Category: Star Trek

I have not seen any episodes of “Star Trek: Picard” just yet. I wanted to get some thoughts I had about my own ideas for a Star Trek series (not that I have any illusions that this series would ever get made).

One reason I want to write about this before watching “Picard” is that I have seen the previews for “Picard”, and there is a slight possibility that a few of my ideas overlap with theirs. (Or all, or none; I won’t know until I watch it).

About ten years ago, someone set some clips from the original series to the song “Tik Tok” (as the contributor pointed out that “Working on the Enterprise is pretty much a non-stop party as far as I’m concerned”). I thought that there should be a new “Star Trek” series. Watching the clip made me realize that there was a lot of visual diversity in the original series. Traveling to other planets and exploring strange, new worlds lets you go to places and build sets that you cannot do in other series.

I kicked around a few ideas in my head on occasion, and I came back to it when I needed some topics for the idea list.

I was in college during “ST:TNG” and the first few years of “ST:DS9”. “ST:V” ended in 2001. I thought a new series should take place 20 years after “Voyager”, as “Picard” is doing. It would avoid any problems of possibly stomping on canon. I like “Enterprise” and “Discovery”, but I think that new shows should take place after prior shows and try to do their own thing unencumbered. Granted, I have no idea what will happen in the third season of “Discovery” or “Picard”, so all future Treks will be further constrained.

Part of my idea what that while there were a lot of episodes (and even movies) about time travel, there has never been a series about time travel. (I started this line of thought before I had heard news of “Discovery”.) More specifically, there has never been home-grown time travel. Alternate Janeway used a time travel device invented by an in-universe contemporary Klingon scientist, but (20 YEARS POST-FACTO SPOILER ALERT), that timeline, and therefore that device, no longer exist.

There is the Red Angel suit in Discovery, but I am guessing that knowledge was buried, just like the spore drive.

Every other time in the first four series and movies when the crews have traveled through time, they have either used alien technology (the Guardian of Forever, the Devidians in “Time’s Arrow” or the Bajoran Orb of time), natural phenomena like sling-shotting around the sun (which in “Star Trek IV” somehow got them to go both backward and forward in time) or the Nexus in “Generations”, Q going through time with Picard in “All Good Things…”, severe equipment malfunctions (“Past Tense” and “Little Green Men” in “DS9”) or future Starfleet personnel bringing a series’ crew forward or visiting a series’ crew in their own time (“Future’s End”, pretty much all time travel in “Enterprise”).

I thought that perhaps the series could be about the crew that is developing the first home-grown time-travel device for Starfleet. They could also be doing other research, combining what they are doing with both the technology that Voyager brought back from both the Borg and the future.

I thought that it would be a combination research vessel and perhaps also going on regular missions. Or perhaps they stay in stealth mode (I use that term the way startups do, not referring to invisibility). I like the Nova class ships we saw in “Voyager”. Maybe they would be a combination of research and a smaller version of Section 31, although Section 31 might be an occasional adversary of our crew. The ship would have a combination of conventional and experimental systems, for propulsion, weapons, transporter, sensors, life support, medical, etc.

I thought the captain would be someone about my age (who wouldn’t want to be the captain on “Star Trek”?). He got a degree in warp engineering, enlisted during the Dominion War, or perhaps during the Federation-Klingon War that preceded it. He was convinced to stay in Starfleet and become an officer by his captain, and rose through the ranks. He spent a lot of time in research and on engines, since energy is the key to everything else. His crew is not only conducting their own research, they are combining it with future and Borg technology. Their ship was based on various planets, and they have had to keep moving to prevent detection, although the captain and his CO suspect there may be leaks.

In the pilot, they had energy dampeners around the system to prevent any radiation or signals from being detected, but these were destroyed one by one, and the ship manages to escape. Barely.

There would need to be a good reason why a research vessel is moving throughout Federation territory, and not stationed on one planet. I guess it could be like DS9, where they make side trips. I don’t want it to be like the pilot of “Voyager”, where they do a smart thing for a dumb reason. A ship in the Delta Quadrant was a good concept, but having Janeway blow up the array was a stupid idea. Why not have the Kazon blow it up to trap Voyager in the Delta Quadrant?

