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November 2, 2015 8:28 AM Subscribe

CBS has picked up a new live action Star Trek tv series, to be produced by Alex Kurtzman. It will premiere on CBS before moving to CBS's digital platform, CBS All Access.
posted by DirtyOldTown (488 comments total) 34 users marked this as a favorite

From inturnaround's words to CBS' ears. Looks like my prediction was off by four months.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 8:32 AM on November 2, 2015

My next prediction: the trailer will appear on September 8, 2016.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 8:34 AM on November 2, 2015 [6 favorites]

I know that you've been hurt before, so in addition to the link from THR: Variety; The Verge; io9; Entertainment Weekly.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 8:35 AM on November 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

BREAKING: CBS Finally Crafts Press Release About CBS All Access That People Actually Read
posted by robocop is bleeding at 8:35 AM on November 2, 2015 [40 favorites]

Me right now.
posted by Fizz at 8:35 AM on November 2, 2015 [30 favorites]

Please don't be a gritty reboot...
Please don't be a gritty reboot...
posted by Atom Eyes at 8:38 AM on November 2, 2015 [54 favorites]

I'm not hoping for something as good as TOS or Next Gen. I'll settle for DS9 levels of quality, but please please please let it be better than Voyager and Enterprise.
posted by Beholder at 8:39 AM on November 2, 2015 [9 favorites]

I give no fucks about how it's being distributed. What part of the universe is it set in? For the love of god.
posted by Uncle at 8:39 AM on November 2, 2015 [31 favorites]

I'm both really excited, and extremely nervous about what this new series would be. With the last TV series being a prequel (Enterprise), and the latest movies being reboots that are much heavier on action and much lighter on what makes Star Trek what it is, I'm concerned about what the setting will be.

It feels like the odds are much higher that it'll be in the prequel/reboot area than what I'm hoping it'll be, another series set in the main universe that takes place post DS9/VOY. And I really feel that's what a Star Trek series needs to be right now - back to being truly forward looking. But done in the new style of storytelling we're seeing in the best shows today - fewer episodes, tighter storylines, and perhaps without the guarantee that the same crew will stick around for the entire show.

One idea I heard tossed around would be a series that focuses on a new ship and crew every season, perhaps all touching on the same, central continuous storyline over multiple seasons. I actually like the sound of that.
posted by evilangela at 8:39 AM on November 2, 2015 [16 favorites]

What I really want is a Star Trek series told entirely from the point of view of the Klingons, or the Vulcans or the Borg. Tired of all these boring human stories. That's been done to death.
posted by Fizz at 8:41 AM on November 2, 2015 [20 favorites]

I like the idea of new Trek a lot, obviously, though I'm a little worried by the All Access nonsense - is this going to be some half assed websidode nonsense because anything will do for nerds, turned over to the trying-to-be-Netflux division who, crucially, will never be Netflix? It doesn't show confidence.
posted by Artw at 8:43 AM on November 2, 2015 [4 favorites]

It just better not be Starfleet fucking Academy.

(it's totally going to be Starfleet Academy, isn't it? I can just feel it in my bones.)
posted by briank at 8:43 AM on November 2, 2015 [8 favorites]

Just as long as they retcon away those two terrible reboot films, they can do anything they want. (I know, not likely.)
posted by Catblack at 8:45 AM on November 2, 2015 [7 favorites]

CBS is looking to premiere a new version of Star Trek in January 2017 that will introduce new characters and new worlds. Alex Kurtzman, who co-wrote and produced the movie Star Trek with Roberto Orci and Star Trek Into Darkness with Orci and Damon Lindelof, will serve as executive producer for the new series.
posted by Artw at 8:47 AM on November 2, 2015

(it's totally going to be Starfleet Academy, isn't it? I can just feel it in my bones.)

“lalalalalallallalalalalala....”
posted by Fizz at 8:47 AM on November 2, 2015 [4 favorites]

Just as long as they retcon away those two terrible reboot films, they can do anything they want. (I know, not likely.)

That ain't happening, because the showrunner is one of the key architects of the terrible reboot films.

I tried CBS's streaming service for a little while so I could watch the Late Show with Stephen Colbert. I can say with no small amount of consternation that they've absolutely succeeded in making a video streaming service that's actually worse than Yahoo Screen. CBS needs to swallow their pride and get their full programming roster over to Hulu or some other usable streaming platform.
posted by Strange Interlude at 8:47 AM on November 2, 2015 [12 favorites]

The 'new episodes will eventually premier on their VOD platform' bit is interesting. I wonder if that means that the show will be more narrowly focused towards their existing fanbase, or what, really.
posted by Kikujiro's Summer at 8:48 AM on November 2, 2015

I really want a new Star Trek show, but the fact that they're using the original logo to sell it has me nervous. I want something that takes place after DS9/Voyager. (Or Star Trek reimagined as if it was made by people in the 1940s, reflecting their political situation)
posted by drezdn at 8:48 AM on November 2, 2015 [2 favorites]

I'm not hoping for something as good as TOS or Next Gen. I'll settle for DS9 levels of quality

*DS9 fans give stern look*
posted by kmz at 8:49 AM on November 2, 2015 [103 favorites]

The cross-platform streaming services, which hosts thousands of episodes from CBS' roster (both past and present) is available for $5.99 per month.

Love Star Trek, but I'm not signing up for this service for it.
posted by Drinky Die at 8:49 AM on November 2, 2015 [5 favorites]

I wonder if that means that the show will be more narrowly focused towards their existing fanbase, or what, really.

CBS's fanbase?

Star Trek: The Assisted Living Generation
posted by AndrewInDC at 8:50 AM on November 2, 2015 [6 favorites]

Star Trek: Enterprise is technically the only trek to have happened in the new universe.
posted by Artw at 8:50 AM on November 2, 2015 [10 favorites]

I'm not hoping for something as good as TOS or Next Gen. I'll settle for DS9 levels of quality

*DS9 fans give stern look*
posted by Fizz at 8:52 AM on November 2, 2015 [45 favorites]

Star Trek: Nights*

*Each season has at least 3 Risa episodes, where we get to see plenty of Admiral Riker, as he has built his command center there.
posted by drezdn at 8:52 AM on November 2, 2015 [29 favorites]

Considering that the general trend toward existing properties is "satiate the fanbase" and that streaming services seem to favor that line of thinking, too, I am figuring this is going to at least intend to be a giving-the-fans-what-they want thing.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 8:53 AM on November 2, 2015

My guess is that it'll be set at the same time as the new movies, but with a different ship and crew. The post-DS9/Voyager era is pretty tapped out--there's too much history there to follow up right after those two series for new viewers, and if you jump ahead 100 years again you start to get into the time-travel-is-even-easier era of Trek (and no one really wants a series about the Enterprise-J).
posted by thecaddy at 8:53 AM on November 2, 2015 [3 favorites]

The impressario Alex Kurtzman?!? The one who wrote the masterpiece screenplays for Star Trek Into Darkness and Cowboys & Aliens!!! Hallelujah.
posted by fairmettle at 8:54 AM on November 2, 2015 [10 favorites]

An all-Founders show would be cheap to produce. A fixed shot of the CGI Great Link with a bunch of voice-overs would cost a grand an episode, tops.
posted by dr_dank at 8:54 AM on November 2, 2015 [11 favorites]

Dear CBS, thanks for the heads up, I have reduced my expectations to the lowest setting.
posted by biffa at 8:55 AM on November 2, 2015 [26 favorites]

Those did suck, fairmettle. But he also did Fringe, which was outstanding. So it's hard to know exactly what to expect, based on his CV.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 8:55 AM on November 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

Kurtzman, Orci, and Lindelof are the trifecta of the "ah, fuck it" school of Sci-Fi screenwriting.
posted by murphy slaw at 8:56 AM on November 2, 2015 [22 favorites]

It's a great universe they built up by the end of VOY, they should explore it more.

There is so much space for non federation (or non-starfleet) stories.
Like, Maquis or pirates or Ferengi traders sailing around in junky ships held together by plot mainly trying to stay out of starfleet's way.

It doesn't always have to be about the big shiny Galaxy Class starships.
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 8:56 AM on November 2, 2015 [12 favorites]

intend to be a giving-the-fans-what-they want thing.

Finally, you will see someone use a bathroom on board the Enterprise.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 8:56 AM on November 2, 2015 [13 favorites]

The impressario Alex Kurtzman?!? The one who wrote the masterpiece screenplays for Star Trek Into Darkness and Cowboys & Aliens!!! Hallelujah.

You'd rather another round of Berman and Braga?
posted by thecjm at 8:57 AM on November 2, 2015

I'm a little worried by the All Access nonsense

I wouldn't be. Assuming it's any good, as the HBO GoT experience shows, if it's shown only on a limited audience service, that isn't even available in most markets (e.g outside the continental US), it will be torrented to fuck and gone.

If CBS wants to be idiots and lose money because they can't figure out world-wide distribution deals, I have zero sympathy for them.
posted by bonehead at 8:57 AM on November 2, 2015 [4 favorites]

Count me in as expecting the new show to take place in the new timeline. Not only do they avoid jumping forward again (as thecaddy above notes), but that also re-opens dozens upon dozens of story ideas they can revisit and do whatever they want with. They have a "new" universe to do everything over with. But, will America want a primetime Star Trek without the Enterprise?

Also, dang CBS All Access to heck. It's single handily responsible for me being a week behind on two of their shows. I'll watch commercials, but just give me access the day after something airs. CURSE IT.
posted by Atreides at 8:57 AM on November 2, 2015 [2 favorites]

My hope is that not only has Kurtzman taken some of the criticism of the reboot (particularly STID) to heart, but that he also isn't going to let CBS do to the new show what UPN did to Voyager and Enterprise: strangle it in the crib because the whole network is riding on its success. There are a bunch of new things that they could do with the improved FX of recent years, but there's also a higher standard for TV shows with a bunch of premiere series that have shown what you can really do if you give people with a genuine vision a little creative freedom.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:57 AM on November 2, 2015

I want a Star Trek set in the ludicrous future where the Federation has become a game-breaking ultimately powerful and secure anarcho-utopian metasociety, and the frequently explored themes are boredom, hedonism, and paradise-angst, as well as the dubious ethical choices involved in the maintenance of such a...culture.
posted by mrjohnmuller at 8:58 AM on November 2, 2015 [58 favorites]

STAR TREK IDEAS I HAVE FOR WHICH NO ONE WILL EVER PAY ME OR AGREE TO:

Star Trek: Space Food Truck
Star Trek: Riker and the Holographic Time-Machine Band
Star Trek: Iron Chef as Hosted by Worf
Star Trek: How I Met My Queen Borg
Star Trek CSI: Betazed
Shonda Rhymes Presents Star Trek: Crusher's Anatomy
posted by Fizz at 8:58 AM on November 2, 2015 [46 favorites]

Can we at least all agree on one thing. Star Trek has squeezed as much out of time travel stories as humanly possible and should avoid doing more of them.
posted by Beholder at 8:58 AM on November 2, 2015 [16 favorites]

SEXY, VIOLENT MIRROR UNIVERSE
posted by thecjm at 8:58 AM on November 2, 2015 [22 favorites]

fairmettle: “The impressario Alex Kurtzman?!? The one who wrote the masterpiece screenplays for Star Trek Into Darkness and Cowboys & Aliens!!! Hallelujah.”

“Those did suck, fairmettle. But he also did Fringe, which was outstanding. So it's hard to know exactly what to expect, based on his CV.”

He also wrote several Transformers movies, and worked close with Michael Bay for many years. Be prepared to be blown away by the stupendous quality of this new series.

Then again, he was a "consulting producer" on Fringe for most of its run, so maybe he'll do that here. I guess the deal is, as long as he doesn't do any writing, it might be okay, depending on the other people involved.

thecjm: “You'd rather another round of Berman and Braga?”

Just about, yeah. In fact, given that they're still working, I would be very surprised if they didn't at least write a few episodes.
posted by koeselitz at 9:00 AM on November 2, 2015 [5 favorites]

NCIS: Starfleet

The N stands for Naval, so this actually might work.
posted by thecjm at 9:00 AM on November 2, 2015 [10 favorites]

If they wanted to do a post-Voyager story while retaining the exploration theme, and avoiding the need to know tons of background, set it on the edge of the Delta Quadrant with the new Enterprise being sent out to explore it on purpose.

If you want to bring in the big Star Trek races sometimes, you could have the Delta Quadrant starting to open up like a frontier after the scattering of the Borg.
posted by drezdn at 9:00 AM on November 2, 2015 [5 favorites]

Can we at least all agree on one thing. Star Trek has squeezed as much out of time travel stories as humanly possible and should avoid doing more of them.

NEVER! I want to see some 5 Doctors type nonsense where Data, Spock, Janeway and Garak all have to work together to solve sexy time mysteries.
posted by palindromic at 9:02 AM on November 2, 2015 [36 favorites]

A Section 31-focused show would probably work as some kind of detective/spy procedural with some action.
posted by AndrewInDC at 9:02 AM on November 2, 2015 [5 favorites]

Why, yes, a mirror universe series where the characters are thugs for the Federation would offer mind blowing opportunities, but prime time CBS won't go there. Not even if the payoff is characters eventually turning against the Federation as pro democracy rebels.
posted by Beholder at 9:03 AM on November 2, 2015 [2 favorites]

I understand the appeal of the terrible things on his iMDb page inflame my snark game.

But Fringe was sooooooooooo good, you guys. There's always hope, because: Fringe.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:03 AM on November 2, 2015 [7 favorites]

It seems odd that they can only slide to one specific mirror universe instead of the presumed infinite variety.

A multiverse episode where they slide into ours and are besieged by nerds? That would be worth a watch. Worf complaining about the placement of his ridges while whacking Michael Dorn with a painstick would win forever.
posted by dr_dank at 9:03 AM on November 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

Currently scrolling through my twitter time-line and this:

ME: If Star Trek has an all-male creative team, Im growing my hair into gorgon snakes & devouring Hollywood.
MORGAN: Prepare yourself now.— Gavia Baker-Whitelaw (@Hello_Tailor) November 2, 2015

posted by Fizz at 9:05 AM on November 2, 2015 [11 favorites]

How many streaming services are we going to have to pony up for in the future? Cordcutting isn't looking much cheaper than cable when you start paying $10/month for each of these streaming services.
posted by octothorpe at 9:05 AM on November 2, 2015 [15 favorites]

A Section 31-focused show would probably work as some kind of detective/spy procedural with some action

Reginald Barclay: Agent of Section 31
posted by drezdn at 9:06 AM on November 2, 2015 [22 favorites]

Let me just toss out the inevitability of SW and ST being merged into a single franchise. It's going to happen. Perhaps the only upside to our wonderful three nation three corporation future. : )
posted by Beholder at 9:06 AM on November 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

I just hope they draw their inspiration from the BG reboot and Firefly and give us a gritty universe already. So tired of pristine ships.
posted by longdaysjourney at 9:06 AM on November 2, 2015

As long as there's plenty of Harry Kim who cares about the premise?
posted by sobarel at 9:07 AM on November 2, 2015 [8 favorites]

Reginald Barclay: Agent of Section 31

Oh is this the theory that Barclay was only pretending to a goofy loser and was secretly the all powerful mastermind behind the whole thing all along, and also had secret force powers... or.. no, wrong universe I guess.
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 9:08 AM on November 2, 2015 [13 favorites]

If it is anything like the Minority Report TV show it will completely miss the fucking point of the preceding stuff.
posted by srboisvert at 9:08 AM on November 2, 2015 [4 favorites]

Grand Nagus Rom Presents: Two-Lobed Tales of Profit
posted by Faint of Butt at 9:09 AM on November 2, 2015 [26 favorites]

Harry Kim as The Oldest Ensign in Star Fleet.
posted by dr_dank at 9:09 AM on November 2, 2015 [6 favorites]

Wheaton as Captain
Wheaton as Captain
Wheaton as Captain
Wheaton as Captain
Wheaton as Captain
posted by Chrysostom at 9:09 AM on November 2, 2015 [48 favorites]

A Section 31-focused show would probably work as some kind of detective/spy procedural with some action.

Would anyone mind if they just do Blacklist with phasers?

“The impressario Alex Kurtzman?!? The one who wrote the masterpiece screenplays for Star Trek Into Darkness and Cowboys & Aliens!!! Hallelujah.”

You missed his worst feature. He has Damon Lindelof's phone number.
posted by biffa at 9:09 AM on November 2, 2015 [5 favorites]

Maybe they could hire JH Wyman to write/run this show. Almost Human wasn't perfect, but it had a ton of promise.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:11 AM on November 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

Wheaton as Captain
Wheaton as Captain
Wheaton as Captain
Wheaton as Captain
Wheaton as Captain
posted by Chrysostom at 12:09 PM on November 2 [+] [!]

Me.
posted by Fizz at 9:11 AM on November 2, 2015 [13 favorites]

One thing you can absolutely take to the bank (no pun intended) is the hundreds of meetings that CBS and producers will have trying to figure out how to mimic the success of TWD, so expect gritty and expect monsters of the week. Andrew Lincoln would make a good Captain, btw. Not the character Rick. He makes Kirk look reasonable, but the actor who plays him.
posted by Beholder at 9:11 AM on November 2, 2015

Masters of Pon farr
posted by drezdn at 9:11 AM on November 2, 2015 [17 favorites]

They already rebooted TOS, and apparently the movie studio wants to milk that goddamned Abrams trainwreck for all it's worth, so the only logical choice would be... TNG reboot! Starring Matthew McConaughey as Picard, and Zach Galifinakis as Riker. The next generation: louder, angrier, and with access to a time machine.
posted by Mayor West at 9:12 AM on November 2, 2015 [9 favorites]

One thing you can absolutely take to the bank (no pun intended) is the hundreds of meetings that CBS and producers will have trying to figure out how to mimic the success of TWD, so expect gritty and expect monsters of the week.

See, but I don't believe that is necessarily true, Beholder. I think Marvel is flipping the script and getting production companies to realize that fidelity to source material is the real draw.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:13 AM on November 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

You could get a good show out of young Picard.
posted by drezdn at 9:15 AM on November 2, 2015 [5 favorites]

The brand-new “Star Trek” will introduce new characters seeking imaginative new worlds and new civilizations, while exploring the dramatic contemporary themes that have been a signature of the franchise since its inception in 1966.

"What more do you geeks need to know? Get a life, people! Now, let's talk about our new streaming service, CBS All Access. You know you need to catch up on The Bold and the Beautiful."
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 9:15 AM on November 2, 2015 [2 favorites]

The Adventures of Young Picard & #1 Dad
posted by Drinky Die at 9:16 AM on November 2, 2015 [18 favorites]

Casting has anyone talked any casting yet?
posted by Faintdreams at 9:17 AM on November 2, 2015

Wheaton as Captain...

...Captain Chroniton, your holographic Chief Time Travel Officer, installed as a standard feature on every Federation starship beginning in 2493.

"It looks like you are going back in time to stop the Borg. Would you like help?"

- Get help with going back in time
- Just go back in time without help
- Shut up, Wesley!
posted by AndrewInDC at 9:17 AM on November 2, 2015 [10 favorites]

Bah, I want to see a show kinda like COPS where we can highlight people like Harvey Mudd Jr, Cardassian Pirates, and of course Joyriding Klingon Teenagers doing Warp 5 in the a Warp 4 area of the Neutral Zone...
posted by Nanukthedog at 9:17 AM on November 2, 2015 [4 favorites]

I went for the Trial of CBS All Excess (or whatever) when Colbert started the Late Show, and found that My Local CBS Station wasn't participating in the Live Streaming. So I did a quick Cancel and when I want to Colbert, the non-subscription site still puts up his shows the day after and keeps them up for a week. Don't know if this will be enough to drag me back in, but I have over a year and a free-broadcast preview in order to decide.

The new Star Trek will introduce new characters seeking imaginative new worlds and new civilizations, while exploring the dramatic contemporary themes that have been a signature of the franchise since its inception in 1966.
So one new Vulcan, one new Klingon, one new alien babe, one new Kirk/Riker hybrid, a couple of young ensigns who should be wearing red shirts and Reginald Barkley's equally neurotic son. Ladies and gentlemen, the New Crew Review, comin' right at you (and all reporting to Wesley Crusher at Starfleet HQ).
posted by oneswellfoop at 9:19 AM on November 2, 2015 [4 favorites]

Keeping the show off the independent monthly sub subscription services (Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, whatever GooglePlay / YouTube product emerges next year as the horse GOOG rides) is an interesting play.

Going around existing distribution is certainly the go-to for the Star Trek television universe. TNG was the first show anywhere near its scale to go to first-run syndication in 1987, with DS9 following. Voyager was the (effective) launch product for the UPN network in 1995, and Paramount (tried) to use Enterprise to continue with that anchor.

I think that they have a real challenge in front of them to create a product that gets good ratings on CBS (with its very old prime-time demographic skew) AND drives people to take down another $5.99 subscription service that doesn't provide anything exclusive, that audience needing to average literally 20 years younger.
posted by MattD at 9:20 AM on November 2, 2015 [2 favorites]

If John DeLancie is free, a show of Q's own would never run dry of material.

Pilot: Q makes every day "Captain Picard Day" on board the Enterprise, cheekily reminding Jean-Luc that he is indeed a role model.
posted by dr_dank at 9:22 AM on November 2, 2015 [10 favorites]

Star Trek Mutiny: The Red Shirt Revenge
Star Trek: Galaxy Quest
posted by jim in austin at 9:22 AM on November 2, 2015 [2 favorites]

I grew up on TNG and I like the reboot movies.
posted by SansPoint at 9:24 AM on November 2, 2015 [11 favorites]

I'd be less concerned about Kurtzman and more concerned about CBS being notorious for just making the same show again, and again, and again with a different set of diverse attractive hairdos.

Hmm, I typed that and then I remembered what an atrocity Into Darkness was.
posted by selfnoise at 9:26 AM on November 2, 2015 [4 favorites]

Ooh, I hope it's super-beige and all queer folks have been genetically engineered out of existence so my nostalgia for everything Trek since '68 will be rewarded.

