The only good idea for a new Star Trek show has already been used and made into a somewhat mediocre show called "Andromeda". A fall of the federation show could have been good. I just hope that Paramount doesn't come back in a few years and attempt to make such a show. Anybody agree?/disagree?

Stuart came up with an idea about an attempt to overthrow the communist military regime with the help of aliens friends that aren't shallow one-dimensional cliches.

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Freedom For Fission A breath of fresh Iodine-131

Glom...Star Trek...Glom...sigh

I think Star Trek ran it's course. I thought the idea behind Enterprise - the era before the TOS - had promise but it never took off. Shallow plots/acting didn't help, but I think the main problem was the simple fact that after TOS and TNG the Trek-cow was milked dry (so to speak). I never liked Andromeda so maybe I'm biased here, but I don't think a post-Federation angle would work any better than Enterprise, Voyager, or DS9 did.

VOY and DS9 actually worked pretty well. After VOY ended, that should have been the end of Star Trek for at least ten years. ENT as well as Nemesis were sort of beating the dead dog.

I don't know if Trek could rebound. At least, not in the military focus that it has been. I think that a civilian centered show would be good, but not for a few years. Trek is on it's death bed. Give it time to recover. Anyway, I'd like to see what the future would be like for an everyday person. Not just people in Star Fleet.

I think Trek needs a different angle. The fandom needs time to get the "only geeks watch Star Trek" stereotype out of the way. Who knows, maybe if Trek is put on a shelf for ten to twenty years, it will become a retro-hit and demand for the show will be there. Demand just wasn't there for Nemesis and ENT.

--hipster

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I heart Ducky. I stalk Ducky. His hair is quite fluffy, and he makes good cookies. (And now he's my prom date...)

First of all they need to tie up B&B, throw them into a sack and hit them with large concrete blocks untill they promise never to step onto a studio, direct/produce, or even look at a scripts again. Without a doubt they are the #1 and #2 reasons for the failure of Star Trek. Want proof? Look at the episode they have produced/directed and written vs those by the other trek directors. Massive difference.

I like Trek alot and i hope they do make a new show. Just dont give it the 3rd rate crappy writers and producres that Enterprise had.

I had a few ideas (some influenced, helped out by, and discussed with Stuart :-))

-Entirely fan written show. That i know of this has never been done. So each season have fgans send in their best scripts, and choose the 24 best. They they get to go to Hollywood and work with a real scriptwriter to improve the weak points on the script. and make the show.

Of course this jhas to be a new show, new characters, etc. but the fans can work with that.

-A show based on a non federation group. The Maquis. Have the show portray them as the good guys and the federation as evil. It would be a fun turnaround thats very rarely done on tv. Might not work, but hell it could not hurt to even do a single episode on this. Look at how much fun the evil fewderation universe stories were in TOS, DS9, and Enterprise.

-A "3rd watch" type show where they follow seperate , but intercoonected groups of Federation p[eople. One on a federation spacestation (not DS9, but a starbase) and one on a ship.

Oh, Humphrey, I'd almost blocked out Bergman, and you had to bring him up again! #-o

Lord Bergman and his evil henchmen {yes, I'm being dramatic} helped to beat Trek into the nothingness it is now. Currently there are no production plans for Trek. I don't know if that's good or bad...

--htx

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I heart Ducky. I stalk Ducky. His hair is quite fluffy, and he makes good cookies. (And now he's my prom date...)

Exactly. You can't have a solid seven years (three under ENT and what, four(?) under VOY) of Berman's obsession with bad writing, reset buttons, and time travel without thoroughly jading the fans. Even Star Trek fans.

Brannon Braga = Bad.
Rick Berman = Bad (and then some).
Manny Coto = Good.

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I'm a major Star Trek fan. TNG is my favorite TV show (I praise the syndication gods). I liked time travel in Trek-verse when it was used with great caution and in drastic situations {and maybe once or twice in seven years}. Since Bergman became the un-official king of Trek time travel became standard. Something so fantastic gets boring after a while.

And I really didn't like ENT. The concept was good, the characaters were good, but the way they were used... were terrible. I think I've seen parts of every episode, but not one episode fully. The writing just didn't hold me to the show. I couldn't sit through an entire episode without changing the channel or picking up a book. It just seemed like Berman borrowed all of the ideas from the other trek series and haphazardly glues them together to make a show. ENT felt like a re-run. A bad re-run, because I like re-runs...

--htx

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I heart Ducky. I stalk Ducky. His hair is quite fluffy, and he makes good cookies. (And now he's my prom date...)