In one of the early episodes, their ship would be attacked by mercenaries and they would have to escape and go to warp to a star base. The captain and admiral would somehow come to the decision to launch permanently, and there would be a military contingent on board. The captain has not had to be in battle since the Dominion War, and while the ship has made journeys of up to a few months, they would need someone with more field experience and battle training.

I thought the second-in-command should be a black woman. (This was before “Discovery”.) I know the show-runners of DS9 liked to dismantle the idealism of ST. I do think “DS9” was probably the strongest series to date, I don’t really agree with that idea. I think one of the appeals of ST is that it represents our ideal selves. Sisko was in the end one of the good guys. And it just bugged me that we have seen more Starfleet captains who were aliens than women of color.

One consequence of the secrecy is that the entire crew of the ship would be human, which many people will regard as unusual for Starfleet. I go back and forth as to whether or not they would stay in stealth mode. If they do, then they would be taking our promising first officer out of circulation. This would also cause people to talk. You might get a few plots out of the need to hide their affiliation/identity.

A third main character would be a hologram. I will be interested to see how “Picard” integrates holographic characters. It has been 20 years since Voyager. What use will they have in Starfleet? Are there special missions/duties that only holographic characters can have? I thought this character’s appearance was based on the captain’s son who died as an infant. Perhaps some of the experimental medical technology was used to infer his appearance as an adult.

I thought I heard Michio Kaku state that time travel would only be possible to the future, and that the point that time travel becomes possible would be the earliest anyone could go to. (I cannot find anything saying that after a few minutes of googling; I did find a file of him stating that time travel is possible if you have LOTS and LOTS of energy). So at first they could only go forward.

When I was using this series idea as a “feedstock” for the daily idea list, I recall that I spent several days on ways the Star Trek universe could have changed since “Voyager” and “Nemesis”. I did not keep any of these notes, so I will have to reconstruct from memory and possibly make some stuff up on the spot. One reason I did this is that I have heard/read that the best sci-fi takes place in worlds/universes that are well-developed. You don’t just need great characters and cool technology, you need a firm context for all of this to be happening in. In addition, Gene Roddenberry said one of the reasons he created “Star Trek” was so that he could talk about contemporary issues and still get things past cagey network executives.

I think that one scenario is that the Romulans found out about the time travel experiments, and they are trying to get it. And some Romulan groups are also funding the Cardassians to cause trouble in what used to be the DMZ. The Original Series made it look like the galaxy was involved in a Cold War between the Federation and the Klingons, which was analagous to the USA and the USSR. I think we are entering a multi-polar world (the USA and China are dominant, but there are plenty of countries doing their own thing, like Iran and Russia, and China’s control over North Korea seems lacking). I always thought the Romulans were the most interesting aliens in Star Trek. I think JJ Abrams made a mistake blowing up their planet. Or perhaps they see the time travel machine as a way to stop it. Or perhaps just as there are always “patriotic Russians” willing to do what Russia wants, there are patriotic Romulans.

There might be a Romulan villain, and he/she and the captain are constantly running into each other. Every good hero needs a good villain. I think that is one of the things that made “DS9” good: It had a lot of interesting recurring characters, and some of them were the bad guys.

The series could be like “Discovery”, with a new story arc every season. One could be about the Borg. I saw a shot of a Borg cube in one of the “Picard” trailers. What happened to them after (ANOTHER SPOILER FROM THE YEAR 2001) Future Janeway infected them with a pathogen? I thought they could break up. Some are still the same old Borg. Some ask people to assimilate voluntarily (long life and infinite knowledge is not a bad deal if you choose it). Some are mercenaries for hire (fuel and bodies being the price). Some are Borg xenophobes who destroy other planets. Some are hard-core Borg purists who destroy other Borg who have strayed from the way. These factions would not be equal in size.

Another season could deal with members of Voyager’s crew. Some decided to stay in Starfleet, some went into the private sector. But perhaps some became guns for hire, working for the highest bidder. Their experiences in the Delta Quadrant as well as their determination to get back to the Alpha Quadrant might give them some unique advantages. Perhaps they found 24th century suburban life too boring. Perhaps some tried to get back to the Delta Quadrant. Perhaps Starfleet regards some of them as knowing too much to be out in the wild. I know Seven of Nine is in “Picard”. We shall see how she fits in. I thought of the Voyager crew angle before I saw the previews. I have a sad that she does not seem to be wearing the catsuit.