And God fucking forbid we get a few skants beyond the first half-season.
posted by sonascope at 9:26 AM on November 2, 2015 [3 favorites]

If John DeLancie is free, a show of Q's own would never run dry of material.

What's Girl Q doing these days?
posted by Capt. Renault at 9:27 AM on November 2, 2015 [3 favorites]

> Starfleet Fucking Academy

That's pretty much the direction in which the reboots are heading anyway.
posted by Poldo at 9:29 AM on November 2, 2015

Not really related, but yesterday, Patrick Stewart tweeted "How do you answer a seventeen year old female shop assistant in a pharmacy who ask you the following? "I'm sorry, what is an enema"?"

Then again, maybe it is.
posted by oneswellfoop at 9:29 AM on November 2, 2015 [20 favorites]

Given the choice of CBS All Access or torrenting it, I'm going to torrent it. I'd gladly pay per episode if they made it available on iTunes, GooglePlay, Amazon, etc. but All Access is just obnoxious and buggy.

I wish they'd take a break from the mainline starfleet POV. Do something like Battleship Potemkin set during the Klingon Civil War; a Section 31 agent gone rogue; Law & Order Q'onos with Worf's ancestor, etc. Hell remake MASH during the Romulan war with Denoubulans
posted by nathan_teske at 9:33 AM on November 2, 2015 [6 favorites]

Yes, let's continue on where the Berman shows left off, after all, if there's one thing that brings in wide audiences, it's lots of holodeck episodes and 25+ years of continuity to catch up on.
posted by entropicamericana at 9:33 AM on November 2, 2015 [8 favorites]

I think it's a neat idea that they're using Star Trek to drive people to their new platform given how well it worked for our favorite network UPN.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 9:36 AM on November 2, 2015 [13 favorites]

Will and Tom Riker are the ultimate odd couple in "The Admiral and the Adjective"
posted by AndrewInDC at 9:37 AM on November 2, 2015 [3 favorites]

What is the reason to make this announcement without any information about the content of the show? Does this actually generate good feelings about the show?
posted by demiurge at 9:38 AM on November 2, 2015 [3 favorites]

oneswellfoop: Not really related, but yesterday, Patrick Stewart tweeted "How do you answer a seventeen year old female shop assistant in a pharmacy who ask you the following? "I'm sorry, what is an enema"?"

I hope he got Jonathan Frakes on speakerphone in the store to have Number One explain Number Two.
posted by dr_dank at 9:41 AM on November 2, 2015 [26 favorites]

Being CBS and being the first new series in decades, I fear that everything about this will be obnoxiously "safe." Can't deviate too far from the formula, so: white male caption, a starship, Klingons, Vulcans, planet of the week format... bah. There are already a lot of warning signs in this one little press release that this new series is coming about by way of cynical calculation and panic.

But you never know... I'll join the chorus of people saying that Fringe was pretty good.
posted by Laura Palmer's Cold Dead Kiss at 9:41 AM on November 2, 2015 [2 favorites]

Didn't Fringe turn into being all about the Very Special Dude in the end, with the once primary female character being reduced to tying herself into knots over him, including obliterating memories/alternate selves so they could be together?
posted by tavella at 9:41 AM on November 2, 2015

Star Trek: Lower Decks
Starfleet as seen through the eyes of junior officers
Executive Producer: Whit Stillman
posted by Ian A.T. at 9:46 AM on November 2, 2015 [8 favorites]

Michael Dorn has been trying to get some traction on a new Worf series.
posted by cmfletcher at 9:46 AM on November 2, 2015 [10 favorites]

Oh - a sci-fi series about a utopian socialist future where needs are fulfilled by replicators, without any sort of artificially enforced scarcity is going to have its cheap digital bits locked up behind a paywall subscription service.

Roddenberry is rolling in his grave.
posted by symbioid at 9:47 AM on November 2, 2015 [33 favorites]

Starring Matthew McConaughey as Picard, and Zach Galifinakis as Riker.

Hey now, there comes a time in every man's life when he has to stop, roll down the window, smell the breeze and smile knowingly and then get home, be handed a martini, turn off the jazz, loosen his collar and watch the hell of that show in a glassy eyed stupor like he has had the best sex of his life. Then fart and scratch his nuts.
posted by srboisvert at 9:47 AM on November 2, 2015 [5 favorites]

I hope Braga and Moore come back, and Frakes comes back to do some directing. First Contact is the best Trek film since Undiscovered Country.
posted by alby at 9:48 AM on November 2, 2015 [2 favorites]

Starring Matthew McConaughey as Picard, and Zach Galifinakis as Riker.

I will accept this if, at least once per episode, Galifianakis attempts the Riker Chair Maneuver and falls awkwardly to ground. It's played completely straight and the other characters don't acknowledge it.
posted by dephlogisticated at 9:48 AM on November 2, 2015 [40 favorites]

EnGage, enGage, enGage
posted by cmfletcher at 9:49 AM on November 2, 2015

Apropos of nothing, a very special Jonathan Frakes moment from a Giant Bomb QL of a Celebrity Poker video game. (Which also later led to this.)
posted by kmz at 9:51 AM on November 2, 2015 [8 favorites]

What is the reason to make this announcement without any information about the content of the show?

My guess is they've seen the incredible buzz being generated by the new Star Wars movie, and they are desperately clutching at its coattails in an attempt to leech off some of that sweet, sweet virality. (Basically, history repeating itself.)
posted by Atom Eyes at 9:51 AM on November 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

A behind the scenes look at Star Trek à la 30 Rock/Muppets.

*cut away to Worf looking displeased*
posted by Fizz at 9:52 AM on November 2, 2015 [3 favorites]

work together to solve sexy time mysteries

Finding out where Admiral Riker transported the missing hyphen in that sentence is perhaps the difference between $5.95 a month and $5.95 an episode.
posted by a lungful of dragon at 9:53 AM on November 2, 2015 [37 favorites]

Let me just make the following statements which have been inadequately addressed thus far.

1. As I've pointed out before, Voyager is a better show than TNG. I don't know what you're on about, Beholder.

2. It DOES have to be all about the Galaxy class starships. Here's why: All those other starships (Kling-on, Ferengi) and the bases (like DS9) are always dark. I would like a show set in a future with light bulbs. If I want to watch people fly through space in the dark, I'll watch DS9. This has not yet happened. It's the future. Turn on the freaking lights.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 9:59 AM on November 2, 2015 [10 favorites]

Those bases and other ships aren't always dark. The Cardassians have 5 wonderful lights in every room!
posted by cmfletcher at 10:01 AM on November 2, 2015 [43 favorites]

Beholder: "Can we at least all agree on one thing. Star Trek has squeezed as much out of time travel stories as humanly possible and should avoid doing more of them."

What if we go back in time to stop Star Trek from doing time travel stories?
posted by boo_radley at 10:01 AM on November 2, 2015 [11 favorites]

qcubed

If I might politely correct you, I do believe that Cardassians always decorate with five lights.
posted by Laura Palmer's Cold Dead Kiss at 10:05 AM on November 2, 2015 [16 favorites]

Yeah, ok, no more time travel. But lights. I demand brightly lit future ships of luxury. I don't know why so much sci-fi has a dark aesthetic. Why would people in a scarcity-free future choose to have dark ugly ships and living quarters?
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 10:05 AM on November 2, 2015 [3 favorites]

What if we go back in time to stop Star Trek from doing time travel stories?

Wasn't there a Star Trek episode about that?
posted by a lungful of dragon at 10:07 AM on November 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

What is the reason to make this announcement without any information about the content of the show? Does this actually generate good feelings about the show?

If nothing else, it's advertising the presence of CBS All Access.
posted by ZeusHumms at 10:07 AM on November 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

Also, all of the ship based Trek shows were fundamentally similar enough that I can't really get excited any more about a new show unless something big is different _and_ good. Berman-Braga era Trek was partly about gettting the formula down and repeating over and over, series to series, episode to episode.
posted by ZeusHumms at 10:11 AM on November 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

Why would people in a scarcity-free future choose to have dark ugly ships and living quarters

Because they used up all the light bulbs in every single 1970s sci-fi movie and/or TV show
posted by briank at 10:15 AM on November 2, 2015 [6 favorites]

Also, all of the ship based Trek

The ships are kind of the premise of the entire franchise though. I mean you can't go trekking through the stars without a ship (at least most humanoid species can't). If you you just had some random drama series set on Risa or at Federation headquarters or whatever, it wouldn't be a Star Trek, anymore. It would just be some random work-drama set in the future.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 10:15 AM on November 2, 2015 [3 favorites]

a lungful of dragon: Wasn't there a Star Trek episode about that?

I believe that was Futures End on Voyager. Patrolling the time line in the Star Trek universe has to be a worse job than Holodeck janitor or waste extraction trainee.
posted by dr_dank at 10:17 AM on November 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

This was what I was dressed as on Saturday for Halloween, so I'm somewhat excited but also apprehensive. Can't they just do TNG: Season 8? If they reuse TNG characters, I'll even give them this for the theme song. It'll fit right in at CBS. In fact, they could program an entire line-up!

For the CBS game show demographic: Star Trek: Holodeck Squares
For the CBS sitcom demographic: Star Trek: Two Bedrooms, Two Bat'leths
For the CBS advice talk show demographic: Star Trek: Lean In (feat. Will Riker)
For the CBS advice talk show demographic: Star Trek: Hypospray's Anatomy
posted by ilana at 10:17 AM on November 2, 2015 [6 favorites]

Let's do a series about Miles O'Brien.
posted by pxe2000 at 10:18 AM on November 2, 2015 [8 favorites]

It's a hundred years after Voyager. The entire interior of the ship is a gigantic holodeck. The layout and furnishings shift hourly according to the caprice of the crew. The bridge might appear as a circle of basalt thrones in an infinite desert, or shifting spheres in zero gravity. The briefing room is usually an exact replica of the Barcelona Pavilion. Each episode costs ten million dollars to produce.
posted by theodolite at 10:18 AM on November 2, 2015 [21 favorites]

Each episode costs ten million dollars to produce

But can then be torrented for free by all us people who don't know and don't care to find out what the hell CBSAllAccess is.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 10:20 AM on November 2, 2015

CBS Exec: *clears throat* "Uh, Alex. Just a suggestion. Is there a way, maybe, you could have the characters visit a planet where the entire society revolves around some kind of reality-based competition, like singing, or cooking, or tribble grooming, or whatever. And they get stuck there for a year? Thanks."

You joke but a studio exec wanted to do a "boy band of the week" on Enterptise. Five slips of Latinum says an exec is already trying to figure out how to tie-in Survivor.
posted by nathan_teske at 10:26 AM on November 2, 2015

Let's do a series about Miles O'Brien.

Ugh, no.

INT. TEN FORWARD MILES Here luv, pour a bowl of me ma's Irish stew down yer gob! KEIKO Yuck! I'm just going to finish my holographic face-hugging tentacle sushi, thank you very much. MILES Let's get married, dearie! *downs some Irish whiskey and plays pipes*
posted by a lungful of dragon at 10:26 AM on November 2, 2015 [14 favorites]

I don't see why it has to be just one show. Make a main show plus a bunch of interlocking segments you could watch in pretty much any combination with the main show. If you were interested, you could watch the weekly science segment that digs into the science related to this episode to explain why, for example, there is no goddamned time travel. If you wanted to stretch your brain a bit, there would be a philosophical segment. If you wanted romance, there would be a soap opera segment. If you wanted action, there would be an action segment that extends the spaceship battles and fistfights of the main show. If you wanted porn, you could watch that hot ambassador from a strange planet do certain things with certain crew members when stuck in the turbolift, etc. Maybe not all segments would be available every week. Spin-offs could be new weekly segments that work with the main show. On the Star Trek Network. In the Star Trek Universe. Until the end of Star Trek Time, Kirk willing.
posted by pracowity at 10:27 AM on November 2, 2015 [7 favorites]

I don't know if I'll watch this new show, but I would almost certainly watch all of the horrible ideas being suggested in this thread.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 10:28 AM on November 2, 2015 [26 favorites]

"... will introduce new characters seeking imaginative new worlds and new civilizations, while exploring the dramatic contemporary themes ..."

Season 1

For The World Is Hollow And I Have No Job

The City On The Edge of Bankruptcy

The Enemy Within The Homeland

Balance of Terrorists

The Trouble With Gender Pronouns
posted by AGameOfMoans at 10:30 AM on November 2, 2015 [25 favorites]

pracowity: I don't see why it has to be just one show.

This is a great point. It's sort of bananas, if you think about it, that Hollywood is killing itself trying to find the next shared universe option when Trek already did that successfully a couple decades back.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 10:30 AM on November 2, 2015 [5 favorites]

MILES
Let's get married, dearie! *downs some Irish whiskey and plays pipes*

MILES then gets captured and tortured for 20 years.
posted by drezdn at 10:32 AM on November 2, 2015 [24 favorites]

I have the feeling I'm going to have to get one of those beer hats with Maalox bottles to watch this show
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 10:33 AM on November 2, 2015 [3 favorites]

You joke but a studio exec wanted to do a "boy band of the week" on Enterptise. Five slips of Latinum says an exec is already trying to figure out how to tie-in Survivor.

I'm assuming tie-ins to other shows will come in via the holodeck. Or maybe Tom Paris will be a character and will host a Early 21st Century Media Appreciation Club (though he was more a fan of the 20th century...maybe his daughter can be into 21st century).

DS9 wasn't ship-based but it had ships in it (the runabouts) and, later, a bigger ship (the Defiant); and, Lo!, there mas much trekking to be had. The one needn't entail the other.

I never watched DS9 because it was too dark. However, my sense is that in that case the stars came trekking to to the station. Also, wasn't it basically a workplace drama set in the future?
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 10:34 AM on November 2, 2015

Also, wasn't it basically a workplace drama set in the future?
posted by alby at 10:38 AM on November 2, 2015 [12 favorites]

I was worried that CBS was moving to an all-streaming, no packaged media model, putting me out of a job, but with these creative credentials no one would want to own these on disc anyway
posted by infinitewindow at 10:39 AM on November 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

I also want the nerd binge up to this to be a reality television show called 'So You Think You Can Join Starfleet'. Where a group of fans compete not only on their Cosplay abilities, but also on their technical and linguistic expertise of the Star Trek universe.

Also, they make Tea, Earl Grey, Hot.
posted by Nanukthedog at 10:41 AM on November 2, 2015 [5 favorites]

Also, wasn't it basically a workplace drama set in the future?

Look at that gif. See how dark it is?
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 10:43 AM on November 2, 2015 [5 favorites]

It's a hundred years after Voyager. The entire interior of the ship is a gigantic holodeck. The layout and furnishings shift hourly according to the caprice of the crew.

Well, really the caprice of the ship's computer, who is the personal assistant/best companion to everyone one board. The AI also manages the tedious flying around and scouting and stuff, while the crew get increasingly interested in re-enacting 1978 CGCB concerts. In fact, most of humanity and other Federation species are in Star Fleet now, finding being on ship infinitely more stimulating than living on static old planets. A good portion of the show is devoted to the sotto voce inter-ship communications of the AIs, all with amusing self-given names, while they manage galactic politics.
posted by bonehead at 10:43 AM on November 2, 2015 [12 favorites]

Ok, I was wrong about DS9 being a workplace drama set in the future. As I said, I never really watched it. I take that back. But I still want a nice bright shiny Galaxy-class starship for the new series.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 10:44 AM on November 2, 2015

The Federation has pacified the galaxy and faces no threats other than boredom. The crew, which is less than 25% human, spends most of its time devising complicated puzzles, attending to exotic pets, and inventing new ways to have sex with each other. Every episode the ship visits a non-Federation planet and uses godlike technology to turn the lives of the its inhabitants into a bizarre morality play. The Prime Directive is a relic and a punchline. The captain, voiced by Sam Elliott, resembles a small parrot.
posted by theodolite at 10:44 AM on November 2, 2015 [24 favorites]

Say what you will about Star Wars, but as far as I know there's no time travel in it.

Yet.
posted by Artw at 10:47 AM on November 2, 2015 [5 favorites]

The crew, which is less than 25% human, spends most of its time devising complicated puzzles, attending to exotic pets, and inventing new ways to have sex with each other.

And, hopefully, not forcing the outer districts to put their children in arenas to kill each other.
posted by Melismata at 10:47 AM on November 2, 2015 [2 favorites]

The Prime Directive is a relic and a punchline.

Well, mostly only in special circumstances.
posted by bonehead at 10:47 AM on November 2, 2015 [13 favorites]

After all this time I still want to know why the French captain of the Enterprise spoke with an English accent, idolized Nelson, drank Earl Grey tea, and was fascinated by the plays of Shakespeare, particularly Henry V.
posted by Justinian at 10:49 AM on November 2, 2015 [28 favorites]

WHY DID YOU MAKE HIM FRENCH IF YOU WANTED HIM TO BE ENGLISH. WHY.
posted by Justinian at 10:49 AM on November 2, 2015 [13 favorites]

Let's do a series about Miles O'Brien.

How about young Miles O'Brien as a ground pounder during the Federation-Cardassian war? Guy has some PTSD issues that are worth exploring plus it would be pre-Keiko.
posted by nathan_teske at 10:49 AM on November 2, 2015 [4 favorites]

I also want the nerd binge up to this to be a reality television show called 'So You Think You Can Join Starfleet'. Where a group of fans compete not only on their Cosplay abilities, but also on their technical and linguistic expertise of the Star Trek universe.

I would watch Top Trekkie. With a vengeful, unsparing Wil Wheaton as the head of the judging panel.
posted by a lungful of dragon at 10:51 AM on November 2, 2015 [15 favorites]

WHY DID YOU MAKE HIM FRENCH IF YOU WANTED HIM TO BE ENGLISH. WHY.

Self-loathing French man.

I hope it is just a show about Tamarians.
posted by Ashwagandha at 10:53 AM on November 2, 2015 [4 favorites]

Stop giving CBS ideas. They'll use one of them and won't pay us.
posted by Melismata at 10:53 AM on November 2, 2015 [2 favorites]

After all this time I still want to know why the French captain of the Enterprise spoke with an English accent ...

From Code of Honour (episode 4 of TNG), a conversation between Data and Picard:

Data: "For example, what Lutan did is similar to what certain American Indians once did, called 'counting coup'. That is from an obscure language known as French. Counting coup..."
Picard: "Mr. Data, the French language for centuries on Earth represented civilization!"

posted by alby at 10:53 AM on November 2, 2015 [11 favorites]

House Hunters Intergalactic: Risa
Real Housewives of Cardassia Prime
Top Chef: Q'onoS
posted by Elly Vortex at 10:53 AM on November 2, 2015 [6 favorites]

All this talk of workplace drama makes me want a Star Trek/Office mashup.
posted by drezdn at 10:55 AM on November 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

If you you just had some random drama series set on Risa or at Federation headquarters or whatever, it wouldn't be a Star Trek, anymore. It would just be some random work-drama set in the future.

Maybe, but before we dismiss the concept, think about this: a series set entirely on Ceti Alpha V.

Every episode a bottle episode.

And the circle would be complete: 1 Who is Ricardo Montalban?; 2 Get me Ricardo Montalban; 3 Get me a Ricardo Montalban type; 4 Get me a young Ricardo Montalban; 5 Who is Ricardo Montalban?
posted by Capt. Renault at 10:56 AM on November 2, 2015 [5 favorites]

Stop giving CBS ideas. They'll use one of them and won't pay us.

*frantically rushes to copyright Naomi Wildman: Attorney at Law*
posted by sobarel at 10:56 AM on November 2, 2015 [9 favorites]

WHY DID YOU MAKE HIM FRENCH IF YOU WANTED HIM TO BE ENGLISH.

In 2106, the New British Empire conquered France. The Empire, which sprang into existence in 2105, collapsed in 2107. It's looked back on as an embarrassment that is not to be discussed in polite company, but its effect on French culture proved surprisingly long-lasting.
posted by brianrobot at 10:57 AM on November 2, 2015 [9 favorites]

A brief but by no means complete list of things I require from a new Star Trek show:

-some properly alien aliens, none of this human with funny ears and some forehead ridges crap. PROPER. ALIENS. I'm talking sentient plants, or weird silicon-based life forms, or a hyperintelligent shade of blue. REALLY ALIEN ALIENS, just like, wandering around in the background. IDIC, goddammit.
-there better be some queer characters. And not, like, some rando redshirt who's space gay married. A proper main cast member. This is a post-Jack Harkness scifi world, and I demand queer characters in my utopian science fiction.
-please tell me more about the economy of the Federation. Please.
-more hilarious and bizarre cross-cultural misunderstandings. This goes with properly alien aliens.
-please tell me more about what the fuck non-Starfleet people do with their lives in a post-scarcity universe. I want one episode, just one! that follows Starfleet officers home on leave.
-feel free to set as many episodes on the holodeck as you want, new Star Trek. But only if you use that opportunity to pursue ever more bizarre and indulgent genre mashups.
-nothing more grim and gritty than DS9. Can you please, for once, just leave us our one goddamn optimistic science fiction utopia without RUINING IT with your TEDIOUS, excessively dudely grimdark nonsense?!
posted by yasaman at 11:03 AM on November 2, 2015 [39 favorites]

I just want a Survivor: Galorndon Core t shit.
posted by cmfletcher at 11:04 AM on November 2, 2015 [5 favorites]

I'll probably watch some of the pilot, at least, but I've been burned so, so many times.

While I like TNG, I could never really get 100% on board, for oft-mentioned reasons. ( The Enterprise-D always looked weird to me, and I swear its bridge looks like a Radisson hotel lobby, ugh.) DS9 is the cult inside the cult. Again, I like it, but it's not quite the Trek show I want to watch. Voyager started pretty strong, but oh my god did it go off the rails. I'm amazed it had as long a run as it did. When I first heard the Enterprise theme song, I knew that show was doomed from the get-go, despite a decent cast.

I want the original show. Give me some philosophy, some thoughtfulness. Give me memorable characters with lots of chemistry between them. Give me spaceships, and shuttlecraft and transporters that glitter and sparkle. Give me cool phaser and communicator and tricorder props. Give me Captain Kirk's green shirt. Throw in a little action, a symphonic theme you can hum. Maybe the occasional shoulder roll. I don't want time travel, technobabble, or Klingons with bumpy heads.