The Enterprise Coto episodes were well done and really improved the show. i enjoyed those episodes. They were well directed, and well written.

But we are getting off topic, how to save the series?

Well first of all, no more movies. Never make another movie unless the next trek series does very, very well. Frankly the Movies just cannot do as well as a good two or three parter for the real show itself. ]

Second: Let your actors act. I do not care about graphicvs, cool ship visuals, or stupid technobable. I want to see the characters being the characters. I want to see Sisko being the leader of DS9, a father, and a authority figure. I do not only want them to be breasts with a trek communicator.

third: listen to the fans. You do not write all of the episodes for the entiure span od the show right away. So if the fans in tyhe first season do not like something, re-write the dman second season scripts. Hold off on the second season untill you got it right. the fans of the show will understand.

Fourth: Do not have the show stupidly compete with other shows that are giuaranteed to take away your viewing audience. like going against the amazing Sci-fi friday night lineup. Move it to a day that is lacking in Sci-fi shows, like Tuesdays, Thursdays, or Mondays.

Fifth: Keep the budget low. You will be amamzed at how good of a show you can make with a limited budget. Spend as little money on graphics as you can, use the rest to hire great writers.

Sixth: LISTEN TO THE FANS They watch your damn show. If you ignore and anoy them they stop watching.

I love ships if done right. A Dyson Sphere based series would be nice.

I loved Relics.

Are they still going to bring back Blake's7(BBC) or has the new series they were planning been abandoned?

[edit to add image from blakes7.com]

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Trek needs to be completely redone if it's going to be any good. Needs:

- Good, non-campy plots
It would be a good idea for plots to place much less emphasis on special effects!

- Well thought out, non-humanoid aliens

- Better main characters

- Better thought out technology
For example, the Enterprise's central computer would just be a very fast (and rather specialized) one, with no artificial intelligence; phasers would be replaced with electrical and projectile weapons; and warp drive would only work at STL speeds (a different mode of FTL travel would be needed).

In other words, it would have to become Babylon 5 minus the supernatural stuff.

My fandom seriously drifted off as DS9 came to an end. I kind of followed Voyager, but just found Enterprise silly. It's a bit tough to do a prequel series with obviously better tech than TOS. Then all the timeline re-writing... :roll: You'd think if sci-fi writers learned anything from B5 it's that the fans like continuity... heck we even prefer it!



As for what I'd like to see in a future Trek. I'd like to skip ahead about 500-1000 years to put the current generations even farther in the past than we are to TNG. Make the setting a galaxy spanning civilization struggling with creating unity and the forces trying to tear it apart. Make the "good guys" the folks trying to forge the fragile pan-galactic "federation" for peace and freedom and the bad-guys shadowy figures attempting to sow dissent and terror for personal gain. You could even introduce a nebulous dark force from another galaxy at some point. Nasty badguys like B5's Shadows intent on grabbing power through trading favors and supported seemingly minor roleplayers in exploiting each other.

Or... turn the whole idea on its head. The bad guys are the ones attempting to forge a pan-galactic hegemony. Maybe even using the ideals of the mythical federation as the basis for their crusade. The hegemonists are perfectly willing to subvert the freedoms and independence of entire civilizations (let alone individuals) to exact their highly conformist versions of stability and "peace". The good guys are the freedom fighters striking from settlements between the stars trying to preserve individual and species based self-determination. The irony is that the "good guys" look a bit like terrorists and are put in a position to seemingly be fighting against the ideals expressed in the older series. The nebulous extra-galactic others are a moderately helpful force trying to get the independents to use less destructful and more enlightened means to fight their battles against a massive and implacable enemy (a serious concern in an age where battles may obliterate entire star systems?). The outsiders will give advice but no active help; kind of like their own Prime Directive is in effect, seriously frustrating the heroes (be great to see that rule turned around I think wherein the protagonists are the ones not getting help). If you want you can still introduce extra-galactic badguys as well. Maybe a nasty civilization that has spent millions of years conquering the local group (of galaxies).

