe a fixed-length fan-short contest, voted on by the whole world via the internet, finalists to do a longer fan-film, and then vote for the winner, the prize being permission and a budget to make the new Trek? Couldn't be worse than what we've been given recently, and at least then we'd have some say in the matter...
--Jonah
So.
This post was spurred by a couple comments I just read in the thread on Star Trek: Beyond.
For me the movies are just entertainment. I understand the fact that they'd be off-putting to people that are looking for more exploration and adventure, and maybe even a bit more science...but for me, I get enough science from my weekly listens to Dr. Tyson's StarTalk podcast and things like that.
What made the good bits of TOS, TNG, DS9, and VOY good were when they were about the characters, not the science. I have always cringed inwardly (and sometimes outwardly) when the technobabble starts flowing fast and furious to solve the problem. More time and dialogue needed to be spent on the characters' coming up with the solution, and less on talking out loud the method they'd use to implement it. One of the good points Gene brought up back in the day was that Kirk didn't take time to explain how a phaser worked -- he just picked it up and used it. The audience is smart -- they can figure out the rest from context.
It's good for scientific plausibility to be involved. It makes things feel more real. TOS consulted with Isaac Asimov and the Rand Corporation, among others. The TNG era saw consultation with physicists, astronomers, mathematicians, etc. All well and good, but the stories shouldn't dwell on that. Trek is about the human condition, not a science lecture.
When done right, the science is there in the background, but the foreground is Our Heroes working together to overcome The Situation. There might be some preliminary disagreement on the approach to take, but ultimately the Captain says "this is how we're going to do it" and they do. As professionals. Conflict between the characters can be appropriate when it's Starfleet vs. alien or Starfleet vs. civilian, or in a "less-evolved" present-day series/movie, but in Trek, among the main characters, it's weak. Lazy writing. I've said elsewhere that, for all the problems the writers' strike caused, the second season of TNG is my favorite out of that series. Meanwhile, Ron Moore praised the season 3+ portion as "when it really got good". Yes, there are good episodes through the latter five seasons of the series, but about as many that I find infinitely rewatchable as in season 2 alone.
This is, I think, because season two was when the actors started getting their characters, the writers (despite the massive turnover and dysfunctionality at the senior levels) had a handle on the characters, and we got some good character growth, some good exploration, and it was largely what in gaming terms would be PvE -- player-versus-environment. The conflict largely came from without, and Our Heroes would band together to overcome it. The interpersonal conflict Ron Moore liked is what we'd call PvP -- player-versus player. The conflict comes more from within, seeing Our Heroes at odds over what the right course of action is, who gets to make the call, etc. It can fly in other properties, but is bad for Trek. Sure, Our Heroes can disagree -- but they can do it professionally and still have it be interesting and engaging and exciting.
So... For a new Trek series (and I say series, because, while it's gorgeous to look at on the big screen, Trek needs longform storytelling that movies don't provide -- not even episodic stuff like Star Wars), the most important thing anyone behind it needs to sort out is where the conflict is going to come from. Enterprise, I think, would have been better without the Vulcan antagonism. Starfleet had only been created about twenty years before from all the various Human system fleets. I'm sure there's still some strong feelings about that. And then, all such considerations are suddenly rendered obsolete when we run into the Romulans, and all the people who had been decrying Starfleet as empire-building the day before would now rally behind it for protection. Even with all the anachronistic elements, I would still have found that more engaging than the bickering and sniping and Temporal Cold War and such.
Axanar was going to be dealing with skirmishes with the Klingons in the 2250s-ish. Discovery might do the same (if the time period's right). Before things settled in for a long, cold war. The Romulans went from being enemies pre-Founding to sporadic adversaries in TOS to allies in the movies. Then there was the Tomed Incident in 2311, that cost thousands of lives and the Romulans sealed their border for half a century. That Incident has been addressed in the novels, but in a fairly unsatisfying way. There are a lot of Prime-timeline things that have been referred to but never seen that would be ripe for development.