The saddest part is, I know absolutely nothing that I want will be present in the new show, whatever it turns out to be.
posted by KHAAAN! at 11:05 AM on November 2, 2015 [3 favorites]

i dunno if prime time audiences are ready to handle the sheer volume of suffering an O'Brien spinoff would entail.
posted by indubitable at 11:07 AM on November 2, 2015 [6 favorites]

Alex Kurtzman, who co-wrote and produced the movie Star Trek with Roberto Orci and Star Trek Into Darkness with Orci and Damon Lindelof, will serve as executive producer for the new series

I have experienced such a roller coaster of emotions. First, the utter elation and joy of a new series, then the pits of despair and darkness in seeing the vile and supremely untalented Kurtzman attached to this. I can't even get to the point of bitching about CBS All Access because this trumps all. I suppose I'll post a rant on FB or the blog at some point once I can process all the rage and bile.
posted by Ber at 11:08 AM on November 2, 2015 [3 favorites]

Four words: My Dinner With Zek.
posted by Capt. Renault at 11:10 AM on November 2, 2015 [10 favorites]

I want one episode, just one! that follows Starfleet officers home on leave.

wasn't there the TNG episode just after Picard/Locutus where Picard visits the family vineyard in France?
posted by indubitable at 11:11 AM on November 2, 2015 [5 favorites]

(and no one really wants a series about the Enterprise-J).

speak for yourself

I demand queer characters in my utopian science fiction

YES FUCK YES THIS FOR THE LOVE OF GOD
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 11:12 AM on November 2, 2015 [10 favorites]

wasn't there the TNG episode just after Picard/Locutus where Picard visits the family vineyard in France

Yup, where his brother was Frenchier than French.
posted by The corpse in the library at 11:12 AM on November 2, 2015 [3 favorites]

S4 E2 - Family
posted by Think_Long at 11:13 AM on November 2, 2015

Four words: My Dinner With Zek.

Excelsior!
posted by Wallace Shawn at 11:13 AM on November 2, 2015 [5 favorites]

I knew that show was doomed from the get-go

I've got fish, in my paaants.
(gotta get those fish out of my pants)
I've got fish in my paants.
(get those fish outta there)
I've got fish in my paaants)
(going where the fish will take me)
I've got fiish, I've got fiiiiiiish, fish in my paaaaants, yeah!
posted by Naberius at 11:14 AM on November 2, 2015 [4 favorites]

Five slips of Latinum says an exec is already trying to figure out how to tie-in Survivor.

That's after they work in the new Head of Engineering talking up the 2017 Honda Civic.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 11:14 AM on November 2, 2015 [2 favorites]

If Rick Berman comes back, count me out. The worst thing that happened to Star Trek was Berman holding onto Rodenberry's idea that everything needs to be reset in sixty minutes (or 120 in the case of a two-parter). I still haven't seen most of the third, fourth, and fifth seasons of DS9 after they pulled another, "it was all a simulation" out of their hat.

Moore and co. showed us how good Voyager could have been with Battlestar Gallactica when they finally got away from his rules.
posted by dances with hamsters at 11:15 AM on November 2, 2015 [3 favorites]

So now my accepted head canon is that Picard was so in love with English history as a way to rebel even more against his family, and honestly, there's tons of proof and I'm not sure why it took me so long to get to this conclusion.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 11:15 AM on November 2, 2015 [7 favorites]

My soon-to-be-dashed dream is that it's longform as opposed to episodic.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 11:16 AM on November 2, 2015 [3 favorites]

I would like to bring the bashing of Star Trek Into Darkness to here.

I did not like that film because they grafted a modern day post-9/11 American political thriller onto a different genre without taking advantage of, or furthering the boundaries of, that different genre. Instead they turned a work of that genre excessively dour, from the acting to the color scheme. That is also why I think Captain America: Winter Soldier is completely overrated.
posted by Apocryphon at 11:17 AM on November 2, 2015 [5 favorites]

Yeah, I'm gonna need more than Picard heading back to the family farm to angst. I want slice of life about everyone's families back on their home planets.
posted by yasaman at 11:18 AM on November 2, 2015

wasn't there the TNG episode just after Picard/Locutus where Picard visits the family vineyard in France?

Yes: S4E2, "Family"

Noteworthy for being the only Trek episode (thus far) not to feature a single episode on a bridge or command deck.
posted by dances with hamsters at 11:19 AM on November 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

Say what you will about Star Wars, but as far as I know there's no time travel in it.

Yet.

I guess you ought to be glad that the EU is down the memory hole.
posted by Apocryphon at 11:19 AM on November 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

I want one episode, just one! that follows Starfleet officers home on leave.

wasn't there the TNG episode just after Picard/Locutus where Picard visits the family vineyard in France?

Also, Sisko occasionally visited his father who ran a restaurant in New Orleans. That somewhat speaks to what some civilians did in a post scarcity society. It doesn't really explain the economics of the Federations however.

There is a forthcoming book on the topic called Trekonomics that promises to discuss some of this. Since it is being written by an economist it will likely not explain what Star Trek creators haven't shown us but rather discuss what contemporary economics tell us about what living in Star Trek's world would mean.
posted by mmascolino at 11:22 AM on November 2, 2015 [7 favorites]

i dunno if prime time audiences are ready to handle the sheer volume of suffering an O'Brien spinoff would entail.

Here's my idea. O'Brien contracts an illness (a sentient parasitic life form has colonized O'Brien) that Starfleet refuses to treat because of the prime directive. The only cure is offered by Ferengi dealers, but the price is way above O'Brien's pay grade. Then the Ferengi make him an offer, they'll bring in people to treat him, if he starts producing and distributing new copies of "The Game" from the episode "The Game."
posted by drezdn at 11:22 AM on November 2, 2015 [3 favorites]

That is also why I think Captain America: Winter Soldier is completely overrated.

There's lots of grimdark or even just noir in comicbooks though. It was completely appropriate to make Day of the Condor featuring Natasha Romanova and Steve Rodgers, even clever, given the characters.

Revenge fantasies aren't part of the ST world-view. STiD was JJ Abrams completely misunderstanding what Rodenberry was about.
posted by bonehead at 11:23 AM on November 2, 2015 [3 favorites]

Let's be frank, a lot of the EU was terrible and has the right to be forgotten.

You say that, but at least however bad the sequel trilogy ends up, Disney-Marvel-Lucasfilm can never reach into my home and take my precious Star Wars: Rogue Squadron for the N64 away from me.
posted by Apocryphon at 11:24 AM on November 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

Also, wasn't it basically a workplace drama set in the future?

No DS9 was more M*A*S*H in Space crossed with a tiny bit of your basic police procedural.

And if you like "very alien aliens" I think DS9s intelligent shapeshifting globs is a start. In general you saw more odd-looking aliens on DS9, usually in the bar. One of the interesting things about that series was that it gave you time with species who didn't think the Federation was all that hot and the Federation itself seemed to have a somewhat tenuous hold there. There was a lot of potential for the storylines to go to more interesting places, though sadly they often miffed it or didn't pursue it.

It was very dark, I'll grant you that. I assumed everything was set for Cardassian preferences and they had good night vision.
posted by emjaybee at 11:27 AM on November 2, 2015 [6 favorites]

After a bizarre transporter accident, O'Brien must order an army of his duplicates to sacrifice themselves to repair a radiation leak in the main reactor core.
posted by indubitable at 11:28 AM on November 2, 2015 [6 favorites]

I don't remember who first proposed it, but I still want my series with Wesley Crusher as a burned out researcher who struggles with guilt that he never lived up to his early potential, has a few brilliant ideas that no one takes seriously, and can't get funding for the audacious experiments it would take to prove them right.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 11:28 AM on November 2, 2015 [25 favorites]

In the ST: Miles series, can it finally be explained why women still change their names when they get married? Surely the tradition will have died out by then.
posted by The corpse in the library at 11:31 AM on November 2, 2015 [8 favorites]

SPOILER ALERT!!!

This is just going to be The Big Bang Theory in Space. Turns out the entire series was a holodeck adventure. Now we get to see the gang in their real lives aboard the Starship Synergy.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 11:31 AM on November 2, 2015 [2 favorites]

I still want my series with Wesley Crusher as a burned out researcher

...at least until he finds a young kid who can play a guitar to fly his vintage gull-wing shuttle.
posted by bonehead at 11:31 AM on November 2, 2015 [4 favorites]

> NCIS: Starfleet

Gibbs is regularly seen leading a team of aliens in the background. This is never mentioned or explained.
posted by lucidium at 11:32 AM on November 2, 2015 [2 favorites]

I'm having flashbacks to the online discussion not unlike this one on the ST CompuServe forum in 1993 when a new show (VOY) was announced. In that discussion I described what I thought a new show should include and I was about 90% right. Female captain, actual exploration, a vulcan officer, an AI holographic character (I got that slightly wrong; I thought the ship itself should manifest as an AI). I felt very proprietary about the show when it appeared and then couldn't make it through that first season. It wasn't until about seven years ago that I watched the entire series.

So I deeply recognize this feeling of hope coupled with dread.

I don't precisely hate the reboot movies and I actually enjoyed them when I watched them. But they just sort of make me sad in that they're not really Trek. I don't object to "gritty" in principle, but I do object to whatever it is that Abrams did with the reboot. Which is basically to not actually understand Trek at all.

DS9 was, overall, the best of the series and my ideal would be pretty much what RDM did with DS9 but on a ship. Not the level of gritty realism such as he did with BSG, but a Trek series that is inflected with just a bit of gritty realism while still being essentially Star Trek. I want more diversity and representation, I want slightly more adult themes and situations, and I want it to be fully serialized. Being more adult and being more serialized is contrary to traditional Trek, but I think that can be compensated for by otherwise being true to traditional Trek. It needs to look like the Trek we know, it's an aesthetic and that plays a big role in how the audience will feel about it. Some of this is like comfort food. The best idea I've heard is the earlier about it being an anthology style show like American Horror Story or Fargo or the like. A different serialized story each season. That would be a nice mix of the familiar and comfortable and the new and different.

The ship should be a new class of ship and relatively small. As mentioned, definitely need a gay lead (human) character. And I'd like to see an Andorian lead and a Romulan lead. I think the ideas mentioned earlier about something to do with intelligence/espionage is a good idea. In fact, the ship and crew could be a sort of clandestine, um, special circumstances group and that's why it includes a Romulan. And that's why they'd end up going to unusual places. Trouble spots.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 11:32 AM on November 2, 2015 [15 favorites]

This is just going to be The Big Bang Theory in Space.

Bazinga!
posted by drezdn at 11:32 AM on November 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

There's lots of grimdark or even just noir in comicbooks though. It was completely appropriate to make Day of the Condor featuring Natasha Romanova and Steve Rodgers, even clever, given the characters.

I get that, but it just came off as feeling really bloodless and generic. In a world where the Bourne trilogy exists, or Homeland, or the X-Files, or heck even primetime pop culture from 24 to Quantico, superhero comic book portrayals of thrilling real-world espionage come off as looking really bland and shallow. Not enough good verisimilitude feel for me.
posted by Apocryphon at 11:34 AM on November 2, 2015

One thing that would be a great inspiration for the writers for some episodes (if they wanted to focus on exploration) would be Roosevelt's guide during the "River of Doubt" trip.

When he set out into the heart of Brazil, he'd be faced with tribes that lacked his technological advantage, but he refused to kill them (or, IIRC, taint their culture).

Voyager would have been able to do it with the Kazon, but didn't really explore that.
posted by drezdn at 11:38 AM on November 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

Say what you will about Star Wars, but as far as I know there's no time travel in it.

How else do you make the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs?
posted by fragmede at 11:38 AM on November 2, 2015 [10 favorites]

OK, hear me out.

On Mad Men, when Paul Kinsey dropped out of advertising, he started writing Star Trek episodes. These were (presumably) unsuccessful, and he started his life slide, evenutally ending up in full Hare Krishna.

What we do is we use Paul Kinsey and his 60s California world as a framework within which we can produce all these non-canonical, terrible Star Trek scripts.

The scripts become a reflection of Paul's own journey into Weirdsville. Nothing changes the Star Trek universe as such, but it's still playing around with original series characters and ideas, much like the holodeck did later, or as the original series did with time-travel episodes. Something of Galaxy Quest, but then have this serious framing device of Paul slowly losing his mind in the real world. There's a crossover as the scripts become better and more real as they go on, and Paul himself becomes detached from his own reality.

Star Trek by way of Charlie Kaufman, basically.
posted by Capt. Renault at 11:41 AM on November 2, 2015 [7 favorites]

WHY DID YOU MAKE HIM FRENCH IF YOU WANTED HIM TO BE ENGLISH.

Could Picard be a Huguenot?
posted by foobaz at 11:41 AM on November 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

WHY DID YOU MAKE HIM FRENCH IF YOU WANTED HIM TO BE ENGLISH.

Whoa, why are you hating on diversity?

(alternatively, the Angevins)
posted by Apocryphon at 11:45 AM on November 2, 2015

> Cordcutting isn't looking much cheaper than cable when you start paying $10/month for each of these streaming services.

I have a TV executive friend, and yep...that's the plan. Paying much less than you would for cable for each individual app/channel/whatever, but at least if not more than that for all of them combined, not to mention your internet usage charges. It'll "seem" cheaper, is what they're hoping.
posted by The Card Cheat at 11:45 AM on November 2, 2015 [6 favorites]

How else do you make the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs?

There's a wookiepedia article on it.
posted by Artw at 11:46 AM on November 2, 2015 [2 favorites]

I like Trek as much as the next dork, but I kinda wish they'd do some other universe. Like a series set in Hamilton's Confederation universe but with no undead. And you just know you would watch the shit out of the ongoing adventures of Captain Tsing of the Aegis... that or you are dead inside.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 11:54 AM on November 2, 2015 [3 favorites]

I just want to know what wacky adventures that outrageous and indefatigable rogue, Thadiun Okona, has been up to for the last 25 years.
posted by AndrewInDC at 11:56 AM on November 2, 2015 [5 favorites]

I just want to know what wacky adventures that outrageous and indefatigable rogue, Thadiun Okona, has been up to for the last 25 years.

And Joe Piscopo, too.
posted by a lungful of dragon at 12:00 PM on November 2, 2015 [6 favorites]

ROU_Xenophobe: Don't know if you've read James S A Corey's Expanse series, but they're making it into a TV series starting late this year.

Granted, it's not on the scale of Hamilton's Confederation (let alone my preferred Commonwealth - oh how I'd love to see Pandora's Star/Judas Unchained make it to TV), but it will still (hopefully!) be worth watching.
posted by Nice Guy Mike at 12:01 PM on November 2, 2015 [5 favorites]

WHY DID YOU MAKE HIM FRENCH IF YOU WANTED HIM TO BE ENGLISH. WHY.

There's some fan handwavium out there suggesting that he is, in fact, speaking French--the universal translator is simply rendering it with an English accent. Of course, the theory then runs aground on why the translator would insist on annoying any Frenchman worth his sel that way, but can't have everything.
posted by thomas j wise at 12:02 PM on November 2, 2015 [4 favorites]

There is a forthcoming book on the topic called Trekonomics that promises to discuss some of this. Since it is being written by an economist it will likely not explain what Star Trek creators haven't shown us but rather discuss what contemporary economics tell us about what living in Star Trek's world would mean.

posted by mmascolino at 2:22 PM on November 2 [3 favorites +] [!]

FUCK! Well, I'll go burn that dystopian draft side-project. Started working on it ~4 years ago...
posted by Nanukthedog at 12:03 PM on November 2, 2015

I'd like to see a Trek show set several hundred years after a horrible war that pretty much all sides lose. . . . a collection of survivors kludge together a ship and head out into the stars to start again, bringing the roots of technology and optimism to the people they meet.

You mean the first couple seasons of Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda?

No, that'd be (except for the kludging) all three seasons of Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek.

please tell me more about the economy of the Federation.

Okay:

On Star Trek the Federation uses money. They earn it, they pay it, they tax it, and they steal it. It's mentioned over and over again throughout the series. Fully a third to a half of episodes specifically mention money, paying, buying, selling, salaries, wealth, and finance. Where do they get it? Based on evidence from actual episodes, I'd guess from mining, manufacturing, trade, and transport of scarce materials and rare goods.

"Real turkeys, captain!"
"It's my favourite [perfume], but there's none in the ship's stores."
"The planet was purchased by a Mr. Braque, a wealthy financier and recluse. "
"I'll bet you credits to navy beans we'll punch a hole in it."
"The government bought [Daystrom's starship automation system], then Daystrom had to make it work."
"The Federation has invested a great deal of money in our training, Mr. Spock."
"Do you know how much Starfleet has invested in you?" "Twenty-two thousand, two hun . . ."
Spock's cover story on Organia: a Vulcan trader ("Vulcan merchants are not uncommon, Captain") in kevas and trillium.
Harry Mudd "a defender of the free enterprise system" was arrested for selling Vulcan patents to the Denebians "without paying royalties".

et bloody cetera.

The idea that Fed doesn't use money is incorrect and needs to die. It may be a true statement about Star Trek: The Next Generation (they are not utterly consistent on this point), but it is definitely not a true statement about Star Trek.

posted by Herodios at 12:09 PM on November 2, 2015 [5 favorites]

Bah! MAJORGRUMBLES! His writing is terrible, his arguments are only partially formulated - and he's not even discussing the events which had to have occurred for money to be viewed as it is. He totally doesn't understand the Ferengis and misinterprets what 'no money' means... Gah, this is going to cause my brain to explode! At least the two chapters available don't focus enough on scarcity of resources and labor. Oh man. I'm seriously going to loose my mind.
posted by Nanukthedog at 12:09 PM on November 2, 2015

Tribble-down economy
posted by a lungful of dragon at 12:13 PM on November 2, 2015 [3 favorites]

Star Trek: Sliders

Each week the crew is thrown into a random parallel universe, each wackier then the last.
posted by sourwookie at 12:18 PM on November 2, 2015 [6 favorites]

The Star Trek show I'd love to see is some sort of a TNG style archaeology / anthropology show. My favorite episodes of TNG were always the ones where they stumbled across something ancient & strange and they'd spend the episode trying to figure out this alien artifact or whatever. Or when they encounter an alien race and need to make sense of them. Make the ship small, give it a diverse crew and send them to the rim of the known universe. The elevator pitch could be Indiana Jones meets TNG with a more diverse crew.
posted by Ashwagandha at 12:18 PM on November 2, 2015 [3 favorites]

the Whelk proposed Space Doctors Without Space Borders before, I have to assume he's working on a spec script now.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 12:23 PM on November 2, 2015 [8 favorites]

the Whelk proposed Space Doctors Without Space Borders before, I have to assume he's working on a spec script now.

I could go for that. Set it on a medical ship like the USS Pasteur (Beverly Picard's ship from All Good Things). It'll make things more interesting when they can't intimidate their way out of situations like the Enterpise-D (and presumably E) could.
posted by dances with hamsters at 12:26 PM on November 2, 2015 [4 favorites]

I heard the name Kurtzman, and all I could think was this: "These are the voyagers of the USS Deus Ex Machina, on a five year mission to explore frustratingly familiar worlds, to seek out cliched life and trite civilizations, to boldly fly through every plot hole in astrometrics."

I'll probably hate watch a few, but... meh.

The idea that Fed doesn't use money is incorrect and needs to die. It may be a true statement about Star Trek: The Next Generation (they are not utterly consistent on this point), but it is definitely not a true statement about Star Trek.

It's pretty clear that this was one of those utopian ideas that Roddenberry kinda chucked into the mix without ever really thinking about for a whole five minutes. It's plainly incorrect in TOS, and as you said, TNG is very inconsistent. DS9 is inconclusive, and while Voyager plays the 'no money' thing pretty straight, there are confounding circumstances.

If I were fanwanking, wanting to clean it up for my own use as a fanfic author or something, my conclusion would be that the Federation doesn't have a single currency, (like, there's no Federation analogue to the Euro), but it allows member states to go about it as they see fit. Add to that the further notion that maybe Earth itself doesn't actually have any 100% liquid currency, (relying on barter for rare goods and replicators for all basic needs), and you're to where humans could smugly claim to lack money while still going to play at Quark's.
posted by mordax at 12:27 PM on November 2, 2015 [7 favorites]

I went to check and am surprised that Riker has not yet googled "where to torrent cbs all access"
posted by phearlez at 12:29 PM on November 2, 2015 [7 favorites]

I still haven't seen most of the third, fourth, and fifth seasons of DS9 after they pulled another, "it was all a simulation" out of their hat.

So you missed all the best seasons of DS9?
posted by panama joe at 12:31 PM on November 2, 2015 [11 favorites]

Postwar rebuilding of Cardassia. AU with Garak, Damar, and kanar, and Dukat as a creepy wannabe-Bajoran philanthropist. Not gonna happen but at least now I know what I'm doing for NaNoWriMo.
posted by thetortoise at 12:32 PM on November 2, 2015 [6 favorites]

If they wanted to do a post-Voyager story while retaining the exploration theme, and avoiding the need to know tons of background, set it on the edge of the Delta Quadrant with the new Enterprise being sent out to explore it on purpose.

I actually really like this idea.

Let's do a series about Miles O'Brien.

Maybe a series based on this comic?
posted by duffell at 12:32 PM on November 2, 2015 [6 favorites]

Additional ideas, ranked from best to worst:

Star Trek: Worf the rogue warrior-diplomat, journeying the galaxy solo in his space-motorbike
Star Trek: the Weyoun Show
Star Trek: Sherlock Holmes, featuring Brent Spiner as Holmes and LeVar Burton as Watson.
Star Trek: Nyota Uhura, Space Linguist of Space
Star Trek: Klingon Drunk History with your host, General Martok
Star Trek: Hu-mons (stories of the Federation from the Ferengis' POV)
Star Trek: the adventures of Sarah Silverman's one-off character from Voyager
Star Trek: Borg Genisys
Star Trek: Crewman Daniels' Temporal Cold War Adventures
posted by duffell at 12:33 PM on November 2, 2015 [12 favorites]

I'd like to see a Trek show set several hundred years after a horrible war that pretty much all sides lose. The Federation has collapsed and a collection of survivors kludge together a ship and head out into the stars to start again, bringing the roots of technology and optimism to the people they meet.