Now that I have that out, I can go watch “Picard”.

Big Jim wonders: Do all women look good in Starfleet uniforms, or is Jeri Ryan beautiful no matter what she is in?

Images from Memory Alpha, copyright owned by CBS, assumed allowed under Fair Use. I will admit, I have no idea how much we will see Seven of Nine in “Picard”. It’s just an excuse to add a few pictures of Jeri Ryan.

 

I watched the first season of Star Trek:Discovery. The verdict: I liked it.

I was afraid that the series might flame out pretty quickly. The original series started strong and frankly got weaker, while the previous spin-offs were just okay for the first season or two, and really got going in the third season. There are a lot more series on television now, and a lot more channels in general. A series no longer gets a season to find its footing. But Discovery worked out okay.

I do wish we got at least one more season of Enterprise. I think the Romulan War would have been interesting. I think that is where the whole series was leading. On the other hand, if they were serious when they said that Future Guy was Archer then perhaps we dodged a bullet. I think the showrunners might have gone full Roddenberry: They were no longer worthy to manage their own brilliant creation.

I think the first two seasons of The Next Generation were almost a different series. Gene Roddenberry was still running things then. For seasons three and four, he wasn’t involved, but he was still mentioned in the credits. Some of the characters were not quite fully formed for the first two seasons. Geordi was just this guy who wore a visor, and….that was about it. And I think with Worf we were just supposed to be impressed by having a Klingon on the bridge of the Enterprise. From the third season on things improved. I think making Geordi the chief engineer was a good move. It’s a bit of a Star Trek cliche, but a show should pick a chief engineer. For the first season of TNG, there was a different chief engineer every time they went down to Engineering. It’s a starship, not a fast food joint.

One reason I think TNG was a different series is the character of Wesley Crusher. I never really liked that character. (One interesting paradox in science fiction is everybody hates Wesley Crusher, yet everybody likes Wil Weaton.) It was irritating and unbelievable that he easily figured out solutions that Starfleet officers with combined decades in space could not see. Frequently the problem at hand was something he read about for school that very same week. I am sure that sort of thing could happen, but not all the time. It’s amazing nobody ever suggested they should all learn how Wesley thinks about things so they could be as efficient as him. Nope, they were just amazed every single time. Wesley was shipped off to Starfleet Academy about the same time Roddenberry died. I think that Roddenberry had plans for the character, and after he had to step back from the show due to his health, the other producers did not have the heart to get rid of him while Roddenberry was around.

One thing I had forgotten: Wesley failed his Starfleet Academy entrance exam the first time. He is smarter than all the officers, but flunks the exam? What the Ferengi???

Season 7 got a little weird, which sometimes worked and sometimes did not. Some of those episodes were just different, and some were out there. It was kind of like the fifth season of Bablyon 5. A lot of people liked “Lower Decks“, but I did not. “Sub Rosa” was out there. I liked “Parallels“; probably one of my favorites of the entire series. I also liked “Masks“, although a lot of the staff did not.

I don’t think there is a series that I do not like (although I have no desire to try the animated series), although some had some weak episodes, even weak seasons. I think Deep Space 9 might be my favorite series overall. It had the best characters overall: great villains, even great recurring characters. I think having an overall story arc really made it stronger. Granted, while arcs are common on TV now, it was just becoming more common during the run of DS9; TNG just missed it. I think the best episodes of Enterprise were the ones that were in story arcs. Most of season three was one arc. But they threw a couple in that had nothing to do with the Xindi; one of them (“Extinction”) was the worst of the season, if not the series. Coincidence? I think not.

Back to Discovery: I liked it. The Mirror Universe is always a crowd-pleaser.

There are a few things that I did not like. I thought the Klingon war got wrapped up a bit too quickly. Maybe I was just hoping it would last longer. I do think that they could have gotten a few seasons out of it. I read on the Discovery sub-reddit that the original plan was to have a different crew for each season of Discovery. I think that would have been a very bad idea. But I think that explains why the Klingon war was ended so suddenly.