• The "disastrous" first contact with the Klingons around 2220 that led to "decades of war". Lead-up, contact, aftermath. I imagine there's much drama potential there. All the way up to the First Battle of Axanar and the "Axanar Peace Mission" in the 2250s that a young James Kirk participated in.
• The evolution of the relationship with the Romulans between TOS and TFF. What happened with the Romulan Commander Our Heroes captured? Did she see we weren't the boogeymen their propegandists painted us as, and when released back to her people told them so? Maybe that was how Spock found Saavik, and when the three powers collaborated to found the joint colony on Nimbus III. So what led to the breakdown of relations to the point of the Tomed Incident?
• The entire first half of the 24th century. The Klingons fighting the Romulans (Narendra III and the loss of the Enterprise-C, Khitomer and the loss of Worf's family, etc.), the Tzenkethi War, the Cardassian War, the Talarian Conflict. The loss of the Excelsior, the loss of the Enterprise-B... There's a lot there.
• Something comfortably post-Voyager, but what? And when? At the end of DS9, Odo went back to his people as a sort of ambassador from the Solids, to show them, by his first-hand experiences via the Great Link, that they had more potential than whomever the Changelings had encountered early on that had impelled them to their philosophy of mistrust and conquest. Maybe some years on, we receive a distress call from him. Some former subject races saw the Dominion's defeat at the hands of the Alpha Quadrant powers as an exploitable weakness and now rebellion has erupted in the Gamma Quadrant. Starfleet sends an expeditionary force to assist. Story ensues. One possibility. Or maybe...
[again regarding Beyond...] At first I was thinking "Great, the ship is gone, now we're going to see what kind of survival training the federation offers" But, nope, they just found another ship. What the heck was the point of that? Lets take away thier tech . . . for a few minutes . . . then we'll just give them back tech. No survivalist training on strange planets needed.
...This reminded me of one of the things as we got into the DS9/VOY era. The Intrepid class is capable of sustained warp 9.975 travel. That's a massive improvement over the capabilities of TOS, and even TNG. Add in quantum-slipstream and transwarp and whatnot, and the galaxy gets a lot smaller. I'd toyed with the idea way back then of "what happens if something takes that away?"... Something Happens (weapon, natural phenomenon, cosmic event, whatever) that renders subspace basically inaccessible over a largish chunk of space. Ships within that region are stranded. Anyone trying to fly in gets yanked out of warp on the fringes. Anyone plipping in via wormhole finds themselves stuck. And so forth. FTL communications don't work, FTL-boosted computers run sluggishly at best, and like that. Maybe pick up a couple generations on from the Event. The crew of a smallish ship was surveying a planet and decided to make it permanent. They've made regular trips up to the ship to maintain it in a low-power mode and see if the situation has changed. And then, one day, the fog lifts (so to speak) and their grandchildren strike out to see what they can find.
Equal measures whodunnit as they try to figure out what happened and to what extent, and the personal journeys as they try to live up to the their birthright with only what their families and the ship's computer could teach them. Not exactly the Academy, but it had to do. Only low-warp trips viable at first. The effect hasn't cleared, just lessened. They find derelict ships, stations that have been abandoned, pockets of survivors, etc. Could get back to real unknown territory sorts of stories, with a bit of suspense thrown in for zest.
So now we find ourselves here. With Axanar dead in the water thanks to A.P.'s ego, with Discovery looking iffy at best, with a fourth JJ-verse film a coin-toss... But mostly with repeated demonstration from the rights-holders that they don't grok the I.P. CBS doesn't get Trek, and never has. They passed on it in the early '60s and gave us Lost In Space instead, which was what they thought Gene was pitching to them. Paramount doesn't get Trek. They've just been fortunate enough to have people in creative positions on the shows and movies who got it right more often than not until fairly late in the game. Heck, even Gene didn't get Trek. His conception of what Trek was changed drastically from the '60s to the '80s. So who "gets" it? Who should get it? Maybe a fixed-length fan-short contest, voted on by the whole world via the internet, finalists to do a longer fan-film, and then vote for the winner, the prize being permission and a budget to make the new Trek? Couldn't be worse than what we've been given recently, and at least then we'd have some say in the matter...
--Jonah
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