The thing about this idea is that it would work best if the Federation was wiped out, if the crew had no support at all. The Federation then becomes something they are spreading as a sort of viral concept of civilization and hope. Each episode, the crew rattles into an alien system in a ship held together with duct tape and spit, encounters chaos, helps order and decency prevail (or alternately learns something themselves that refines and enriches their ideals), then leaves the locals as new converts to the idea that peace and progress can win out. The Federation becomes something one doggedly heroic crew leaves in its wake, less an actual government than an expression of faith that progress wrought by technology and optimism can win the day.

Anyway, this is the show that plays in my head.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 12:33 PM on November 2, 2015 [16 favorites]

The idea that Fed doesn't use money is incorrect and needs to die. It may be a true statement about Star Trek: The Next Generation (they are not utterly consistent on this point), but it is definitely not a true statement about Star Trek.

In my own headcanon, I always assumed it was a mixture of the two. Sort of like The Diamond Age: nanotechnology has made most things trivial, and there's a public matter feed you can use to get anything you need, but it's slow and kind of shitty, and while you *can* live in public housing and technically have all your needs met, it's an awful day-to-day grind. A military gig means you can live in a sweet house in the nice part of town, on the rare occasion that you're home to enjoy it. Thus, everybody who can wrangle a Star Fleet commission does so, both because they don't want to live in the 24th-century equivalent of squalid poverty, and because they know that lounging around the house all day will be soul-crushingly boring.
posted by Mayor West at 12:34 PM on November 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

"Money doesn't exist in the 24th Century"
-Captain JP
posted by fragmede at 12:36 PM on November 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

Star Trek: Klingon Drunk History with your host, General Martok

what are you talking about that's the best idea. With special appearances by teen Worf: "You guys, stop making fun of Kahless, he's awesome!"
posted by thetortoise at 12:37 PM on November 2, 2015 [5 favorites]

Is there any way they could please include Iggy Pop as Yelgrun again?
posted by DirtyOldTown at 12:40 PM on November 2, 2015 [4 favorites]

Mayor West - works just like that on the Earth of the Expanse series that Nice Guy Mike mentioned above.
posted by thecjm at 12:47 PM on November 2, 2015

Post-TOS Star Trek seems to depict a material scarcity-free society where the only trade-able commodity (within the Federation, anyway), is time.

TNG / DS9 / VOY establish that you can replicate pretty much anything you want, even introducing the idea of "industrial replicators" that make the manufacturing and construction economy as we know it completely out of date.

So what are you really buying? Time. Replicator time would have a market value -- you can replicate anything you want, but you can't replicate everything simultaneously and not everyone has access to the most sophisticated tech all the time. Labor still has value -- for whatever reason, replicators in Star Trek seem to require human operators, and furthermore replicator programming skill seems to be in demand (seen primarily in DS9, particularly regarding food and entertainment). Something like "Federation Hours" as a trade-able currency is what probably would emerge in this kind of society, and it would act as money in all but name.

It makes sense that Federation officers on board a starship with access to their own replicators/holodecks/whatever wouldn't have to think about currency at all until they left the ship.
posted by AndrewInDC at 12:48 PM on November 2, 2015 [4 favorites]

"Money doesn't exist in the 24th Century"
-Captain JP

Which is why they're so baffled by the Ferengi, and vice versa. Most of their crime and vice seems to involve smuggling, not money per se. Still a black market for things the replicator can't handle, or for people that are outside of the governed populace.
posted by thecjm at 12:50 PM on November 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

YES!

(Can't possibly be worse than Voyager.)
posted by zarq at 12:57 PM on November 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

Obviously the important question here is whether or not they're going to include one of those long-necked orange dudes from The Animated Series because come on.
posted by brianrobot at 12:59 PM on November 2, 2015 [3 favorites]

fragmede: ""Money doesn't exist in the 24th Century"
-Captain JP"

"Scotty, you just earned your pay for the week!" - Captain James T. Kirk
posted by RobotHero at 1:01 PM on November 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

For as much shit as Voyageur gets, its best episodes were among the best of Trek.
posted by drezdn at 1:05 PM on November 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

They do establish that Latinum is not replicatable which explains why Quark and his customers gamble with it.
posted by mmascolino at 1:06 PM on November 2, 2015

Star Trek: the Weyoun Show

Actually, even better:
Star Trek: Weyoun's video diary
posted by duffell at 1:07 PM on November 2, 2015 [5 favorites]

(alternatively, the Angevins)

Or Picard is actually a Canadian.

In the grim reboot, everybody will be Ferengi. And section 31 will be some kind of KGB.
posted by Phersu at 1:12 PM on November 2, 2015

That would work if there weren't an episode or two of TNG in which Picard visits his family's vineyard in France.

I think the likeliest explanation is that the idea of a French captain sounded good on paper but was instantly regretted once Stewart appeared on screen. So they made the least French French captain in history.
posted by Justinian at 1:18 PM on November 2, 2015

Honestly? They should follow mostly non-Federation characters, and they should take it blue collar. The Federation is undergoing budget cuts, and has to outsource the exploration gig to a crew of barely-legal scavengers. They toss on a Federation science officer and a political liaison, but they don't actually have any authority over the crew.

They proceed to explore a little more boldly than we are used to seeing.

Star Trek: 3rd-Party Contractors
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 1:22 PM on November 2, 2015 [14 favorites]

evilangela: "One idea I heard tossed around would be a series that focuses on a new ship and crew every season, perhaps all touching on the same, central continuous storyline over multiple seasons. I actually like the sound of that."

It would be great to follow the career of an officer from ensign through lieutenant and onto captain of a ship. Everyone like origin stories why not extend one to several seasons? The feature character could transfer to another ship every year along with a few other companions for increased continuity. Be hard for the writers not to churn out another Wesley though.

Kind of like Pryzbylewski on The Wire.

Justinian: "That would work if there weren't an episode or two of TNG in which Picard visits his family's vineyard in France."

Historically there was a certain amount of back and forth between Canada and France (and England, and the US). One of my keystone ancestors in Canada emigrated from France to the New World three times before it finally took. No reason that couldn't happen again at some point in the future.
posted by Mitheral at 1:25 PM on November 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

Obviously the important question here is whether or not they're going to include one of those long-necked orange dudes from The Animated Series because come on.

Lt. Arex has three arms and three legs, and you noticed his neck?

the idea of a French captain sounded good on paper but was instantly regretted once Stewart appeared on screen. So they made the least French French captain in history.

He did say 'merde' once in an early episode. And of course there was that regrettable "Frère Jacques" incident.

How much more French* can you get than that?

---------------------------------
* On US teevy, that is.
posted by Herodios at 1:27 PM on November 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

We've had a captain obsessed with tea, coffee, and space-cappuchino. The first order from the next Captain? Dr Pepper, iced.
posted by drezdn at 1:32 PM on November 2, 2015 [8 favorites]

Mountain Dew and Cheetos, surely?
posted by entropicamericana at 1:37 PM on November 2, 2015 [6 favorites]

[surrendering the ship at the drop of a hat joke here]
posted by Naberius at 1:37 PM on November 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

[~~surrendering the ship~~ jettisoning the warp core at the drop of a hat joke here]
posted by alby at 1:41 PM on November 2, 2015 [4 favorites]

Now I'm wondering whether widespread access to transporter technology changes commuting patterns -- why emigrate to Canada when you could transport over in the morning, clock your 9-5 and then by back home at the vineyard in time to put dinner on the table?

More to the point, what percentage of transports result in 'accidents'? How many 'miles' or individual dematerializations between malfunctions resulting in deaths, injuries (yuck), duplications, or sending the travelers to the wrong planet, or a parallel beardiverse?

Would there be traffic jams?
Traffic cops to herd people clear of the platform to make room for the next group and avoid unfortunate (and disgusting) collisions?

Would we need a "Don't drink and energize" campaign? Designated 'energizers' for returning from Mardi Gras?

What about that little data problem: That it'd take more bits than there are atom in the visible universe to store a single person in the pattern buffet? That'd be some traffic jam: step on the platform at 12:05 am 01 January 2415 to get away from the New Years crowd in Times Dilation Square and your turn to be reassembled doesn't come up for another 500 years.

"Sorry I'm late, recognizable civilization, I got hung up in transport. You know how it is. Guys? Guys? Things? . . . "

posted by Herodios at 1:47 PM on November 2, 2015 [5 favorites]

Star Trek Spinerfems

Episode one: Stuff found in Brent's trash can.
posted by dr_dank at 2:00 PM on November 2, 2015 [2 favorites]

> For as much shit as Voyageur gets

Is this some way of explaining the English / French confusion with Picard?
posted by The corpse in the library at 2:03 PM on November 2, 2015 [2 favorites]

"Money doesn't exist in the 24th Century"
-Captain JP

I hear they all the time from Trek fans, and my response is this: "Remember those scenes of Future San Francisco? What determines who lives in those fancy skyscrapers? If you're moving, and there's a hundred people who want your place that's in walking distance of Star Fleet Headquarters, who gets it? What determines whether you get a spacious apartment with a view of the Bay, or a cramped basement den?"

The answers are always interesting.
posted by happyroach at 2:03 PM on November 2, 2015 [3 favorites]

Star Trek: Glengarry Glen Ross

Space(y): the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Free Enterprise. Its endless mission: to exploit strange new worlds, to sell out new life and new civilizations, to boldly grow markets where no man has grown before. You call yourself a Romulan? A-B-C. A-Always, B-Be, C-Cloaking. Always be Cloaking. ALWAYS BE CLOAKING.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 2:05 PM on November 2, 2015 [12 favorites]

Remember those scenes of Future San Francisco? What determines who lives in those fancy skyscrapers?

It's only a model.
posted by a lungful of dragon at 2:06 PM on November 2, 2015 [9 favorites]

For as much shit as Voyageur gets

Pretty sure that Star Trek: Voyageur is that series about the early years of the Klingon tribble fur trade.
posted by thetortoise at 2:09 PM on November 2, 2015 [16 favorites]

How many 'miles' or individual dematerializations between malfunctions resulting in deaths, injuries (yuck), duplications, or sending the travelers to the wrong planet, or a parallel beardiverse?

I would be interested in seeing that data, and I do believe the correct unit of measure would be Miles (or O'Briens). It would be expressed as number which indicates how many accidents in every 100,000 transports. So a normal Miles might be 1 (which would be 1 accident for every 100,000 transports), but during an ion storm a ship might have a Miles of 500, let's say.

What really disturbs me, though, is the existence of the pattern buffer. According to Memory Alpha, the pattern buffer retains things for 420 seconds. That's 7 minutes during which time you could run duplicates of something...or someone. I'm kind of surprised Star Trek hasn't had a Clone Wars issue.
posted by nubs at 2:09 PM on November 2, 2015 [3 favorites]

Stop hating on Voyager. It was a better show than TNG.

Now, at the risk of losing all credibility by being misunderstood here...Let me first state very clearly: THIS IS NOT A DEFENCE OF ENTERPRISE OR A STATEMENT THAT IT IS A QUALITY SHOW. However, Enterprise did one thing better than all the other shows (Except maybe DS9 which I did not watch because I couldn't see anything because they never turned on the lights). That is this: Enterprise made me want it SO BAD. When I watched enterprise, every single episode I ached for our future or intersteller travel. It gnawed on me that we don't have warp drive yet and that I will likely never leave the solar system. All the other series are so far in the future that they're not recognizably US. The Enterprise crew feels like it's really us. They're not THAT advanced. They have digital cameras clunkier than ours. They can't magically translate everything. They haven't worked it all out yet. They're us as we could be if only we were! Why aren't we? Why don't we? I want it so bad and I never wanted it as hard as when as I was watching Enterprise.

Again, that is not a defence of Enterprise and should in no way damage the credibility of my self-evidently true statement that Voyager is a better show than TNG.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 2:13 PM on November 2, 2015 [7 favorites]

Lt. Arex has three arms and three legs, and you noticed his neck?

Well, yeah. That neck was crazy
posted by brianrobot at 2:20 PM on November 2, 2015 [2 favorites]

For as much shit as Voyageur gets

Pretty sure that Star Trek: Voyageur is that series about the early years of the Klingon tribble fur trade

"No, let that one go. He has spirit; one day he may be first officer!"
posted by The Gaffer at 2:27 PM on November 2, 2015 [14 favorites]

I hear they all the time from Trek fans, and my response is this: "Remember those scenes of Future San Francisco? What determines who lives in those fancy skyscrapers? If you're moving, and there's a hundred people who want your place that's in walking distance of Star Fleet Headquarters, who gets it? What determines whether you get a spacious apartment with a view of the Bay, or a cramped basement den?"

The answers are always interesting.

But what are you talking about? There are no basement dens in the Star Trek version of SF. Your answer is just a regurgitation of Lily Sloane's perspective in First Contact, after she prompted Picard to give that very line about fetishization of material wealth. That whole scene was about the difference in world-view between the people of Cochrane's post-WWIII Earth and the people of 24th–25th century Earth. Remember, she said that line because she was asking how the Enterprise-E was made—which reveals her mental models about society. That's how you should read the scene.
posted by polymodus at 2:31 PM on November 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

In DS9 there's a moment where Sisko is telling his son that he used to teleport from San Francisco to New Orleans every night for dinner as though he hadn't left. His son laughs and says "you must have used a fortune in transporter credits!"

Now tell me there's no currency in space. Go on.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 2:31 PM on November 2, 2015 [4 favorites]

Also: what about Star Trek Babies?
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 2:32 PM on November 2, 2015 [8 favorites]

Star Trek: Storage Wars

Each week, a group of salvage experts takes apart a derelict spacecraft, vying to see who can find the most valuable overlooked part/piece of equipment.
posted by nubs at 2:39 PM on November 2, 2015 [4 favorites]

Existing characters I would be willing to watch as Captains of the newest Enterprise:

Geordi LaForge,
B'Elanna Torres (ok, unlikely given she only had a field commission and dropped out of star fleet to become a terrorist),
Seven of Nine,
Icheb (not so much in that I think "there's a character I could see more of...." but more that we never got much sense of the character, so I think there's a good combo of blank-slate-with-a-known-backstory here).
Miral Paris (again, we didn't really meet her in any meaningful sense, but there's a basis to speculate about what she might be like).
Riker...I mean I guess, ok. I don't absolutely hate the idea.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 2:40 PM on November 2, 2015 [2 favorites]

Each week, a group of salvage experts takes apart a derelict spacecraft, vying to see who can find the most valuable overlooked part/piece of equipment.

This would have to be set at the border of the Alpha and Delta quadrants, since that's where Neelix was left and this was essentially Neelix's career before he became chef, morale officer, and diplomat avoid Voyager.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 2:41 PM on November 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

Star Trek: Voyeur would totally have been better than TNG. Talk about "must see TV."
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 2:42 PM on November 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

Existing characters I would be willing to watch as Captains of the newest Enterprise: Geordi LaForge

Star Trek: Voyeur

Too on-the-nose, Leah Brahms?
posted by AndrewInDC at 2:44 PM on November 2, 2015 [7 favorites]

That's not his nose.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 2:45 PM on November 2, 2015 [5 favorites]

Icheb (not so much in that I think "there's a character I could see more of...." but more that we never got much sense of the character, so I think there's a good combo of blank-slate-with-a-known-backstory here).

Icheb's in Star Trek: Renegades. You can see him in this scene.
posted by zarq at 2:57 PM on November 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

Speaking of noses.
posted by zarq at 2:57 PM on November 2, 2015

O'Brien recounts a mission in which he led a shuttlecraft crew deep into Cardassian space to assassinate a renegade and presumed-insane Starfleet captain.
posted by indubitable at 3:00 PM on November 2, 2015 [3 favorites]

Star Trek: Sloppy Seconds
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 3:03 PM on November 2, 2015 [4 favorites]

⌘ + F "Captain Worf" REALLY GUYS NOBODY??? REALLY???
posted by emptythought at 3:04 PM on November 2, 2015 [11 favorites]

How about a Star Trek with force powers and laser swords?
posted by mazola at 3:06 PM on November 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

I know I'm in the minority here, but I actually enjoyed about 75% of Enterprise. Some of it was groan-worthy for sure, but the good stuff was really super good!

Also, Voyager going off the rails is something I hear kind of often, but I feel like it didn't get good until the end of it's run, when it got past the whole monster-of-the-week, Janeway-get-your-gun shtick. I like character-oriented Trek, especially when the writers know who their most talented actors are.

So now that you think I'm detached from reality, does it make a difference that I'm still a TNG girl at heart? Or that I find TOS basically unwatchable? Or that I like DS9 in abstract a lot more than I do in practice? Or that I think Abrams Trek is fine for what it is, even while I acknowledge that it's profoundly silly?

I feel like I'm on the fringe of the Trek constellation here, is what I'm saying. So without reservation, I'm pretty psyched for whatever they're planning to deliver.
posted by WCWedin at 3:07 PM on November 2, 2015 [5 favorites]

I was very excited about the new show, until I heard it was going to be on CBS All Access. Even Fox gave up on trying to make their own thing happen. CBS either needs to buy Netflix, or hold their nose and join the rest of the titans in the Hulu partnership.
posted by ob1quixote at 3:08 PM on November 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

Stop trying to make CBS All Access happen.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 3:09 PM on November 2, 2015 [11 favorites]

How about a Star Trek series that follows up on all the wild and wacky adventures of the other crews? So we get to see what happened with that planet running itself like a bunch of 30s mobsters, check up on the oil slick monster that killed Tasha, etc.

Now I'm just picturing, like, a Star Trek/Hee Haw kind of ensemble variety show.

Hey Armus, what's for supper!

Roasted targ with apple fritters
Boneless cuts of those tribble critters
Fresh strawberries, just in season
And Tasha Yar (for NO REASON)
posted by teponaztli at 3:14 PM on November 2, 2015 [11 favorites]

You can always replicate more replicators, so time/parallelism isn't the bottleneck. Replicators turn energy into matter. Energy is the bottleneck, therefore the Federation's currency is energy. More precisely, energy futures.

And what's still worth buying is provenance. The antique eyeglasses Bones buys for Kirk, a genuine slice of Zek, Sisko's baseball, Picard's flute. It's a universe of hoarders.

What worries me is that the broadcast platform seems to be more important than, oh, you know, having an idea.

The one thing all Trek has in common is Starfleet, and I doubt we're leaving that behind. So I just hope for Bashir and Garak cameos. Low expectations here.
posted by Leon at 3:19 PM on November 2, 2015 [5 favorites]

Just be set in the original universe, just be set in the original universe, just be set in the original universe, just be set in the original universe, just be set in the original universe, just be set in the original universe, just be set in the original universe, just be set in the original universe....
posted by Kevin Street at 3:31 PM on November 2, 2015 [12 favorites]

Star Trek: Sliders
posted by nubs at 3:34 PM on November 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

Haven't seen this so far, so apologies if it's a repeat, but Five Thirty Eight has some demographics thoughts: ‘Star Trek’ Needs This New Show To Win The Next Generation.
posted by immlass at 3:37 PM on November 2, 2015 [3 favorites]

Star Trek: Sliders

Star Trek Sliders are made with tribble meat.
posted by brianrobot at 3:39 PM on November 2, 2015 [5 favorites]

Sees news 'Oh I've never really been a Trek fan but this could be interesting...' Sees who's involved in it: Kurtzman, Orci, and Lindelof... 'NOPE'
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 3:41 PM on November 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

Riker, Riker, Riker!
posted by clavdivs at 3:44 PM on November 2, 2015

Don't you mean "NOPE?"
posted by entropicamericana at 3:44 PM on November 2, 2015 [8 favorites]

I know I'm in the minority here, but I actually enjoyed about 75% of Enterprise. Some of it was groan-worthy for sure, but the good stuff was really super good!

I liked it too. It's not just you. I'm also on team "it was starting to actually get legitimately good and then they canned it". I'm fairly upset about not getting to see the romulan war stuff. I'm not like, firely fan upset, but yea.

Then again, i also liked a lot of Voyager even though it had it's low points. It was capable of being good. And at the same time, i think the high points of Enterprise were higher than those of Voyager, and that it got in to good TNG territory a couple times even.

I've been meaning to come up with some kind of abridged TNG/machete order sort of thing for Enterprise. It has some STINKER episodes, like voyager did, and some of the subplots are SO BORING AND STUPID. I really wish they had never gone there with the whole time travel thing at least in parts.

I just don't know how i feel about it, but it's not super negative. I wish it got another season, and i wish it didn't have that terrible ass ending. Even if they had started and not finished the romulan war and it had ended with a "what if" in everyones head, it would be superior to that start-weak-finish-weak way it exists right now.

More to the point, what percentage of transports result in 'accidents'? How many 'miles' or individual dematerializations between malfunctions resulting in deaths, injuries (yuck), duplications, or sending the travelers to the wrong planet, or a parallel beardiverse?

In my brain-canon, transporters on earth or between in solar system federation outposts(like earth to earth spacedock/starbase that seemingly doesn't have a consistent number, etc) was agonizingly safe and boring. It was beyond commercial aviation levels of safe. The entire environment and transmission system is hardwired, or using entirely reliable wireless links and running completely preprogrammed. I think they even show transport from earth to a station in orbit at least once without someone actively sliding the controls, just by pressing "go".

Memory alpha says "By the mid-24th century, there were only an average of two or three transporter accidents a year across the Federation, yet millions of people were transported every day. "

There's also a few times in episodes where someone sets up a remote transport, and activates it remotely and the computer handles it all. By TNG at least it seemed like having someone there manning the controls was more about handling edge cases and the computers ran on autopilot unless input was needed. And to me it always seemed like the problems arose in "military aviation" sorts of situations where they were transporting through interference, to/from a damaged vessel that may be putting out tons of interference, at the limits of range, or in an area where an active space or ground battle is going on that could interfere(and whose to say there isn't electronic warfare/ECM in the future?).