I also have read that the showrunner was replaced. I am not too clear on why. I don’t follow the behind the scenes stuff too much. Perhaps the new boss did not want to deal with the old boss’s stuff. But from what I have read on the sub-reddit, I am not the only one who thought the war ended too abruptly. [Note 1]

Another thing that I did not like is that sometimes Michael Burnham seemed a bit too much like Wesley. Maybe Wesley was just a magnification of an odd phenomenon in Star Trek: Sometimes they know an awful lot about an awful lot of subjects. They are dealing with technology that is far beyond what we have today, yet they all seem to be able to fix the warp drive, and the transporter, and the replicator, and fly a shuttle, and shoot pretty well, and this, and that. Which brings me to Paul Stamets. I guess we will see more of Stamets, since we will be seeing more of Culber (presumably through flashbacks). But Stamets will not use the spore drive. Will he stick around and manage the conventional warp drive? Again, these technologies would be beyond what we have today. People with degrees in physics do not just go off and become chemical engineers. But now Stamets is going to be an expert in warp drive after spending years trying to perfect the spore drive.

Plus it takes place before some of the other series. I try not to be one of those people who complains when there is an inconsistency. It’s fiction. There are plenty of people in the real world who are lying.

I did not like Tilly most of the time. Too much post-modern “let’s joke about everything” irony. Wouldn’t people be a bit more serious during a war? And stuck in a parallel universe. Besides, we already get enough sass with Stamets, dammit. And I am going to come out and say it: She looked too heavy to be in the military. To be frank, everybody else looked pretty fit, like they were ready to fight a war. Even Stamets, the character with the least military bearing, at least looked like he would fit in on a military vessel (as long as he keeps silent). They had to give Stamets some leeway because he was the expert on the spore drive. Tilly would have no excuse for being silly.

And before you get upset: No, I am not where I want to be either. I have come to realize that training more is not that hard, but eating less is.

This Star Trek has a pretty high body count. There were other series that took place during wars (like DS9), but Discovery had a lot of characters who appeared on-screen and bit the dust (and a few implied off-screen): Philippa Georgiou, Culber, Landry, the real Ash Tyler (which sounds like a twitter handle), Mirror Stamets, and both Lorcas (even though we only see one). Wearing something other than red no longer saves you.

I was not too thrilled with the look of USS Discovery. I thought the USS Shenzhou was a better looking ship.

I liked the first season, and I look forward to the second season.

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Note 1: I strongly suspected that Discovery would be about Klingons after CBS put a stop to the fan film Star Trek: Axanar. I figured one reason had to be that the proposed fan film was about a similar topic to something CBS was planning.

Big Jim honors the past, but doesn’t want to be trapped by it.

Image from Memory Alpha, copyright owned by CBS, assumed allowed under Fair Use.

I don’t know if “Deep Space Nine” is my favorite “Star Trek” series, but it is the top choice of a lot of fans.

It was certainly different than The Original Series or “The Next Generation“. There are a lot of quotes on Memory Alpha from the producers that they wanted to do something different in the Star Trek universe, and they certainly did. But sometimes they seemed to be bad-mouthing the prior series. It is easy to look back a couple of decades later and say that DS9 made TNG look like it was standing still, that in some ways TNG was just a re-hash of TOS.

In some ways, TNG was a re-hash of TOS. But I don’t think it could have been anything else. At first, a lot of Star Trek fans did not accept TNG. This was in the early years of the spread of the internet amongst the general population, and pages and posts about why Kirk was better than Picard were all over the net. But after the third season, and “The Best of Both Worlds” in particular, a lot of that stopped and I think TNG was seen as a legitimate incarnation of Star Trek. DS9 producers loved to say they broke the mold, but if TNG did not become successful, there would not have been a mold to break. I think if TNG was not successful, the franchise would probably have ended there.

One thing that was new (for the time) was that DS9 was the first Star Trek to have story arcs. This is common now in prime time television, but then it was pretty new. Although, reading through the articles on Memory Alpha, I think they came up with some of the story arcs while the series was in progress. There were a couple of episodes in the first season about alien groups on the other side of the worm hole that we never heard from again and seemed to have no connection to the Dominion or the later story arc (“Captive Pursuit”, which I liked, and “Move Along Home”, which stunk then and still does).