And if you really want to make it interesting: start with the first premise that the hegemonists/federalists are the good guys fighting these terrorists and extra-galactic forces, but slowly show us how they are kind of bad and the independents are the good guys trying to preserve some modicum of species and personal individuality. You could do this through the idealistic eyes of a new recruit who witnessed heavy handed federalist tactics and maybe eventually even some hints of deliberate genocide of non-cooperative civilizations. Such a person full of patriotic fervor might eventually come to see his side as wrong and seek out contacts among the rebels. Perhaps an extra-galactic infiltrator is the one slowly training his thought process and aiding his intellectual rebirth (which he and the viewers won't know for a while). What is his reaction the first time he sees or is asked to do something he finds questionabe? What happens the next time he is asked to do something he now believes to be wrong? Will any of his former friends feel as he does? Will his attempts to find rebel contacts tip his hand to his superiors, or will suspicious rebel contacts think him a spy or plant and kill him? What happens the first time information he gives to the rebels results in someone he knows being killed? Or when a number of federal citizens die as a result of his help to the rebellion? How does he deal with the conflicting loyalties and consequences? Is he a traitor or an idealist? Good question to explore if his/her/its story line persists.

Just a broad framework of the kind of story I might like to see.

In many ways, I'm quite sad to see what is apparently, for a while anyway, the end of the Trek universe. I can still remember sitting in our basement when I was about 7 or 8, in the great big black arm chair of my great grandmother's, pretending it was my own captain's chair. The original series influenced me quite a bit in my likes and dislikes of science fiction.

With the newer series (I still consider TNG "new"), I still thoroughly enjoyed them. Voyager really started to wear on me, though, at least as far as the writers were concerned. With the blatant tossing out of continuity, I fell into the status of simply watching the show on an episode by episode basis, without really connecting them to the greater Trek universe at large.

Enterprise, I felt, had a lot of promise. But the writing was pretty sad. I don't really think the acting was bad; the actors were pretty much limited by what the writers presented, and from what I've read, little room for even minor improvisation. Unfortunately, the episodes were simply rehashed tales from the other series. There was nothing outstanding, nothing to mark this as its own series.

A lot of people had a major problem with the introduction of Enterprise. For myself, I liked it as a nice change. but really, if you judge the show on the basis of the intro, you'r essentially ignoring the entire meat of the series. Unfortunately, the meat of the series was somewhat tainted. After all, the biggest hurdle was to make the show appear pre-TOS. How can you do that and not look just plain silly when TOS was made in the 60's? Even dials and meters looked more advanced!

In the end, it was not until the fourth season that the show began to become what it should have been all along: an introduction to the Star Trek universe, and a set up for TOS. We saw the Andorians, the Tellerites, we saw a fairly good story line involving the Vulcans (though this was more to make up for thier shoddy treatment of that species in the earlier seasons than anything that *needed* explaining in the Trek Universe). Had the show not been cancelled, we would have been able to see the Romulan War, far more exciting in my view than some new, uber-enemy like the whole bloody temporal time war thing.

So what is to become of Trek now? I had thought that movies were the way to go, but I tend to agree more with Humphrey (was that who said it?). Movies would only be a waste of time. I like the movies, but they are still little more than extra long television episodes. In my view, I would like to see some well thought out, well done mini-series, set in various points along the Trek time line, dealin with key events. It's time not to let one ship hog all of the action for a given time frame.

At any rate, I'm out of time and I have to go back to work. I had more to say, but it has pretty much been said, and people tend to skip these long posts anyway!

...John...

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proof of the failings of Enterprise:

I'm a huge Scott Bakula fan. loved Quantum Leap--I have all the novels, the encyclopedia, and even the soundtrack. (it would be a much better soundtrack without the 11-minute interview on side 2, but I digress.) in my personal opinion, Scott Bakula is one of the most underrated actors around.

I gave up less than half-a-dozen episodes into Enterprise, because not even Scott Bakula could make me watch. I watched about as far as the first obligatory "weird alien sex" episode, and then, I was done.

how to improve it? I have to agree--let the franchise sit for a while. don't force it. after all, how many years went by between TOS and TNG? I didn't watch DS9; I didn't watch Voyager except to MSTie it with my friend Cara. if there is demand in ten, twenty, thirty years, bring it back then. otherwise, let it cool until a new generation demands it back. I, for one, don't yet.

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"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Yes i said to not do any more movies. Frankly becuase i have yet to see a trek movie that was better than any of the episodes of the show could do, or did. I just disagree with most movies made out of tv shows. It frankly just wont work. Make it into a miniseries like they did with farscape.

Rich ...

Sounds like Trek Wars ...

Hmmm, It's a Thought ...

At least they left Room in the Continuity, for More Episodes of Enterprise ...

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Voyager lost me when they introduced the time police dudes.
Enterprise lost me when they introduced the temporal cold war.
I spat on Enterprises undug grave when I flipped past