The statistics mentioned would make it the safest form of transport in the history of humanity. The show just features it operating in a lot of edge case situations because those are interesting, and i bet someone had to click "You're about to transport with X Y and Z problems, are you sure?" on the LCARS terminal every single time. It was shown more than once that the entire freaking ship INCLUDING the transporters is capable of operating completely autonomously, or with one person commanding all functions. I don't think the system would even ALLOW that unless it had an amazing safety record, especially since starfleet seems to take safety more seriously than any other space-navy depicted in the universe.
posted by emptythought at 3:47 PM on November 2, 2015 [5 favorites]

I think the likeliest explanation is that the idea of a French captain sounded good on paper but was instantly regretted once Stewart appeared on screen. So they made the least French French captain in history.

On one of the episodes of the Mission Log podcast, someone involved with TNG (but I can't remember who) mentioned that in early rehearsals they had Patrick Stewart do his lines with a French accent, and it just seemed silly. They abandoned that quickly, but kept him officially French.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 3:47 PM on November 2, 2015 [4 favorites]

"Remember those scenes of Future San Francisco? What determines who lives in those fancy skyscrapers?

I like to think that 300 years into the future after humanity has solved all those pesky little problems, like world hunger or war and there's a weather grid to avert any possible natural disasters. When those things are relics of the past, San Francisco will still be in the midst of a housing crisis.

If the present is anything to go on those fancy skyscrapers will be full of Starfleet bros who won't let anyone build more housing to alleviate a 350 year-old housing crisis. Maybe Mr. Bell could do something about that, though he'll be long dead by then.

But forget about the hypotheticals of a post-scarcity society of a high-rise apartment in SF, what I want to know is how did the human race survive a single generation after the invention of the holodeck. When humans are no longer able to tolerate contact with other humans, preferring instead to "swipe left", how will society adapt? WHERE'S MY DAMNING SOCIAL COMMENTARY ABOUT BEING ADDICTED TO THE INTERNET???
posted by fragmede at 3:47 PM on November 2, 2015 [12 favorites]

When humans are no longer able to tolerate contact with other humans, preferring instead to "swipe left", how will society adapt? WHERE'S MY DAMNING SOCIAL COMMENTARY ABOUT BEING ADDICTED TO THE INTERNET???

Swiping left is so 21st Century. In the future, we'll all be sliding discs to the left into that cone thing.
posted by AndrewInDC at 3:49 PM on November 2, 2015 [9 favorites]

drive a truckload of money out to jscalzi's place, make Redshirts canon
posted by Iris Gambol at 3:58 PM on November 2, 2015 [6 favorites]

The Old Man's War series would make a hell of a Trek replacement /competitor if treated right.
posted by Artw at 4:03 PM on November 2, 2015 [3 favorites]

When humans are no longer able to tolerate contact with other humans, preferring instead to "swipe left", how will society adapt? WHERE'S MY DAMNING SOCIAL COMMENTARY ABOUT BEING ADDICTED TO THE INTERNET???

You're looking for Black Mirror, friend.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 4:07 PM on November 2, 2015 [4 favorites]

WHY DID YOU MAKE HIM FRENCH IF YOU WANTED HIM TO BE ENGLISH.

Patrick Steward talked about this when he was on Marc Maron's WTF a while back, as I recall. I think the gist of it was that his French accent was hilarously Clouseau-like, which kind of ruined the whole gravitas thing, and so they gave up on the idea of him being actually French, name aside, pretty quickly.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 4:10 PM on November 2, 2015 [4 favorites]

Pretty sure that Star Trek: Voyageur is that series about the early years of the Klingon tribble fur trade.

Oh I'd watch this in a heart beat. So many LOLs about pemmican made out of Gagh!
posted by Ashwagandha at 4:12 PM on November 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

Star Trek: Storage Wars

Data (Made from the body they found in Nemesis): YUUUUUUUUUUUPPPP

Riker: (Holds up piece of worthless debris) I can get 5 pieces of gold-pressed latnium for this all day in my shop.
posted by drezdn at 4:12 PM on November 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

The dreamers of tomorrow should be weighing climate change and visiting worlds where the perils of our times are exaggerated then enlightened solutions are presented.

I want a future which is not run by the allocator (from Voyager S7E5) but somehow stops the path we're on.

This seems unlikely given that the rebooted movie started with a mustang ride down a dirt road.

FWIW: my ST summary;

ToS: Cold war peace
TNG: Computers, tech boom/bubble.
DS9: Religious.. didn't watch.
Voyager: Medical tech (bio computers, phages) (Human Genome project was maybe the next boom).
Enterprise: Xenophobic blind trust of military authority(*).

(*) The first season of Enterprise had an episode where a character was tripping, and had a choice of believing their perceptions (and not firing their weapon) or trusting authority, firing and killing someone. The plot reveal at the end was that trusting authority, over their own moral compass, was the correct decision. Fail! Contrast that with "4 lights". Or TNG's first season which had a planet where an arms race killed everyone.
posted by ecco at 4:13 PM on November 2, 2015 [4 favorites]

The economics of Star Trek: best not thought about.

Anyway, I'm excited by the news. Even if the new show sucks, we get a year plus of speculation, gossip, and news. Who's going to be writing it? Who's going to be starring in it? What's the setting? Who are the characters?

The best part: we get to welcome an entirely new creative team (actors, writers, etc.) into the Star Trek family.

I'm finally getting my Trekkie in 1986 moment and I am going to enjoy the hell out of it.
posted by Automocar at 4:26 PM on November 2, 2015 [2 favorites]

DS9: Religious.. didn't watch.

As quasi-military science fiction, I think it's fairly easy to see the Star Trek series through at least DS9 as direct reactions to the geopolitical environment of the day. ToS sets the Federation and Klingons at odds in a space Cold War and takes the analogy straight through to The Undiscovered Country. TNG in the late-'80s to mid-'90s has inward-focused Klingons that can still be thought of as an analogy to Russia, and places the Romulans (China) front and center as a more active and threatening power. In this sense, in focusing on a Bajoran society emerging from occupation and angling to join the Federation, DS9 takes its cue more from places like Bosnia, Afghanistan, and the former Soviet republics.
posted by AndrewInDC at 4:31 PM on November 2, 2015 [6 favorites]

Or just have someone buy the rights to do Babylon 5 over again with a budget and also after he does a rough-plot script JMS has to hand over to Whedon or someone else who has heard human beings speak to one another.

This is the perfect time to link JMS's reboot proposal for Star Trek [pdf]. Woulda been much more interesting than anything Abrams could come up with.
posted by honestcoyote at 4:33 PM on November 2, 2015 [2 favorites]

Does Kirk get bitten by a Shatner-Totem?
posted by Artw at 4:35 PM on November 2, 2015

If they want to keep the reflection of current affairs thing going, they'll need a show where the Klingons are a crumbling empire but resurgent military threat, while the Romulans have become a vital trade partner and an increasingly influential power in the quadrant. Holographic technology is transforming everyday life in unpredictable ways. Meanwhile there's some kind of apocalyptic threat that everyone is ignoring...
posted by Kevin Street at 4:36 PM on November 2, 2015 [10 favorites]

Sunspace damage caused by Warp Speed, as seen in that one episode everyone ignores.
posted by Artw at 4:39 PM on November 2, 2015 [7 favorites]

I'd like to see more of the old school races -- the Andorians and Orions and Gorn and such. They were the best part of Enterprise.

And as a reflection of current events Bajoran religious fundamentalists are rampaging around the Quadrant.
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 4:40 PM on November 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

There's actually some pretty cool stuff in Enterprise after they say "fuck it"and let it be Trek. Pity about the preceding three seasons.
posted by Artw at 4:43 PM on November 2, 2015 [4 favorites]

(Likewise Voyager can be quite good when it actually remembers its own premise.)
posted by Artw at 4:44 PM on November 2, 2015 [6 favorites]

If the present is anything to go on those fancy skyscrapers will be full of Starfleet bros who won't let anyone build more housing to alleviate a 350 year-old housing crisis. Maybe Mr. Bell could do something about that, though he'll be long dead by then.

My understanding was that large parts of earth had been preserved and maintained by the advanced technology/replicator sourced materials/etc, but that not all that many people actually lived on earth anymore. A huge number of people live on starbases, starfleet ships, operate their own shipping/mining/etc vessels or on companies ships, live on colonies, have moved to other worlds(they totally show humans on vulcan/betazed/etc) not to mention the people sort of "outside the system" operating the merchant ships or living places like DS9.

I wish there was a solid figure on this, but it always seemed like earths population both never recovered from that giant war, and also that the general human population existed more off-world than on in the universe. Remember, there's a large population on mars and the moon for example.

It always seemed like earth and sector 001 in general were sort of a seat of power and symbolic thing, rather than the site of any significant population in the grand scheme of things. There's nearly a trillion people in the federation.
posted by emptythought at 5:05 PM on November 2, 2015 [3 favorites]

(Likewise Voyager can be quite good when it actually remembers its own premise.)

I think that only made me madder about Voyager, really: the fact that when it was on, it was *on*. Living Witness is one of my favorite episodes of Trek, right on the same show that brought us Threshold.

In a way, I'm sort of relieved by the certainty that the new show won't have those highs - at least I won't feel compelled to sift through it looking for them.
posted by mordax at 5:09 PM on November 2, 2015 [6 favorites]

We really don't know how many people live on Earth, vs. the rest of the Federation. It's one of those things they've kept undefined, probably so future writers aren't boxed in to specific kinds of stories.

We do know that there are other human worlds much like Earth, and some of them are centuries old and members of the Federation in their own right, like Alpha Centauri and Vega. So there's probably a lot of people moving around between the human worlds much like people travel between continents today. Then there are many smaller, more recent colonies and enclaves on other Federation worlds where non-humans are the majority species.
posted by Kevin Street at 5:19 PM on November 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

It's probably just boring.
posted by Artw at 5:20 PM on November 2, 2015

I liked the way Leckie's far future Ancillary Justice phrased that same idea:

Nearly everywhere I’ve been, popular wisdom has it that the location of humanity’s original planet is unknown, mysterious. In fact it isn’t, as anyone who troubles to read on the subject will discover, but it is very, very, very far away from nearly anywhere, and not a tremendously interesting place.

posted by Ian A.T. at 5:36 PM on November 2, 2015 [5 favorites]

Meanwhile there's some kind of apocalyptic threat that everyone is ignoring...

The global warming allegory has already been made. High warp speeds are breaching holes in subspace. In TNG the federation established a speed limit of Warp 6, except in dire emergencies. So the analog now would be that everyone is ignoring that and yelling that everyone else should obey the speed limit first.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 5:40 PM on November 2, 2015 [3 favorites]

As long as Tom Hardy isn't playing a clone of Captain Picard, I'm good with most things.
posted by crossoverman at 5:45 PM on November 2, 2015 [2 favorites]

If the new Captain isn't genderqueer and pansexual, I'm going to riot.
posted by crossoverman at 5:56 PM on November 2, 2015 [4 favorites]

If it's got anything to do with the revised timeline, I might check it out just because I'm such a Trekkie that I can't not. But that Nu-Trek stuff hates Trekkies like me nearly as much as I hate it, so I doubt I'd stick with it for very long.

Abrams and company approached the Trek universe with contempt. Abrams was openly dismissive of the franchise because there was too much boring talking and not enough kabooms, and there is a lot of stuff in the 2009 movie where his actual loathing for the franchise and its fans is crystal clear. He blew up Vulcan and Romulus, arguably erased the entire Trek continuity after Enterprise and included more subtle horrors like a mention of "Captain Archer's prized beagle" being lost in some time warp for decades. I wasn't even an Enterprise fan, and even I cringed at such a random act of sci-fi cruelty being inflicted on poor little Porthos. That was Abrams saying, "Hey, hardcore Trekkies? Like, the people who even watched Enterprise? Here's a piss in the chops, just for you!" He was circling back to Enterprise, the one part of the continuity he hadn't attempted to erase, and making sure that we knew he despised it as well.

I liked Star Trek into Darkness a little better because it wasn't so overflowing with Trek hate and "extreme" stuff like Kirk banging green chicks and rocking out to the Beastie Boys. It still wasn't very good, but I didn't sit through the whole thing with a sneer on my face. I figure he'll do better with Star Wars because he grew up actually enjoying that franchise and those are clearly movies he wanted to make, so presumably we won't see Tattooine blown to chunks or hear some offhanded reference to R2-D2 being ripped apart and sold for scrap. Maybe he'll include some inside joke where we see Jar Jar has been made into a rug or something, but that's fine because the Star Wars prequels are bad in ways that make even the worst of Trek look fan-freaking-tastic.

Also, can we lay off the Lindeloff hate already? Whatever you thought of the ending of Lost, he co-wrote a lot of the episodes that made you love the show enough to be disappointed by the ending, and while I've yet to see it the critics are raving about that Leftovers show. Even if the guy isn't always great, he is at least sometimes great. (I credit him with scaling back the aggro jock nonsense in STID and making the characters feel a little more real. It was still a cruddy movie, but it felt like it was trying to bring us actual characters at least.)
posted by Ursula Hitler at 5:59 PM on November 2, 2015 [7 favorites]

Also, can we lay off the Lindeloff hate already?

Nope.
posted by crossoverman at 6:14 PM on November 2, 2015 [11 favorites]

I did like the dog joke.

If the new Captain isn't genderqueer and pansexual, I'm going to riot.

Yes, yes, we've mentioned the Culture already.
posted by Artw at 6:26 PM on November 2, 2015 [2 favorites]

Also, can we lay off the Lindeloff hate already?

Nope.

Seconded.
posted by Artw at 6:27 PM on November 2, 2015 [5 favorites]

Nope.

Seriously, to what end? It's just... so... tired. The guy didn't kill your daddy.

You know he's not untalented. I mean, The Constant? The Lindeloff hate is taking on this weird, ritualistic quality. It's almost creepy. So, you were disappointed by the finale of a show of his that you'd really enjoyed once, and Prometheus didn't quite work. A pox on his house!
posted by Ursula Hitler at 6:31 PM on November 2, 2015

Eh, I heard him on some podcast talking about how it was just impossible to do SF plots that make sense and anyone that tried was a big old nerd. Fuck that guy.
posted by Artw at 6:33 PM on November 2, 2015 [10 favorites]

When I first heard the Enterprise theme song, I knew that show was doomed from the get-go

Oh, god, that's awful!
They played that every time?

There's even an extended version!
posted by madajb at 6:34 PM on November 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

Well, it's not like The one for Firefly is any better and everyone loves that.
posted by Artw at 6:39 PM on November 2, 2015 [3 favorites]

While the Enterprise song was awful, the opening sequence really stoked that aching/longing that Enterprise always made me feel. YES! That's right...there was a time when just crossing the Mediterranean by boat was a huge deal, and we went from that sailing around the Cape of Good Hope, and then across the Atlantic, then circumnavigating the earth, then flight, space, orbit, the moon....The stars are next....when do we finally get the stars? Why don't we have the stars yet? I want the stars.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 6:40 PM on November 2, 2015 [6 favorites]

Seriously, to what end? It's just... so... tired. The guy didn't kill your daddy.

It's kinda hard to reconcile you taking this line of argument in defense of Lindelof when it is literally following up on your own comment denouncing J.J. Abrams' Star Trek work in a way that indicates you take it very personally, as if he did it specifically with the intent of hurting you in particular.
posted by tocts at 6:41 PM on November 2, 2015

Nope. indeed. My hatred of Lindelhof has nothing to do with Lost. I gave up on that show after season one. When you have writing credits for World War Z, Star Trek Into Darkness, Cowboys & Aliens, AND Prometheus in your CV, your reputation as a hack is pretty much written in stone.
posted by Ber at 6:51 PM on November 2, 2015 [4 favorites]

I would watch the shit out of a Captain Worf show
posted by trunk muffins at 6:52 PM on November 2, 2015 [10 favorites]

When I first heard the Enterprise theme song, I knew that show was doomed from the get-go

It sounds better when you've been rubbing yourself and your crewmate with decontaimination gel. (I lied, it's still awful)
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 7:00 PM on November 2, 2015 [2 favorites]

TNG reboot! Starring Matthew McConaughey as Picard, and Zach Galifinakis as Riker.

With Zooey Deschanel as Manic Pixie Dream Q!
posted by ActingTheGoat at 7:01 PM on November 2, 2015 [8 favorites]

It's kinda hard to reconcile you taking this line of argument in defense of Lindelof when it is literally following up on your own comment denouncing J.J. Abrams' Star Trek work in a way that indicates you take it very personally, as if he did it specifically with the intent of hurting you in particular.

Abrams doesn't know me, and obviously wasn't trying to piss off me in particular. But fans of the first few decades of Trek? Yes, he very clearly dislikes us, and dislikes the Trek that existed before he got his mitts on it. The dislike is there in plenty of his on-the-record comments and it's a constant, ugly thing in the 2009 film. I don't think anybody is saying that Lindelof hates these franchises he's working on or that he went into these franchises hating their fans and wanting to annoy and alienate them, although he may well be coming to that since he's become geekdom's latest whipping boy.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 7:13 PM on November 2, 2015 [3 favorites]

If you watch the Enterprise intro with no audio, it is a fantastic way of establishing the setting in an artistically brilliant way

If you watch it with the audio, it becomes Now That's What I Call 1998 Beer Commercial
posted by DoctorFedora at 7:13 PM on November 2, 2015 [17 favorites]

This is the perfect time to link JMS's reboot proposal for Star Trek [pdf]. Woulda been much more interesting than anything Abrams could come up with.

Ok this is cool, but it also scares the shit out of me because it's way too easy for me to see that sort of overarching long plot of the mystical super space overlords being turned in to some TERRIBLE Lost-esque religious thing. My faith in a tv show presented with such an obvious ring to grasp of that sort of failure and not taking the meandering no clear ending BSG style long road to failure is just TOO LOW. The only way i'd even accept this could maybe be good is if they hammered out the pilot, final episode(or really even like, the last six episodes of the final season), and maybe 2 or 3 important plot-carrier-episodes a season before they shot a single scene, leaving only the other ones to be filled in.

They sort of cover this in that plan, but it leaves way too much room for failure. Babylon 5 at least attempted to get this right. It seriously needs to be a miniseries style capsule even more than they suggest.
posted by emptythought at 7:15 PM on November 2, 2015

The intro for the mirror universe episode is just flat out great.
posted by Artw at 7:15 PM on November 2, 2015 [7 favorites]

Captain Naomi Wildman!

Also, Star Trek: Daystrom Institute, which is a bunch of scientists messing around creating wacky hi-jinks while catering to the Federation's technical demands (basically "Better Off TED" in space).
posted by daisystomper at 7:16 PM on November 2, 2015 [5 favorites]

ActingTheGoat: " With Zooey Deschanel as Manic Pixie Dream Q!"

You can just say Q.
posted by boo_radley at 7:18 PM on November 2, 2015 [10 favorites]

Fair enough
posted by ActingTheGoat at 7:21 PM on November 2, 2015 [2 favorites]

Also NCIS: Alpha Quadrant
posted by daisystomper at 7:22 PM on November 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

..... on a on a desolate planet, Vagra II, Tasha Yar slowly rises up out of a pool of black goo. She crawls to dry land and while brushing the last remnants of space goo off her uniform takes out her communicator and tries to contact the Enterprise. "What the f..??!" she exclaims as nobody answers. She survives long enough to hail a passing space freighter with her communicator and then proceeds to plot a meaningless revenge upon her former shipmates who left her behind....
posted by AGameOfMoans at 7:26 PM on November 2, 2015 [13 favorites]

The thing about the many proprietary VOD/streaming options that have popped up is that almost none of them work outside of the USA.

I'm curious if this CBS All Access thing will mean this ends up on a Canadian streaming site, or if it will end up like Powers or Community season 6 and just never be legally seen outside of the US
posted by thecjm at 7:33 PM on November 2, 2015 [2 favorites]

On one of the episodes of the Mission Log podcast, someone involved with TNG (but I can't remember who) mentioned that in early rehearsals they had Patrick Stewart do his lines with a French accent, and it just seemed silly. They abandoned that quickly, but kept him officially French.

I have friends who speak English as a second language with native accents; one friend grew up speaking Arabic, but speaks English with a more classically "English" accent than most English people.

I always assumed Picard was similar: he learned English with an English accent. What didn't make sense was when he went home, and his brother had a French accent but his nephew had an English one. It would have made sense if his whole family also had English accents (maybe were French anglophones) or all but Picard had French accents (ie he trained his accent as an adult).
posted by jb at 7:47 PM on November 2, 2015 [3 favorites]

If the new Captain isn't genderqueer and pansexual, I'm going to riot.
posted by crossoverman

That was Torchwood.
posted by jb at 7:55 PM on November 2, 2015 [10 favorites]

Too Many Kirks
posted by furtive at 8:17 PM on November 2, 2015 [8 favorites]

Keeping up with the Cardassians
posted by Kabanos at 8:30 PM on November 2, 2015 [14 favorites]

The Priceline is Right (hosted by the Shat)
posted by Kabanos at 8:34 PM on November 2, 2015

Starfleet Academy Musical
posted by Kabanos at 8:37 PM on November 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

Ferengi Junior High
posted by Kabanos at 8:38 PM on November 2, 2015 [5 favorites]

If the present is anything to go on those fancy skyscrapers will be full of Starfleet bros who won't let anyone build more housing to alleviate a 350 year-old housing crisis.

I actually assume everybody on Earth lives underground, in holocubes that by regulation, are of exactly the same volume, have the same power demands, and give exactly the same level of amenities. All those skyscrapers above ground? that's just to impress the tourists.
posted by happyroach at 8:39 PM on November 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

I assume those skyscrapers are modular. Basically, each apartment like a giant lego brick. The location of your lego brick apartment moves around, from higher to lower flowers, bay view to mountain view, sometimes at ground level or underground, and of course sometimes right out of San Francisco into San Jose or something. All this rotating keeps it fair, since everyone is the penthouse suite sometimes, and everyone is commuting in from San Jose sometimes.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 9:26 PM on November 2, 2015

It's very simple. The Federation finally built the Manhattan to San Francisco's Brooklyn. (Previously)
posted by Apocryphon at 9:48 PM on November 2, 2015

Actually, I like the end of LOST. That's not my problem with Lindelof. My problem with Lindelof is shit like this:

“It’s almost impossible to, for example, not have a final set piece where the fate of the free world is at stake. You basically work your way backward and say, ‘Well, the Avengers aren’t going to save Guam, they’ve got to save the world.’ Did Star Trek Into Darkness need to have a gigantic starship crashing into San Francisco? I’ll never know. But it sure felt like it did.”