I think the first season of TOS was the best, and while the other two seasons had good episodes, the show did get weaker as time went on. It seems like the spin-off series have all needed a couple of seasons to really find their groove. DS9 was no different.

TOS was pretty much a three-man show: Kirk, Spock and McCoy. There were a few episodes with Scotty as the main character, but there were no episodes primarily about Uhura, Sulu or Chekov. TNG was more of an ensemble show, and that seemed to continue through the rest of the franchise. I think Enterprise was mostly a three-character show (Archer, T’Pol and Trip), closer to TOS, but it was trying to be a franchise show. I think the episodes with Travis and Hoshi as the primary characters were some of the weakest. I think the producers never figured out how to use them. I am not a tv show producer; maybe that sort of thing is only obvious in hindsight.

But DS9 not only figured out how to use all the characters, even the recurring characters were strong and used well.

Image from Memory Alpha, copyright owned by CBS, assumed allowed under Fair Use.

I am still going through the Star Trek canon.

After I got done with The Next Generation, I started going through Deep Space Nine. After I got started CBS started taking episodes off the site. There are still 160 episodes of Voyager, so I started watching that. There are currently no episodes of Enterprise, five of The Next Generation and two of Deep Space Nine. Last week there were 55 of The Original Series, then 34, and now there are 24.

So far I like Voyager. Somewhere I read that out of all the series that Voyager is the only one for which several of the regular actors said that making the series was not a happy experience. Robert Picardo (The Doctor) was 43 during the third season. I am 43, and I think he looks older then than I do now. I assumed he was in his 50s when the series started.

I thought Jennifer Lien (Kes) has one of the hottest voices of any women I have ever heard in my life. I liked what I heard the first time I heard her speak. I haven’t gotten to any of the Seven Of Nine seasons yet, but if they made the switch to up the babe factor, they could have kept Kes on. The Doctor is a lucky hologram to get to spend so much time with her in sick bay (“Please state the nature of your sexual emergency”). I thought the forehead ridges on B’Elanna Torres looked a bit odd, but the more I see her the more I like her. She’s fit, smart and intense. If they needed to up the babe factor, they could have just had those two wear something tighter.

Maybe later I will write something up about Deep Space Nine. I might just wait to see if I can get through all of Voyager before they take episodes offline. I was hoping to get through Star Trek to put off paying for a subscription to Netflix. Now Netflix is having conflicts with Verizon and Comcast will be merging with Time Warner, so who knows what will happen with online content.

Image from Memory Alpha, copyright owned by CBS, assumed allowed under Fair Use.

I got through Star Trek: The Next Generation this weekend.

There is one thing I did not like thoughout the series, or at least the last couple of seasons.

Picard had this uniform that was a jacket that he always wore open, with a purple shirt underneath. I did not think it was appropriate for the captain to walk around with his jacket open. It looked like he was getting sloppy. It was very un-military in my opinion. I do not think the purple shirt underneath looked good either. It made Patrick Stewart look small. He did not seem to fill out the shoulders and arms. Just about all the men on TNG looked pretty muscular in the standard uniform. Supposedly Patrick Stewart asked for this uniform to stand out, but I do not think it looked good at all.

Granted, Counselor Troi spent most of the series in non-standard clothes, and I think it all looked good on her. Even the standard uniform looked good on her. Pretty much anything looks good on Marina Sirtis. I think they should have kept the season one unitard longer. I think the v-belt accentuated her waist. T&A are nice, but lately I have been noticing women’s waists. I saw a web page in which one guy said he never noticed how hot Linda Park was on Enterprise since they were all in the garage mechanic uniforms most of the time. You just need to know where to look.

I watched a video on YouTube in which she spoke with her natural accent. Maybe it was just a bad sample, or she had a cold, but she did not sound pleasant at all. She sounded like a British person trying to imitate a Noo Yawk-er, or vice versa. Her Troi accent was much nicer.

Another thing I did not like about Picard is that Patrick Stewart always seemed to let his arms hang limp a lot. He was just a talking head. I actually did a bit of googling about this, and it appears I am the only one who ever got that impression. I think if he made more gestures, he would have had a more dynamic presence, and he would not have needed the open jacket uniform.

Images from Memory Alpha, copyright owned by CBS, assumed allowed under Fair Use.