I mean, he's not the only perpetrator of this kind of nonsense on the big screen but he sure does like to talk about how he writes this stuff without caring about how stupid he sounds. I mean, if he respected the characters and new what human drama was, he wouldn't have needed to crash a ship into San Francisco bay.

Someone upthread mentioned World War Z as one of his terrible scripts. And again, he tried to write a big finale for it. Tried to outdo himself and the rest of the film and every other blockbuster ever. It wasn't working, so Drew Goddard came along and wrote a much smaller finale, which works because it's about the characters and not blowing shit up.
posted by crossoverman at 9:54 PM on November 2, 2015 [6 favorites]

There was a NextGen episode where we saw an alternate-universe Riker from a timeline where the Borg had won and the crew of the Enterprise were unshaven refugees. You could set a whole show there, with the only payoff being "will the crew still be around next week". It would be a lot more exciting than more bumpy-forehead-du-jour nonsense.
posted by Joe in Australia at 9:56 PM on November 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

It worked for Battlestar Galactica.
posted by ActingTheGoat at 10:08 PM on November 2, 2015 [3 favorites]

There was a NextGen episode where we saw an alternate-universe Riker from a timeline where the Borg had won and the crew of the Enterprise were unshaven refugees.

"Parallels"
posted by Chrysostom at 10:17 PM on November 2, 2015 [2 favorites]

*SIGH*

As someone who just yesterday finally got around to buying TOS on DVD (and all of the films), I just can't get excited about this news.

As people have said, the presser was so corporate and lacking in any detail you just know the early meetings are going to be a hodge-podge of weaselwords and focus groups.

It feels as if they're going into this with not much more than a date and a title: Star Trek.

I've kicked around a few ideas, and here's what I have come up with:
Four interlocking series, 8-10 episodes each, with a common theme running through them, set across various eras:
Admiral Sulu's Excelsior
Captain Worf
Something set 80 years after TNG-VOY

and.... I'm not quite sure. I'd like to see the ENT era (maybe the Romulan War) or Renegades...

Either way, you get your old and new, you don't have the fat for much time travel (and no holodeck episodes), you can do bottle episodes... chuck in new characters for every demographic, and away you go.

Hell, I'd even do it backwards. Start with a mystery in the future and peel it back over the series until you end up in the TOS era.
posted by Mezentian at 11:30 PM on November 2, 2015 [3 favorites]

while the Romulans have become a vital trade partner and an increasingly influential power in the quadrant

...while expanding their empire's territorial claims by creating artificial planets in the Neutral Zone, which are not recognized as valid by the Federation, prompting close flybys from starships patrolling in the region?
posted by Pryde at 12:13 AM on November 3, 2015 [5 favorites]

It practically writes itself!
posted by Kevin Street at 1:05 AM on November 3, 2015 [3 favorites]

You had to go talk about the Enterprise theme song. Now that is all I can hear in my brain and it won't stop and I'd really like to go to bed now but the hypnopoppypseudofeels are not going to let me. Oh no. I tried watching a few choice season 1 episodes, but that did not soothe the earworm.

Deploying Countermeasures Now

I really love Enterprise. I'm glad I'm not the only one. Love DS9. Liked and occasionally loved Voyager, once Kes was out.

I also love Fringe, but you could break axles off several 18 wheelers in the plotholes. The mighty power of John Noble's magnetism just made me not care. But I saw Cowboys and Aliens in the theater, and The Island, and the first two Transformers movies, and I have very little hope for NuTrek: Phan Pander Blast with mandatory media money grab. So I'll just enjoy being mad by bathing in the nerdrage of people more clever than I.

NCIS: Bajor - DS9 is now without a security officer, so Kira is guided by an Orb vision to the top secret Starfleet Brain Trust Vaults, wherein resides a jar containing the brain of LJ Gibbs. Using black market Borg parts he is resurrected, he then subdues Quark with laconic charm and after some time is elected the new Kai. At which point, devout Bajorans now read Pagh by slapping the back of the head and squinting. Gibbs' devotion to duty over so many centuries also inspires predictably treacherous loyalty from the Cardassians, but he always sees them coming and only gets shot or blown up once a season. After a chat with Dr. Bashir or waking up from a coma-communion with Mike Franks, he lets them live every time because he knows they're too useful to exterminate. Besides, the damn plasma rifle won't work because it is set to stun and he can't get anyone to set it to max power for him.
posted by monopas at 1:22 AM on November 3, 2015 [3 favorites]

So it seems like Kurtzman is just producing and they are looking for a head writer/showrunner. Bryan Fuller has said running a Trek show would be a dream job, after starting his career with DS9 and VOY. Give it to Bryan! I know he's already got two shows, but you know!

I think the new series will have to be concurrent with the new films, though I guess crossovers don't really depend on that. I can't imagine they won't try to get a guest appearance by Chris Pine or Zachary Quinto - and if they crossover with the original Trek universe, you gotta think Patrick Stewart will show up.

I really just want a starship boldly going, exploring strange new worlds and civilisations. I'd like some sense of ongoing character development, though I don't need ongoing story arcs or mysteries necessarily. I think the one thing that really dates Next Gen is that each episode feels like it's got a reset button. No one seems to suffer episode to episode; sometimes, but rarely.

I'd like it to be optimistic. I'd like it to feel adventurous but tell strong science fiction stories. I'm not asking for a lot, am I?
posted by crossoverman at 2:44 AM on November 3, 2015

I would watch a Bryan Fuller Trek series until my eyes bled.
posted by Justinian at 2:53 AM on November 3, 2015 [5 favorites]

Star Trek- TMG (The Millennial Generation)

Deep in the throws of a 10 year recession Cpt. Jean-Luc Picard and Data are brought out of retirement to command the Enterprise X now crewed solely by unpaid Federation interns. While Data struggles to reprogram the Holodeck for something called "Foosball", Picard becomes intensely annoyed in finding that the replicator will no longer produce "Earl Gray hot" but instead materializes endless cups of Chai Latte.

Together the crew face their greatest challenge as they attempt to monetize the Borg by stealthily placing sub-space video cameras into cube ships and transmitting back imagery to be compiled into a new Federation reality series, "Oh Those Borg! "
posted by AGameOfMoans at 3:09 AM on November 3, 2015 [5 favorites]

If you want to bring in the big Star Trek races sometimes, you could have the Delta Quadrant starting to open up like a frontier after the scattering of the Borg.

drezdn, maybe a post-war reconstruction show... quite a few Voyager episodes seem to suggest that even after their dissolution, the scattered remnants of the Borg would attempt to reconstruct their old order. You could have several warring "tribes" of Borg faux-collectives (fauxllectives?) fighting over the Delta quadrant while other Delta quadrant races try to turn the disorder to their own advantage and come out on top. tl;dr, basically the Kazon but not stupid.
posted by duffell at 3:48 AM on November 3, 2015 [3 favorites]

Zombies overrun the Trek universe in The Warping Dead.

Wesley Crusher is The Last Starfleeter

Captain Janeway is on a mission to the early 21st century and must infiltrate a women's prison.
posted by humanfont at 5:27 AM on November 3, 2015 [8 favorites]

fragmede: ""Money doesn't exist in the 24th Century"
-Captain JP"

RobotHero: "Scotty, you just earned your pay for the week!" - Captain James T. Kirk

Just because Kirk says it, doesn't mean its literally true Scotty gets paid, it could easily be an outdated figure of speech. More significantly, its the 23rd century when Kirk says it, so its not relevant to Picard's later statement.
posted by biffa at 6:06 AM on November 3, 2015 [1 favorite]

Seriously, to what end? It's just... so... tired. The guy [Lindelof] didn't kill your daddy.

Well he kills Kirk in STID, and since Kirk is (1) a time traveller and (2) a total slapper, he could have fathered any one of us.
posted by biffa at 6:09 AM on November 3, 2015 [4 favorites]

Man, I wish I could get excited about this like I was excited back before the reboot film came out and Zach Quinto's spocky face was my desktop background for about four months but I can't help but feel like this is the final nail in the coffin of my 2nd favorite scifi franchise of all time being wrested violently out of my hands. Realistically, there won't be another Star Trek show, or movie, that does to my brain or heart the things that oldTrek did to me. A lot of that was the history, the expansiveness of the universe, which is why ST:FF was so exciting to me as a premise, and why I've never really recovered from the 2009 film. Unless it's set in the old continuity, it's just not the same. And this won't be.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 6:19 AM on November 3, 2015 [5 favorites]

It's worth pointing out that the movie rights and the television rights aren't held by the same studios so there's a good possibility it won't be set in the new universe and a good possibility there won't be any crossovers.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 6:21 AM on November 3, 2015 [3 favorites]

I think the likeliest explanation is that the idea of a French captain sounded good on paper but was instantly regretted once Stewart appeared on screen. So they made the least French French captain in history.

If we have no problem accepting Sean Connery as a Soviet sea captain, there can certainly be no problem accepting Patrick Stewart as a French one. Their respective awesomeness far outweighs any faults in the characters.
posted by Capt. Renault at 6:26 AM on November 3, 2015 [4 favorites]

I will eat my hat if Bad Robot isn't involved in this, particularly given the names attached.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 6:31 AM on November 3, 2015

If you want to push the modern political situation out to Trek, you could use the Breen as the North Korea stand in.
posted by drezdn at 6:59 AM on November 3, 2015 [1 favorite]

yasaman said:

A brief but by no means complete list of things I require from a new Star Trek show:
-list of smart things

There are cubic parsecs of these subjects covered deeply in some of the Star Trek novels. The Titan series series in particular, in addition to focusing on The Riker and the naughty goings-on with his wife/colleague Deanna, has plenty of plenty weird alien aliens, queer characters, cross-species sexytimes, and snarky, liberated Ferengi females.

I would hope that whoever produces the new Star Trek series would tap the talents of the most excellent writers, such as Christopher L. Bennett, Michael Martin, and David Mack, who have written very good Star Trek novels over the years. But I know that's a stretch.
posted by the matching mole at 8:05 AM on November 3, 2015

I'd love to see a Trek series that resists the temptation to do time travel stories, alternative reality stories, Holodeck stories or have any god-like characters.
posted by octothorpe at 8:15 AM on November 3, 2015 [1 favorite]

Yeah, but..."Parallels", "Yesterday's Enterprise", "Tapestry".... Those are some of my favorite episodes of TNG.

And what about "City on the Edge of Forever" from TOS?
posted by Chrysostom at 8:33 AM on November 3, 2015 [2 favorites]

I think we just have to put some limits down. The writers get:

-one Holodeck story per season, noted and advertised well in advance (so you can skip it if needed);
-one alternate reality every 2 seasons;
-one time travel story every 3 seasons;
-one godlike character every 4 seasons;
posted by nubs at 8:39 AM on November 3, 2015 [7 favorites]

And what about "City on the Edge of Forever" from TOS?

I always thought "Edith Keeler Must Die" would be a great name for a Trek Metal band.

Also, Trek Metal needs to be a genre. Can we get on that, hive?
posted by duffell at 8:40 AM on November 3, 2015

Nothing but Bele and Lokai, every episode is Bele and Lokai.
posted by The corpse in the library at 8:42 AM on November 3, 2015

It's a shame Majel Barrett-Roddenberry is no longer with us... we could have gotten Star Trek: the Fifth House of Betazed, a part-royal-court-drama, part-real-housewives series featuring Lwaxana Troi.
posted by duffell at 8:47 AM on November 3, 2015 [3 favorites]

Chrysostom: "Yeah, but..."Parallels", "Yesterday's Enterprise", "Tapestry".... Those are some of my favorite episodes of TNG.

And what about "City on the Edge of Forever" from TOS?"

City is great but you can only do that a few times before the show turns into Dr. Who. And I don't remember if I've seen any of those TNG episodes, that whole show just blends together in my head into one big beige/pastel blur. I just never could warm up to that series at all.
posted by octothorpe at 8:48 AM on November 3, 2015

Also, City on the Edge of Forever has this scene.

NEVER FORGET
posted by duffell at 8:49 AM on November 3, 2015

Currently watching DS9 for the first time, and it comes so close to everything I want from Star Trek, I'd be happy if the premise of New Trek was just "like DS9 only in a different setting, maybe with a ship or something".

My #1 request would be all long story arcs and no standalone throwaway episodes. It seems like all the worst episodes from all the Treks (except TOS, which I've never been able to watch) fit the Lame Whodunit template : brief intro; crew identifies Big Problem; commercial break; crew struggles trying to figure out Big Problem while Big Problem gets worse; commercial break; we find out the cause of Big Problem, which crew still hasn't figured out; commercial break; we then spend the rest of the episode waiting for the crew to figure out something we already know, with a few commercial breaks interspersed. Ugh. Please, none of that. Long story arcs are what modern "new Golden Age" TV viewers expect from our shows, so please give us that.

Also, please please please please please no technobabble. This is something that BSG gets right : use the technology for plot devices and set pieces and THAT'S IT. GET ON WITH IT. The tech (or the crew figuring out how to jerry rig some piece of tech) should never be a the center of attention or deus ex machina. We don't care about some fake made-up tech. We care about the characters. We want to see them struggle, do heroic things, grow, change, learn, etc. Fuck the tech. Nobody cares. No important plot point should be solved by tech. It should be solved by the characters doing something interesting that we care about, preferably growing in some small way in the process.

I guess my favorite thing about DS9 is that, through a combination of factors, we get the feeling that DS9 is a real place and the characters have real lives outside of their jobs. We learn things about their characters that don't directly relate to the performance of their jobs. TNG was always so sterile, the characters so perfect and so defined by their jobs, it made their world seem a bit 2D. So yeah, more side details, in-between moments, more "messy reality" poking its way into main action of the show.
posted by panama joe at 8:51 AM on November 3, 2015 [14 favorites]

nubs: "
-one Holodeck story per season, noted and advertised well in advance (so you can skip it if needed);
-one alternate reality every 2 seasons;
-one time travel story every 3 seasons;
-one godlike character every 4 seasons;"

But that would mean we'd only get the defeat of a god like character using time travel in an alternate realities' holodeck once every twelve seasons.
posted by Mitheral at 9:12 AM on November 3, 2015 [7 favorites]

duffell: Also, Trek Metal needs to be a genre. Can we get on that, hive?

Allow me to introduce Portland's very own StovoKor.
posted by dr_dank at 9:48 AM on November 3, 2015

But that would mean we'd only get the defeat of a god like character using time travel in an alternate realities' holodeck once every twelve seasons.

Yes, but the build up to it will be fantastic.
posted by nubs at 10:50 AM on November 3, 2015 [3 favorites]

>City is great but you can only do that a few times before the show turns into Dr. Who

Well maybe one really good time ...
posted by AGameOfMoans at 10:51 AM on November 3, 2015 [1 favorite]

I love me some golden age serialized story telling, but good self-contained episodic television is often underrated nowadays. I still love dipping into a random old episodes of Star Trek or an X-Files MotW ep. They're like comfort food.

Old episodes of Babylon 5 or Battlestar Galactica (both series I also loved) don't have that same feeling--I can't go back and rewatch just one. I'd be happy with a nice balance between short and long term arcs. DS9 did that reasonably well, as did other long running series like Stargate.

I'd be happy with a new Star Trek being a show with a status quo that slowly shifts season by season, rather than constant narrative upheavals for dramatic sake. Don't get me wrong, many shows that do that are great, but not all sci fi shows need to go that route.

My one key requirement for a new series to feel like real Star Trek: It should have a hopeful vision for the future.
posted by Pryde at 10:59 AM on November 3, 2015 [9 favorites]

Here's a wishlist I can endorse:

My Next Trek Wish List:

1. Next Trek wish-list: Actually on television rather than exploiting ST fanbase to fluff digital sideline service.
2. Next Trek wish-list: Actually a science fiction series rather than a military action-adventure soap opera about masculine anxieties.
3. Next Trek wish-list: Queer woman of color as captain. Oh, hell, just please a future with queers, women, POC, and non-human majority crew.
4. Next Trek wish-list: An earnest progressive show, opposed to racist patriarchal capitalism, however fraught individual episodes may be.
5. Next Trek wish-list: Only a history-making show honors ST history: episodes should scare TV execs and make audiences gasp at its audacity.
6. Next Trek wish-list: We should get a richer look at the world of the Federation apart from Star Fleet. What are the non-militarists like?
7. Next-Trek wish-list: More Vulcans. More sexy, sexy Vulcans. Vulcans in their underpants.
8. Next Trek wish-list: No Big Bads -- the enemies are ignorance, fear, miscommunication, error. Not one super-villain revenge plot. Not one.
9. Next Trek wish-list: Understand Roddenberry's vision and commit to it. If you can't: nobody is making you do Star Trek, do something else.
10. Next Trek wish-list: Nnedi Okorafor, Bruce Sterling, Starhawk, Nalo Hopkinson, KimStanleyRobinson & Becky Chambers should write episodes.

posted by vibratory manner of working at 10:59 AM on November 3, 2015 [10 favorites]

10. Next Trek wish-list:

Peter Watts
posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:08 AM on November 3, 2015 [1 favorite]

Next Trek wish-list: Actually a science fiction series rather than a military action-adventure soap opera about masculine anxieties.

But to be honest, the whole reason I watch Trek is because I love character-centered military soaps about masculine anxieties and am not all that interested in science fiction as such Oh erm sorry did I say something? I love SF of course the harder the better something about Peter Watts here
posted by thetortoise at 11:09 AM on November 3, 2015 [1 favorite]

I would like to point out for the record that I wrote that comment without previewing, I swear to God
posted by thetortoise at 11:09 AM on November 3, 2015 [1 favorite]

I really don't think we're getting that network TV Rifters series.
posted by Artw at 11:13 AM on November 3, 2015 [1 favorite]

It'd be cheap to produce! Pretty much one set!
posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:40 AM on November 3, 2015 [1 favorite]

You don't even have to light it!
posted by Artw at 11:43 AM on November 3, 2015 [1 favorite]

vibratory manner of working: "Next Trek wish-list: Queer woman of color as captain. Oh, hell, just please a future with queers, women, POC, and non-human majority crew."

The last part is really expensive. Though it would be great to regularly see non-bipedal and non-bilaterally symmetric aliens or some variation in height and or mass. Why no race, even in the rubber forehead style, of aliens only 4' tall or over 8' tall.
posted by Mitheral at 12:12 PM on November 3, 2015 [1 favorite]

Peter Watts' Blindsight vampires vs the Borg (in their Borg cubes).

Total one-sided slaughter.
posted by duffell at 12:40 PM on November 3, 2015

Hope they took their anti-euclidians.

Also both sides have their perceptual glitch vulns there.
posted by Artw at 12:45 PM on November 3, 2015

Next Trek wish-list: Nnedi Okorafor, Bruce Sterling, Starhawk, Nalo Hopkinson, KimStanleyRobinson & Becky Chambers should write episodes.

Ann Leckie because the gender of characters need not be obvious.
John Scalzi, but only for non-star cast stories.
"James Corey", because sometimes you really should have cosmic plots.
Walter Jon Williams, because John M Ford is no longer available.
Nancy Kress, because Trek needs good post-humans, not just energy blobs.
Elisabeth Bear, because Trek also needs strong AI to go with the post humans.
posted by bonehead at 1:12 PM on November 3, 2015 [1 favorite]

vibratory manner of working: "9. Next Trek wish-list: Understand Roddenberry's vision and commit to it. If you can't: nobody is making you do Star Trek, do something else."

Well.... Roddenberry gave us something wonderful, and we should honor that (JJ Abrams's movies may have good qualities, but they are not Star Trek). That said, TNG only really found its way after Roddenberry passed on and they were able to make some changes. A society without conflict doesn't make super interesting television.
posted by Chrysostom at 1:20 PM on November 3, 2015 [4 favorites]

My #1 request would be all long story arcs and no standalone throwaway episodes.

My big wish is that all genre television pattern itself after Steven Universe at this point, wherein you think that the early episodes are standalone episodics but eventually realize that it was all part of the mytharc all along.

Can we have Rebecca Sugar just write Star Trek, please?
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 1:50 PM on November 3, 2015 [2 favorites]

The Star Wars cartoons do a pretty great job of mixing up single issue stories with on going arcs.
posted by Artw at 1:53 PM on November 3, 2015 [2 favorites]

You had to go talk about the Enterprise theme song. Now that is all I can hear in my brain and it won't stop and I'd really like to go to bed now but the hypnopoppypseudofeels are not going to let me.

My remote control has a mute button. Consequently, when Enterprise premiered on September 26, 2001 was the last time I heard that song past, "It's been a lo---"

After the ubiquitous TOS theme, the rousing TNG theme, the pseudo-Fanfare-For-The-Common-Man DS9 theme, and the okay Voyager theme, all of which I have heard hundreds of times, I am okay with this choice.

Now that I reflect on it, I am having trouble thinking of any other song that I have heard by choice only once. Maybe "Revolution 9" but that is all I can dredge up.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 2:52 PM on November 3, 2015 [2 favorites]

We do sing-a-long to the enterprise tune in our house, and by we I mean me, and by along I mean I mean I sing a bit of It now and again, I haven't seen the show in ages.
posted by biffa at 3:21 PM on November 3, 2015 [1 favorite]

Okay so here's the thing about the replicator and currency. To us, it seems like they can replicate anything in their replicator or create anything in their holodeck. This simply isn't true. If they could, Geordi or Scotty would have been replicating spare parts for the ship left and right anytime they got hit - basically nullifying any damage almost immediately. We know it takes years and years to build a starship - this isn't something that can just be whipped out. So knowing that, and knowing matter can't be made from nothing - we know that they have a supply of some good on the ship that they can convert into their resource at some fixed rate of speed. In general, it seems as though they mostly replicate food. I'd wager, that what goes in to the replicator has to have at least some of the basic building blocks as to what comes out of the replicator. So in the case of food, hmm... where would they get a renewable resource from the ship that works is produced at the same rate (or thereabouts) as which it is consumed? Here's the thought that will haunt you forever now: Why do we really rarely mention the bathrooms in Star Trek?

Tea, Earl Grey, Hot is recycled waste. Picard and the rest of the crew are living a John Waters film.
posted by Nanukthedog at 3:33 PM on November 3, 2015 [2 favorites]

This simply isn't true. If they could, Geordi or Scotty would have been replicating spare parts for the ship left and right anytime they got hit - basically nullifying any damage almost immediately.

They do replicate parts whenever they get hit or something breaks down. The replicators make matter from energy, not other matter, so there's no supply of stuff that needs to be kept on hand. Even on Voyager, where energy supply is a frequent issue, the Delta Flyer (the new super-shuttle designed by Tom Paris) was built from replicator parts. Though the parts are built in a replicator, humans assemble/install them. Presumably there's a size limit to what the replicator can provide pre-assembled and presumably this is somehow linked to the size/space allocated a particular replicator.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 3:40 PM on November 3, 2015

The more I think about it, the more I think they should be watching Clone Wars and Rebels and taking heavy notes. Clone Wars in particular is how you do large scale space opera with an extended cast these days - it really is the most successful space set TV SF of recent years.
posted by Artw at 3:40 PM on November 3, 2015 [2 favorites]

>>Also, can we lay off the Lindeloff hate already?

>Nope.

>Seconded.

I wouldn't have disagreed not that long ago -- he is just ludicrously limited as a writer as contrasted with his success -- but the first season of The Leftovers was good, and the currently-running second season is flat amazing. Even though it's chock full of the idiotic IT IS A MYSTERY lazy copout Lindeloffisms, it shows me at the very least that what talent he has can be channeled into good stuff.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 4:05 PM on November 3, 2015

He had a book to work off, didn't he?

Still, I guess he should be congratulated for not killing whatever worked in it.
posted by Artw at 4:07 PM on November 3, 2015

I believe they exhausted the book at the end of season 1, and this new season (which again, I think is going from strength to strength, although we'll see how they stick the landing) is all Lindy-boy and co.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 4:09 PM on November 3, 2015

I like The Leftovers even more this year than last, but I keep threatening to quit watching it because I have a deep suspicion that it won't play long enough for the mysteries to actually mean anything. Which, while it's still more arresting than most other things I could be watching, does ultimately matter.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 4:21 PM on November 3, 2015

DS9 mentioned the use of industrial replicators from time to time.
posted by Servo5678 at 4:22 PM on November 3, 2015

Even on Voyager, where energy supply is a frequent issue, the Delta Flyer (the new super-shuttle designed by Tom Paris) was built from replicator parts.

Yeah, as well as all the replacement shuttles for the ones they lost along the way, and constant damage repairs. A major complaint about Voyager was that the ship's damage was almost always repaired by the next week instead of gradually deteriorating like many people wanted to see (like the Galactica).

The Voyager that returned to Earth by the end of the series was actually more powerful overall than the one that set out in the beginning (even if you don't take into account future Janeway's last minute retrofits). Clearly as long as raw energy and a bit of repair time was available, they never seemed to be greatly lacking for material parts or resources.

Which I was okay with--it might not have been the most interesting choice they could have made, but it wasn't inconsistent with the established 24th century Trek universe which is largely post-scarcity in nature (except during the most desperate times of conflict).

I would love to see a late 24th-25th century Star Trek show that involved extra-galactic expedition, which would be a fun way to change things up and introduce less-human aliens. We've glimpsed all four quadrants of the Milky Way and the frontiers aren't what they used to be...

(One thing I liked about the Stargate shows was the ever growing expansion of scale in Stargate: Atlantis and in Stargate: Universe.)
posted by Pryde at 4:24 PM on November 3, 2015 [3 favorites]

It's Lindeloff. Of course the mysteries are open ended and meaningless.
posted by Artw at 4:29 PM on November 3, 2015 [2 favorites]

The replicator technology is horribly broken from a continuity point of view and lack of ability is used extensively as a MacGuffin. Earl Grey Hot full of hundreds of distinct molecules in exact proportions? No problemo. Need a single vaccine molecule replicated to save the lives of thousands/millions? Sorry no can do; better send in a crew-person to fight to the death for a supply from a planet that doesn't even have spaceflight.
posted by Mitheral at 4:51 PM on November 3, 2015 [2 favorites]

"Only a precise mix of bergamot and tanin can cure space plague!"
posted by Artw at 4:53 PM on November 3, 2015 [2 favorites]

How many streaming services are we going to have to pony up for in the future? Cordcutting isn't looking much cheaper than cable when you start paying $10/month for each of these streaming services.

I forgot this one the first couple times i pulled the trigger on a comment, but i utterly gave up on this. I will pay for ONE service. I used to have hulu and netflix when i thought that would cover everything... then all these bullshit channel specific ones came out that should cost like, $2 at most, but cost as much as netflix. Seriously, walling the simpsons off in a streaming service that has nothing else anyone cares about?

The model i WOULD support is what i think apple is going to do. You pay for something to the effect of hours of streaming available. This can be shared among as many devices or people as you want(like apples new family app share thing).

So lets say i buy 40 hours a month. I can now use that time on every fucking network. If i stream a CBS show, they get paid for that view. They get paid just as much if i watch something low value from their old catalog as if i watch a show that just aired 3 hours ago. I'm 100% against this being nebulous "credits", because a new show should not cost 10 credits while an old show costs 2 or whatever. Bill me for the gas pumped, so to speak.

I would accept ads for a discount on this service or more hours per price point. I would NOT accept ads and pay "full price" ala hulu.

As it is, i switched to only paying netflix because i like most of their original shows and they have a pretty solid selection of movies. However, very often i go here and punch in a show or movie(for instance fringe after seeing this thread) and it's NOWHERE. I can pay for a stupid overpriced digital rental(which may be, for example, an appleTV thing and not even possible for me), or oftentimes i can buy the dvd, possibly not even a blu ray for some more obscure stuff, and that's it.

And then i go on a pirate streaming app, and bam, there's like 10 servers i can play that stupid obscure old movie or show from.

I've said it before, but i would happily pay even as much as like $29.99 for some all inclusive streaming service like what i described run by apple or google. I don't even expect it to be "unlimited". It just needs to include almost everything, and work on any reasonable device. None of this "no amazon streaming on some google products" bullshit or whatever. Someone big enough needs to strongarm all these assholes and pull a spotify.

Sadly, the only ways i can see this happening are either apple, being the biggest company in the world... Or google or someone outright buying several of the big services, balling them all up into one product, then going to every outlier network trying to run their own halfassed service and saying "look, get onboard".

I realize what i'm asking for is essentially the comcast of streaming and would probably be fraught with its own problems, but holy shit i hate this crappy "per diem" current streaming model so much. You basically need a computer wired up to your TV to even use it all at once. If you have an appletv, you can use a few of them but not foo or bar. If you have a firetv you can use these other ones, if you have an android tv then there's these other ones you can and cant use. And you actually want to access it all you have to pay for like 9 fucking services AND do rentals on stuff they wont let you stream. Crappity crap crap crap.
posted by emptythought at 4:58 PM on November 3, 2015 [3 favorites]

It's Lindeloff. Of course the mysteries are open ended and meaningless.

Well, to be fair, it's not open-ended and meaningless because of Lindeloff. The book was open-ended and meaningless more or less on purpose (or so I'm told). The point was supposed to be that the people in the story are having to deal with the uncertainty, too. Nobody knows what's going on, but they still have to find a way to cope.

But this year, they've really doubled down on the mystery elements, so it feels like they need to follow through on a few of them. Like, I don't need to know where everybody went or why, I guess, but if they're going to continue with the premise that there's something "special" about the lead and that he's going to be tormented with ghosts and visions and sleepwalking into the middle of "miracles" until he gets with his destiny, then at some point it would be good to know what that destiny is at least supposed to entail (whether it ever pans out or turns out to be "real" or not). I can roll with real prophets and healers, false prophets and healers, and even ambiguous prophets and healers, but ambiguous prophets who never even share their prophesies with us are... pointless.

And destinies are only interesting to the extent we see the characters grappling with them. If we never find out what the destinies are supposed to be, then why should we give a crap whether they are fulfilled?

And yet - it's pretty compelling.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 5:01 PM on November 3, 2015

Well, good luck.

Don't say we didn't warn you.
posted by Artw at 5:04 PM on November 3, 2015

The replicator technology is horribly broken from a continuity point of view and lack of ability is used extensively as a MacGuffin.

Not to belabor the point, but tech was one thing BSG got right. I think there was something in the series bible to the effect of "No magical technologies." Basically, the only future technologies the crew had access to were the bare minimum you'd need in a universe where faster-than-light travel was possible. Hell, the Galactica didn't even have basic LAN technology! Because the writers couldn't rely on technology as a plot point, they had to center all the action around characters and character development, which is exactly what I want.

This, more than anything else, makes me wish they'd set New Trek in a time period where humanity has just discovered warp technology, but has't yet discovered holodecks, transporters, or replicators.
posted by panama joe at 5:05 PM on November 3, 2015 [1 favorite]

Everything you just described is what made Enterprise good when it was at it's absolute best. I guess they DID have a transporter, but it was scary and glitchy and barely worked and wasn't rated for transporting people, only small to medium sized objects. And only like one person at a time if it even DID a person. No replicators, no holodecks, no fancy talking computer that can drive the whole ship.

It did really make for a better show when it wasn't busy poopings its diapers.
posted by emptythought at 5:08 PM on November 3, 2015

Well, good luck.

Don't say we didn't warn you.

No, I know I'll get burned on this one. At least Lost ended, and you had some of idea of what the central conceit was supposed to be by that end (whether it was a satisfying end or not). The Leftovers is pay TV and way too dour to run long enough for a pay off. Unless they have some surprise reveals planned for this year, I don't expect to ever find out what the point was.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 5:12 PM on November 3, 2015

On the other hand sometimes they went overboard on making everybody primitive screwheads, like some of the early episodes have the crew so dumb they don't know not to lick alien plants and stuff. "hey, we're in space for the first time, should we just touch all the things?"

* not another Lindelof dig as the Spaith script had this problem too.
posted by Artw at 5:13 PM on November 3, 2015

To be clear, I'm not a complete Lindelof hater; I think he has talent, but his record is spotty enough that his involvement in any project is cause for a bit of concern.

That said:

But this year, they've really doubled down on the mystery elements, so it feels like they need to follow through on a few of them.

Red flag the size of Rhode Island. This is Lindelof we're talking about, and you are describing almost exactly the situation on Lost around Season 3. The likelihood of a satisfying payoff is probably so small as to only be detectable with advanced mathematics and/or heretofore unheard of technology.
posted by tocts at 5:14 PM on November 3, 2015

Maybe it's a being-a-writer thing - I just don't consider setting up mysterious things a very hard task. Doing something interesting with them and sticking the landing, now that takes skill.
posted by Artw at 5:16 PM on November 3, 2015 [3 favorites]

Well, The Leftovers is all kinds of interesting, and the actors are seriously sticking it. I just have no faith in its longevity, so I don't think they'll get the chance to pay it off even if they had a perfect resolution.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 5:20 PM on November 3, 2015

It's worth pointing out that the movie rights and the television rights aren't held by the same studios

When did that happen?
posted by crossoverman at 5:53 PM on November 3, 2015

Brief explanation here - the title is wrong, at least.
posted by Artw at 6:00 PM on November 3, 2015 [1 favorite]

Prometheus didn't quite work.

And the Titanic wasn't quite a successful cruise ship.
posted by phearlez at 6:35 PM on November 3, 2015 [6 favorites]

Brief explanation here - the title is wrong, at least.

Fascinating.

On the one hand, I wish corporate stuff wouldn't get in the way - it worked so much better back in the 80s/90s when they could go back and forth and reference each other.

On the other, this is actually more freeing than if it was built on the back of the new films. I'd like them to find a time/place where they don't have to worry too much about continuity.
posted by crossoverman at 7:22 PM on November 3, 2015

http://bztv.typepad.com/newsviews/files/ST2004Reboot.pdf

If I were e.g. Bill Gates I would drop a billion fucking dollars on this.

I'd wager, that what goes in to the replicator has to have at least some of the basic building blocks as to what comes out of the replicator.

nerd alert
This is covered in the ST:TNG Technical Manual. 'Organic waste' is reduced to some sort of simple homogeneous slurry which is the most energy-efficient for breaking down again and creating more rak dajino (my skin fucking crawls every time someone says that) for our spandex-clad future selves to fuel up on.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 8:11 PM on November 3, 2015 [3 favorites]

I take it back, please do not tell me more about the Federation economy, that is not a thing I wanted to know about the Federation economy, fffm.
posted by yasaman at 8:35 PM on November 3, 2015 [3 favorites]

I'm guessing you don't want to know what happens to farm biosolids either?
posted by Mitheral at 8:41 PM on November 3, 2015 [1 favorite]

no. I know that life is a cycle of poop, but the replicator thing is a little too...direct of a cycle of poop.

Though what about species that don't excrete--you know what, no.
posted by yasaman at 8:50 PM on November 3, 2015 [4 favorites]

Well to be fair it also gets replicated into replacement parts for the Holodeck hoses.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 8:51 PM on November 3, 2015 [1 favorite]

I wonder what that even means. If you're breaking something down into subatomic particles, then beaming those particles into a replicator that builds them into another kind of substance, does it really matter what form of substance you started with? What part of the process takes the most energy? The technical manual seems to suggest that breaking down the substance is the most energy intensive thing, which would explain why they're keeping the organic matter in a slurry that doesn't have any strong chemical bonds.

You could probably use that same slurry to replace any redshirts that died on the last away mission. Just run it through the transporter buffer...
posted by Kevin Street at 9:11 PM on November 3, 2015

hey it's technobabble, I didn't say it was logically coherent technobabble

Also I feel like there's probably some bone-deep social proscription against replicating living things--maybe comes under the Federation's general ban on genetic tinkering. Thus the vaccine thing, no reincarnating the dead redshirts, etc.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 9:30 PM on November 3, 2015 [1 favorite]

Regarding the proliferation of streaming services, each with a separate subscription fee...

Remember how for years consumers have cursed cable companies for offering only 2-4 "packages" with a whole bunch of channels they didn't want along with the ones they actually watch, and those same consumers clamoring for cable companies to offer channels a la carte?

Be careful what you wish for.

(Also, I wish I could say I wouldn't subscribe to a new streaming service just to watch a single show, but I would not be credible seeing as I originally picked up Netflix solely for Arrested Development S4.)
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 10:39 PM on November 3, 2015

You could probably use that same slurry to replace any redshirts that died on the last away mission. Just run it through the transporter buffer...

Maybe they do.

That would explain a lot:

1) Why send senior personnel (including the captain!) on dangerous "away" missions?

– Because you can almost always rebuild them.

2) Why do we see only a relatively small proportion of the crew?

– Because nobody wants to see a dozen identical drones swabbing out the lavatories.

3) Why are Star Trek doctors so quick to announce that someone has died?

– Because they're impatient, and it's not economical to waste time on damaged components.

4) Why are there apparently no circuit breakers or seatbelts on the bridge?

– Replicators are necessary for other things and are therefore a sunk cost, but safety devices cost money.
posted by Joe in Australia at 11:08 PM on November 3, 2015 [2 favorites]

My Trek Wishlist:

*NO FUCKING BEIGE (or '80s patterns that look like carpet or couch material).
It's just something I can't get over on rewatching TNG or DS9 (Enterprise was kinda blue and copper - I dug it) and I seem to recal Voyager was grey (Neelix aside), but space shouldn't look like it was decorated by my parents.

*No TMP pastel leisure suits - except for off-duty personnel (rocking the retro).

* No Neelix/Phlox/Rom "comedy" character. Pls.

I really don't think we're getting that network TV Rifters series.

Suddenly, this is a thing I want.
But I may have spent too much of my teens wishing I could make proper sense of Rifts.
(I also spent much of my teens trying to create a cohesive story blending Babylon 5 and Star Control 2).
posted by Mezentian at 1:00 AM on November 4, 2015 [1 favorite]

(Enterprise was kinda blue and copper - I dug it)

Orange and blue everything is a very original color choice.
posted by Drinky Die at 2:21 AM on November 4, 2015 [2 favorites]

Also I feel like there's probably some bone-deep social proscription against replicating living things

The technical manual says that you can't replicate living things, because that requires building on a quantum level, which the replicators can't do.

This always puzzled me because in the episode "A Matter of Honor" where Riker goes off to be a Klingon for a bit the Klingons on the Pagh make a big deal about how they don't waste space on luxuries, but then they serve him live Gagh. So, they have space store a ton of live serpent worms because they're better alive, how is that not a luxury!
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 2:41 AM on November 4, 2015 [4 favorites]

REPLICATION LIMITS
The chief limitation of all transporter-based replicators is
the resolution at which the molecular matrix patterns are
stored. While transporters (which operate in realtime) recreate
objects at quantum-level resolution suitable for lifeforms,
replicators store and re-create objects at the much
simpler molecular-level resolution, which is not suitable for
living beings.

Page 91 of the TNG Technical Manual
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 2:43 AM on November 4, 2015 [1 favorite]

Orange and blue everything is a very original color choice.

That's teal and orange, you BARBARIAN!

(I was mostly thinking of the copper colour on the warp engines. I always dug that).
posted by Mezentian at 3:47 AM on November 4, 2015 [1 favorite]

they have space store a ton of live serpent worms because they're better alive, how is that not a luxury!

Maybe they breed them the way we do.

By not washing our hands after visiting the bathroom.
posted by Joe in Australia at 3:48 AM on November 4, 2015

* No Neelix/Phlox/Rom "comedy" character. Pls.

Rom was a comic character (and I loved him, even if he was admittedly played pretty broad) but I don't think Neelix was supposed to be and Phlox even less so. Neelix had a genuinely tragic backstory and some of the grimmest stuff in Trek's history happened to him. (He died and found out there was no afterlife, for one thing, and when he was revived his loss of faith was so devastating that he tried to kill himself. Voyager gets shit for never being as gritty as BSG, but Voyager had the guts to just say, "There's no heaven. You die and piff away into nothing and you'll never see your dead family again. That's just how it is, and you'll have to find a way to live a worthwhile life knowing that." BSG, uh, handled mystical matters differently.)

Phlox had a creepy Mr. Peabody voice and as something of an outer space medical pioneer his techniques could be rather frighteningly experimental (of the various Trek doctors, he is probably the LAST one you want treating you), but that was about as far as his "comedy relief" went. He was mostly there to kind of split Wry Alien Observer of Humanity duties (the Mr. Spock/Data role) with T'Pol. If Enterprise had comic relief, it was probably Trip. He's the one who made wisecracks and got impregnated by a space babe and stuff like that.

Given where Trek is at right now, I think it's unrealistic for me to hope for a show in the proper Trek timeline, set after Voyager where we could see how the Federation is getting along after the Dominion War and all that. As long as this show doesn't feel like an Abrams-esque dump on everything Trek ever was, I guess I'll have to call that a win.

they have space store a ton of live serpent worms because they're better alive, how is that not a luxury!

For Klingons, fresh gagh is NO LUXURY!
posted by Ursula Hitler at 4:36 AM on November 4, 2015 [7 favorites]

...Voyager had the guts to just say, "There's no heaven. You die and piff away into nothing and you'll never see your dead family again. That's just how it is, and you'll have to find a way to live a worthwhile life knowing that."

Interestingly enough, they went to that well at least twice. First with Neelix, as you mention, and then with Harry Kim and an entire civilization in Emanations. They also examined the afterlife concept in Coda.
posted by zarq at 7:05 AM on November 4, 2015 [1 favorite]

Maybe they do.

This is why I want Elisabeth Bear and Richard Morgan to write newTrek episodes. Humanity and what it means to be human is going to be weird and strange in 500 years, repellent perhaps even to our sensibilities. If Trek has a failing, it's that it too frequently plays it too safe. Gives it a rubber-bumpers-world feeling.

Rodenberry got it, but this was all too common in the Berman years.
posted by bonehead at 8:50 AM on November 4, 2015

> nobody wants to see a dozen identical drones swabbing out the lavatories

Actually, I do. I appreciated that in one of the movies or shows -- it's not coming to mind which one -- where there was a scene that involved people walking through the galley. I'd like more of those kinds of questions answered. Like, I wonder about on "Stargate: Atlantis." Surely there are people who are just low-level military or contractors who are hired to wash dishes and clean the cafeteria, like in Big Dead Place, right? But... in space? How does that work? It's all top secret and amazing but on the other hand all they do is laundry?
posted by The corpse in the library at 9:03 AM on November 4, 2015

I'm really more excited about the Expanse series on SyFy that starts next month than any new Trek series.
posted by octothorpe at 9:04 AM on November 4, 2015 [3 favorites]

Voyager gets shit for never being as gritty as BSG, but Voyager had the guts to just say, "There's no heaven. You die and piff away into nothing and you'll never see your dead family again.

Of course, TNG dipped into those waters as well...

Captain Jean-Luc Picard: Q, what is going on?
Q: I told you. You're dead. This is the afterlife. And I'm God.
Captain Jean-Luc Picard: [laughs scornfully] You are not God!
Q: Blasphemy! You're lucky I don't cast you out or smite you or something. The bottom line is, your life ended about five minutes ago, under the inept ministrations of Dr. Beverly Crusher.
Captain Jean-Luc Picard: No... I am not dead. Because I refuse to believe that the afterlife is run by you. The universe is not so badly designed.

Picard was clearly just in denial.
posted by Pryde at 9:05 AM on November 4, 2015

Please no Neelix.
posted by Artw at 9:06 AM on November 4, 2015 [1 favorite]

I appreciated that in one of the movies or shows -- it's not coming to mind which one -- where there was a scene that involved people walking through the galley.

Possibly Babylon 5's A View from the Gallery?

Oh wait, if you mean Trek, there was also Star Trek VI when they were searching for the traitors, and someone uses a phaser on a cooking pot...
posted by Pryde at 9:09 AM on November 4, 2015 [1 favorite]

I appreciated that in one of the movies or shows -- it's not coming to mind which one -- where there was a scene that involved people walking through the galley

Star Trek VI involved a scene or two in the galley, as well as in actual crew quarters. I also recall a lot of time in the galley in Voyager, since Neelix needed something to do.
posted by nubs at 9:12 AM on November 4, 2015

Possibly Babylon 5's A View from the Gallery?

No, it was definitely a Trek. I've seen them all and they can blur together.
posted by The corpse in the library at 9:12 AM on November 4, 2015

I'm really more excited about the Expanse series on SyFy that starts next month than any new Trek series.

They'll give it a season, end on a cliffhanger and then replace it with Sharknado, The Series.
posted by zarq at 9:15 AM on November 4, 2015

Look at all those galleys!
posted by The corpse in the library at 9:17 AM on November 4, 2015

Q: I told you. You're dead. This is the afterlife. And I'm God.

To my delight, the scene's on Youtube.
posted by zarq at 9:17 AM on November 4, 2015

Neelix and Chill?
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 9:18 AM on November 4, 2015 [5 favorites]

Every episode of the new Trek should feature John de Lancie and the mariachi band.
posted by Chrysostom at 9:51 AM on November 4, 2015 [3 favorites]

Neelix and Chill?

No. No no no.
posted by Artw at 9:57 AM on November 4, 2015 [1 favorite]

Neelix and Chili.
posted by zarq at 10:13 AM on November 4, 2015 [1 favorite]

The differences between replicators and transporters, and the reasons why you can't turn one into another, are one of the greatest mysteries of Trek for me.

So replicators use "molecular matrix patterns" to repattern molecules into the desired shape and temperature. Meanwhile, transporters do the same thing at the much more complicated (and scientifically impossible) quantum level, but can only do it in realtime. (Or rather, within a timespan of about 420 seconds.) To use a computer metaphor, it's like the replicator can save patterns to a hard disk, but because of Heisenberg Compensators or whatever, the transporter can only work in RAM.

If they could crack that limitation and store "quantum matrix patterns" in long term memory, the transporter could become the greatest replicator ever, and you could crank out copies of the crew as much as you liked.
posted by Kevin Street at 10:47 AM on November 4, 2015 [1 favorite]

Exactly, Kevin Street, and even in 420 seconds how many duplicates could you crank out? Let's say a transporter cycle takes 5 seconds to complete - so that's 84. And then you pop one of them back in and start the cycle again.

Star Trek: Clone Wars.
posted by nubs at 11:01 AM on November 4, 2015 [2 favorites]

I think that you kinda have to just let the replicators and transporters be handwavey technobabble, because there's really no reconciling them. If they really are to be understood to be transforming energy into matter without any other inputs, the first species to create them could have trivially:

1. Set up solar collectors with replicators attached orbiting their native star
2. Use the solar collectors to power the replicators to replicate more solar collector/replicator devices
3. Repeat with exponential growth and quickly build a Dyson Sphere
4. Now harnessing all the energy of their native star, construct nigh-infinite starships and weapons

The only way this doesn't work is if there's some other limiting factor to production, which would require for example a storage tank of raw materials that everything is made of (and all waste is recycled into), with the replicators just being used to assemble that material. That'd be fine, but at least once you get to TNG / DS9 that does not seem to be what's going on, so we're left with godlike replicators that nobody ever thinks to use in the most obvious way.

Hooray for technobabble.
posted by tocts at 11:02 AM on November 4, 2015

Star Trek: Masters of Technobabble
posted by nubs at 11:04 AM on November 4, 2015

I like your thinking, nubs. But if the process could be finagled like that, more ruthless entities like the Dominion and the Borg would be doing it all the time, churning out copies through the transporter. Imagine how effective the Borg would be if all they needed to do was hack a ship's transporter and beam endless clones onto the victim vessel!

There's something almost analog about the transporter process, like they're somehow cheating Heisenberg by not actually observing what's going on. It just... happens, with hardware. That would explain why the pattern buffer is a machine that can burn out and be replaced, instead of just being a computational process performed by a computer. They can't record what's happening inside as that would defeat the process.

Thinking about transporters as limited in this way explains a lot of things about Trek, like why they still have doctors and still get old. Or why they can't just replicate valuable vaccines.
posted by Kevin Street at 11:32 AM on November 4, 2015

OK, now I'm googling around to learn about transporters and found a discussion about this issue, from the Physics of Star Trek:

Krauss notes that "The Star Trek writers seem never to have got it exactly clear what they want the transporter to do. Does the transporter send the atoms and the bits, or just the bits?" He notes that according to the canon definition of the transporter the former seems to be the case, but that that definition is inconsistent with a number of applications, particularly incidents, involving the transporter, which appear to involve only a transport of information, for example the way in which it splits Kirk into two version in the episode "The Enemy Within" or the way in which Riker is similarly split in the episode "Second Chances". Krauss elaborates that: "If the transporter carries both the matter stream and the information signal, this splitting phenomenon is impossible. The number of atoms you end up with has to be the same as the number you began with. There is no possible way to replicate people in this manner. On the other hand, if only the information were beamed up, one could imagine combining it with atoms that might be stored aboard a starship and making as many copies as you wanted of an individual."

So it might be that something in the pattern buffer keeps track of the number of atoms made from a pattern and acts to prevent more than that number being created? Although, if that is how it is programmed, it must be able to be circumvented/hacked. At any rate, the pattern buffer aspect of Star Trek joins many of the other pieces of tech from the show that really start to sprain your brain if you think through the implications and possibilities.
posted by nubs at 11:52 AM on November 4, 2015

I'm willing to classify the stranger transporter malfunctions as "quantum weirdness" that occasionally happen because of the way the transporter regularly mangles the laws of physics. ;-)

In the case of the two Rikers (and the two Kirks) it seemed like interference was preventing the physical beaming of Riker's total energy back to the ship, so the transporter used ship's power to make up for the loss. Most of the time the particles that dematerialize in one place are the same ones that materialize in another, but in edge cases like that one the transporter needs the ability to create extra matter as a safety feature. I guess as long as it happens within 420 seconds the universe doesn't care.

No clue what happened with Tuvix, though.
posted by Kevin Street at 12:09 PM on November 4, 2015

Transporters really don't make sense, unless you take the view that the Federation really are totally squicked out by non-standard humans. Their reaction to the Borg kind of supports this---post-humans are evil.

It would be cheaper to keep a bunch of drone patterns about and simply transport conciousnesseseses about. A Transportee could even "sleeve" into specialized drop types, vacuum-safe, aquatic, combat, heavy equipment mover, etc.... But Federation social politics probably precludes those sorts of "perversions".

It would make a really interesting dynamic to show the Federation as some sort of ultra-conservative human absolutists in a super culture of post and altered humanity (and other species).
posted by bonehead at 12:23 PM on November 4, 2015 [1 favorite]

Al Reynolds trek!
posted by Artw at 12:29 PM on November 4, 2015

The Federation meets The Culture.

I like it. Simply because I think the Culture novels do explore the weirdness that might result from living in a society where so many things are possible and attainable - strong AI, FTL travel, genetic engineering, advanced robotics, and so forth. Trek has always kind of edged up to those possibilities and shied away. And part of that is the core of Trek: a belief in humanity, which means it must be valued above technology, and humanity must still be recognizable to the audience.

I mean, given the technology of Data, project the Federation 50-100 years in the future when they've figured out how to reverse engineer him - something Data himself was trying to figure out, so he'd be a willing participant in creating copies/descendants of his design. You can have a ship guided by an AI based on his brain, with a supply of android bodies that could be activated and programmed for specific functions when needed. They could be the Borg without the need to assimilate.
posted by nubs at 12:33 PM on November 4, 2015 [1 favorite]

Any proposal you care to make about how transporter and/or replicator technology work have probably been disproven somewhere in the Trek canon, so it's probably a losing battle.

But if the next Trek breaks the continuity, then we're free to imagine replicators and transporters in a new and consistent way and then wish that the showrunners would respect that (and not make transporter malfunction episodes anyway)

The new transporter *effect* should look like an aperture that wipes across the transported party or items, and the technobabble implementation should be that it is a form of warp technology that creates a warp bubble between the source and destination of the transport. Because of how the energy to create this kind of warp bubble scales with endpoint distances, the technique is only useful across distances where lightspeed delay is negligible (so like we see in TOS you have to orbit the planet before you can beam to it).

Now, is the replicator an application of transporter technology? If so, it can only move items from one spot to another. Perhaps it does it at a scale around 100micrometers. So when you order a steak, medium rare, the replicator will use a computer model and access vats full of "steak, well done", "steak, rare", and "beef fat" (not to mention, but preferably not to think about, the fraction of meat glue that is also added at replication time), transporting around 200 million units in all for your 200 gram steak. This will probably be just about as satisfactory a steak as you imagine :-/ though many would be entirely accustomed to this style of food just like many of us today eat vegetarian imitation meats and report that we're satisfied with the result. Drinks would be produced by combining concentrates and syrups with bulk water, just like fountain drinks today. Glasses and plates would be transported whole, not replicated.

All those inputs are going to be produced on ship, but it's a very biological process--test-tube meats, yeasts engineered to produce the same flavor molecule that is in bergamot, etc. And, yes, if something goes wrong down in food engineering you might not get another teacup full of earl grey until you make it back to starbase and replace the cultures.

This explains why replicators and transporters aren't good for creating fleets of ships or armies of clones and why they can't produce vaccines or dilithium on demand. It also means giving up some handy handwavium, such that transporters filter out most infections, disarm the transported, etc.

But transporter techology is still too powerful as a weapon. Forget phasers and photon torpedoes, a transporter beam with one terminus in your warp core and the other on top of the enemy ship will make a hell of a bang in airless space.
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 12:41 PM on November 4, 2015 [2 favorites]

now we just need to explain what synthehol is.
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 12:42 PM on November 4, 2015

The star trek technical manual (page 17) says:

Given the existence of matter replication devices (like the show's "food replicator" terminals), a very logical question is: "Why can't they just replicate entire starships?" The real reason is that such an ability would allow us to create entire fleets of starships at the touch of a button. This might be great for Federation defense and science programs, but makes for poor drama. For this reason, starship construction facilities (seen at Utopia Pianitia in "Booby Trap" and Earth Station McKinieyin "Family") have been depicted as construction platforms rather than large replicators. We assume that replication is practical for relatively small items, but that energy costs would be prohibitive for routine replication of larger objects. (Jon Singer points out that if you could make a starship at the push of a button, you wouldn 't need to....)
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 12:44 PM on November 4, 2015

I was thinking more of Richard Morgan-style Kovacs-trek, but sure, Revelation-trek works too. Even that's kind of old hat now, but would be a huge change to the ST 'verse.

Trek has always kind of edged up to those possibilities and shied away.

That's very much true and why I've long felt that Trek in many ways, particularly in the Berman years didn't live up to its potential. Say what you will about Abrams missing the point, but he wasn't afraid to think outside of the comfortable little traps surrounding the show cannon.
posted by bonehead at 12:44 PM on November 4, 2015

The real question is why the smeg the federation bothers with hand weapons when you could just transport the target into the nearest sun/fusion reactor.

Or photon torpedoes for that matter. Just transport all the hatches/doors on an enemy ship 3m to the left.
posted by Mitheral at 12:51 PM on November 4, 2015 [2 favorites]

Oh man, biofilters! That doesn't fit with my conception of the transport process as an analog black box that can only process information for a limited time. To scan for "known biological anomalies" there has to be some sort of interaction between a computer and the matter stream. Um...
posted by Kevin Street at 12:51 PM on November 4, 2015 [1 favorite]

Any proposal you care to make about how transporter and/or replicator technology work have probably been disproven somewhere in the Trek canon, so it's probably a losing battle.

Nah you just [tech the tech]
posted by phearlez at 12:57 PM on November 4, 2015

Say what you will about Abrams missing the point, but he wasn't afraid to think outside of the comfortable little traps surrounding the show cannon.

Abrams missed the point about Star Trek being a show/franchise that is supposed to be about humanity learning to use its intelligence to solve problems, as opposed to just blowing shit up. If he had remembered that, the films could have gone to some fun places - I think Into Darkness had the potential to fuck with show cannon in a way that was engaging to both the old and the new fan. (Particularly if, in that scenario, Khan is the one to sacrifice himself to save the ship).
posted by nubs at 1:03 PM on November 4, 2015 [2 favorites]

Oh, that would be more fun than the stupid pointless Kirk/Spock scene.
posted by Artw at 1:06 PM on November 4, 2015

high praise. sorry for inspiring so much local entropy though.
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 1:58 PM on November 4, 2015

If Greg Nog engages the Heisenberg compensators, that local entropy will clear right up.
posted by nubs at 2:00 PM on November 4, 2015 [3 favorites]

I feel the need to summarize my thoughts on this so I can stop thinking about it and get real work done today. So, in Socratic fashion:

Q: How can replicators change waste matter into endless cups of Earl Grey, but transporters can only convert one thing into energy and put it back together again the same as it was before?

A: It's an information problem. Replicators only deal with inert matter, which 24th century science is capable of analyzing and recording down to a molecular level - but to transport something alive you need to rebuild it on the quantum level, and transporters can only process that information while it's contained in a buffer for a limited time. After that a person's transporter pattern "dissipates" from the buffer somehow and can't be recorded permanently.

Q: That's why you can't materialize someone younger than they were before?

A: Exactly, the younger transporter pattern no longer exists.

Q: What about that TNG episode where they cured Pulaski by doing exactly that? Or the one where the transporter turned them into twelve-year-olds?

A: Quantum boojums! Weirdness in the subspace membrane!

Q: And what about the one where Scotty was stuck in the buffer for seventy-two years?

A: You want me to beam you into a closet? I can do that, you know.

Q: Okay, okay. But what about the incident of the two Rikers?

A: The mysterious storms on the planet mirrored the effect of the transporter, pulling potential energy out of... uh, the vacuum state, and using it to make a new Thomas.

Q: Isn't that different from what you said before?

A: There's no law for conservation of bullshit in this universe.

Q: Hey, what about biofilters? Why do they need doctors if they can just run sick people through the transporter and filter out the pathogens?

*humming sound effect*
posted by Kevin Street at 2:13 PM on November 4, 2015 [3 favorites]

I believe Kevin Street has just identified the First Law of Star Trek Technobabble: There's no law for conservation of bullshit in this universe.
posted by nubs at 2:16 PM on November 4, 2015 [1 favorite]

Or photon torpedoes for that matter. Just transport all the hatches/doors on an enemy ship 3m to the left.

Can't transport through raised shields. For all the inconsistencies in the Trek canon, they've been pretty consistent on that point.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 2:31 PM on November 4, 2015 [2 favorites]

“'Star Trek's bold new TV streaming series has fans concerned,” Jill Serjeant, Reuters, 02 Nov 2015

"The fact that this new series is exclusive to CBS All Access makes some of us Star Trek fans feel like paying chumps. Star Wars fans don't get treated like this," complained raphael143 on website startrek.com.

posted by ob1quixote at 4:41 PM on November 4, 2015 [1 favorite]

"The fact that this new series is exclusive to CBS All Access makes some of us Star Trek fans feel like paying chumps. Star Wars fans don't get treated like this," complained raphael143...

...who apparently has never heard of George Lucas.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 4:43 PM on November 4, 2015

Also, is that guy not paying to see the new Star Wars movie(s)?
posted by crossoverman at 6:01 PM on November 4, 2015

Star Trek: Sherlock Holmes, featuring Brent Spiner as Holmes and LeVar Burton as Watson.

This reminds me of the idea that the new Downton Abbey spin-off should be about the Dowager Countess and Mrs. Crawley driving around the countryside together solving crimes. And I realize that this is a specialty channel I might pay for all on its own: Just wierd spinoffs with characters from other shows, still in-character doing things that aren't at all what they do in the original show. Also featured would be a House Spinoff where House and Wilson live together as Odd-Couple style roommates and a series that is actual full-length episodes of Troy and Abed's talk show.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 7:21 PM on November 4, 2015 [4 favorites]

A: Quantum boojums! Weirdness in the subspace membrane!

A: There's no law for conservation of bullshit in this universe.

You know, once they showed up, i just figured that the Federation's TimeFleet was VERY proactive in protecting their future.

"Oh crap, the Enterprise has figured out how to give people eternal youth using the transporter. Again. We need to go back and alter everybody's memory. Again."

"DON'T look at me, I'm busy trying to pass off the duplicate Riker as "a freak accident that will totally never happen again." If I don't, they'll start souping up the food replicators to make security officers. Why is it always the damn Enterprise?"
posted by happyroach at 12:48 AM on November 5, 2015 [4 favorites]

Q: Hey, what about biofilters? Why do they need doctors if they can just run sick people through the transporter and filter out the pathogens?

This has always bothered me to an unreasonable degree.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 7:37 AM on November 5, 2015 [1 favorite]

All this overthinking about a plot device that Roddenberry concocted fifty years ago just because he couldn't afford to show a shuttle craft land every week.
posted by octothorpe at 7:47 AM on November 5, 2015 [2 favorites]

Also, is that guy not paying to see the new Star Wars movie(s)?

The two major Star Wars cartoons (Clone Wars, Rebels) air(ed) on basic cable on Cartoon Network. Well, all except the final, abridged season of CW.
posted by zarq at 10:11 AM on November 5, 2015

All this overthinking about a plot device that Roddenberry concocted fifty years ago just because he couldn't afford to show a shuttle craft land every week.

Here's the thing, though : why were those the only two options? Why would they have to show the ship landing at all? Couldn't they just show the characters on the planet's surface, implying that the ship landed? Outside of Birdemic, I can't think of any movie that feels the need to show the characters parking their cars every time they arrive at a different location.
posted by panama joe at 10:41 AM on November 5, 2015

Showing the characters drive and then park at their destination used to be a pretty common visual shorthand/trope and was still pretty common in 1965 or so. Viewers are used to a more jumpy/fast-forward editing style now but filmmakers used to have to show at least a shot of the character at each step of the journey. Go watch old movies and you usually see a montage series where the character gets in their car, drives on the freeway, parks, gets out, goes in an office/apartment building, takes the elevator and finally knocks on a door.

Also viewers weren't expected to know anything about science fiction or space travel back then so Roddenberry wanted to be able to show the process of getting to the planet and to also emphasize that they weren't going to land the whole star ship.
posted by octothorpe at 10:53 AM on November 5, 2015 [5 favorites]

Of course Abrams not only showed the starship on land in his first film but under fucking water in the second.
posted by octothorpe at 11:18 AM on November 5, 2015 [2 favorites]

Professor Hubert Farnsworth: Dear Lord! That's over 150 atmospheres of pressure!
Fry: How many atmospheres can the ship withstand?
Professor Hubert Farnsworth: Well, it's a space ship, so I'd say anywhere between zero and one.
posted by Artw at 11:32 AM on November 5, 2015 [4 favorites]

Go watch old movies and you usually see a montage series where the character gets in their car, drives on the freeway, parks, gets out, goes in . . .

Roddenberry wanted to be able to show the process of getting to the planet and to also emphasize that they weren't going to land the whole star ship.

I'd go further and suggest that Star Trek contributed to this modern acceleration of exposition.

Robbenberry's writing at the time -- as seen in Whitfield's Making of Star Trek and in more recently available interoffice memos, 'series bibles' and such -- show an impatience to get the story told and leave out needless exposition for the sake of exposition. He was already pushing to modernize storytelling on the small screen. *

In solving one problem (avoiding having to show a ship the size of an aircraft carrier landing on a different planet each week ) they solved another: getting their stars into hot water as quickly as possible.

I wonder if in the process they also demonstrated to other teevy people that if Roddenberry et al can get a 22nd (or whatever) century starship captain and his Vulcan sidekick out of cushy chairs in comfortable orbit and into an alien prison cell or a desolate waste surrounded by heavily armed tribesman before the opening theme music, maybe we can get our private dick in the mill** or spy in the ointment*** that quickly without showing him put on his hat, grab his keys, drive there, park, get out . . .

Of course Abrams not only showed the starship on land in his first film but under fucking water in the second.

Really? Really?

Soon's I get his finger out of my eye, Abrams can kiss my asteroid.

-------------------------
* Obviously, not Roddenberry alone.
** So to speak.
*** Ditto.
posted by Herodios at 11:41 AM on November 5, 2015 [3 favorites]

Of course, in one Star Trek movie, really one and a half, they ditched the Enterprise (the spaceship) completely after blowing it up. In a TNG movie, they crashed the saucer section on a planet's surface. On Voyager they landed the ship on a planet.

You can have complaints against Abrams for his movies, but what he did with the ships were wild departures from previous Star Trek incarnations. His greatest crime for the Trek faithful was offering an action movie, which most Trek films were decidedly not, jettisoning a certain amount of thoughtfulness that tried and succeeded and tried and failed across the Trek film spectrum. Incidentally, Into Darkness was probably much closer to a true Trek film than his first, when evaluating it on that basis.
posted by Atreides at 12:14 PM on November 5, 2015

Videos:

Enterprise under water. (Scotty: "Do you have any idea how ridiculous it is to hide a starship on the bottom of the ocean?!")

Enterprise rises from the water

Kirk and Spock get into trouble for violating the prime directive.
posted by zarq at 12:18 PM on November 5, 2015 [1 favorite]

Showing the characters drive and then park at their destination used to be a pretty common visual shorthand/trope and was still pretty common in 1965 or so.

Noteworthy in that both Batman and Maxwell Smart always managed to park right in front of the government building.

His greatest crime for the Trek faithful was offering an action movie, which most Trek films were decidedly not,

Arguably, most of them were trying to be action movies...and just not succeeding.

Oh that fan-dance scene. The passion, it lingers.
posted by happyroach at 1:27 PM on November 5, 2015 [1 favorite]

happyroach: "Noteworthy in that both Batman and Maxwell Smart always managed to park right in front of the government building."

Everyone always had a primo spot.
posted by Mitheral at 5:47 PM on November 5, 2015

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