Reboot Star Trek.
Posted: Thu Apr 12, 2018 11:34 pm
So one of the main things I hate about Discovery is the insistence that it is a Prime Universe show when it clearly isn't. But that got me to thinking... what would a total reboot of Trek look like? Call it an alternate universe, or just a plain hard reboot or whatever, but what if you were going to remake the series from a blank slate. What would you use from previous Trek? What would you ditch?
My thoughts...
1) Clear out most of the stuff that happened around the present times. Television and baseball aren't going to die out, there weren't Eugenics wars, there isn't going to be WWIII (Glances at the news. Well okay that might happen tomorrow.) etc. In fact I would have a general rule - the writers must never posit any event happening prior to 2100. No "when the first Lunar base opened in 2025..." lines, because nothing dates your show faster.
2) In fact, 2100 is when a near-light-speed-drive was invented - perhaps this would be 'impulse drive', or maybe first generation warp drive that could only do a fixed 1xc. There follows about 150 years of Earth sending out colony ships. Some of the closer ones would remain in contact via STL ships or lightspeed comms, with journey and message times in years. But many ships head out into the galaxy in a great diaspora, and many are never heard from again.
First contact with Vulcans, Andorians and Tellarites happens during this period, they are roughly comparable in technology. The four powers exist as allies. Around 2250 warp drive is invented, a joint effort between them. "The Federation" is formed about 2270, but it's less like the USA and more like the EU, or even the UN.
The show is set in 2290. So there are plenty of people alive who remember the first warp drive, and most adults would remember a time before the Federation existed.
Point being, let's not constantly have to invent alien races who look just like humans, or even like bumpy headed humans. A lot of the civilisations the Enterprise discovers are just going to be flat-out humans. This makes their similarities to us more plausible. And with the makeup money saved on those, you make the relatively fewer aliens you do have look even more alien.
3) There would be no universal translator. But there would be Inter Stellar Basic. ISB is an ancient language whose origins are lost in time. It serves as a common tongue for spacefaring species. ISB is not necessarily the primary language of all spacefaring species as such - just one they tend to have in common. You're not likely to get a job on a spaceship if you don't at least know enough of it to get by. The purpose of this is to avoid the silliness that you can translate an alien language you've never heard before - but you can still have occasions where language barriers are a problem if you want to. ISB is rendered on screen as English via standard Hollywood translation convention.
4) Controversial one - the Prime Directive exists only in the loosest form. Essentially it states that an officer may not interfere in an alien culture without orders from above. So you can interfere... if the government tells you to. And saving people from natural disasters is not regarded as interference. Essentially, the PD just means a Captain can't run his own foreign policy. The PD has been done to death, so let's see what we can do without it.
5) Nothing about humans being "evolved" beyond basic emotions like greed. Nor anything depicting a future in which basically everyone agrees about every political point because one point of view is so obviously right. People are people, and they're not going to stop being people in a few hundred years.
6) Generally a more realistic mixture of technologies. By which I mean, computers way more advanced than Trek typically shows them. Plus lots of genetic engineering, highly advanced medical science, etc. But interstellar travel is relatively new, it's difficult, it's hellishly expensive. I want the Enterprise to feel like its on it's own out there most of the time, in a dark, scary place where help is not usually available. Think about travel during the age of sail, where journeys took weeks, months or even years. No more nipping home for the weekend!
As a consequence of that, the Federation is NOT a post-scarcity society. Yes, money still exists.
7) I'd like to see a more realistic depiction of weapons and their firepower. TOS did this better than anything that came afterwards. Being hit by a ships' phaser bank or a photon torpedo should be like being hit by a nuclear blast. A LARGE nuclear blast. If the shields go down and the ship gets hit again, the ship is vapourised. Totally. And weapon ranges are in the hundreds of thousands of miles - two ships next to one another exchanging fire is something we should never see.
Similarly, decide how powerful your hand weapons are and stick with it. Don't treat a hand phaser like a handheld artillery piece in one scene and a .45 in another.
8) Yes, diversity! Upwards of 80% of the crew should be Chinese, Indian, African, South American. That's just how the demographics of the world are. But at the same time, do not go around making a big deal about it, either in the show or out of it. Starfleet takes recruits from anywhere in the world, no bias, and that's just taken entirely for granted by everyone concerned.
Those are my thoughts... anybody else?
My thoughts...
1) Clear out most of the stuff that happened around the present times. Television and baseball aren't going to die out, there weren't Eugenics wars, there isn't going to be WWIII (Glances at the news. Well okay that might happen tomorrow.) etc. In fact I would have a general rule - the writers must never posit any event happening prior to 2100. No "when the first Lunar base opened in 2025..." lines, because nothing dates your show faster.
2) In fact, 2100 is when a near-light-speed-drive was invented - perhaps this would be 'impulse drive', or maybe first generation warp drive that could only do a fixed 1xc. There follows about 150 years of Earth sending out colony ships. Some of the closer ones would remain in contact via STL ships or lightspeed comms, with journey and message times in years. But many ships head out into the galaxy in a great diaspora, and many are never heard from again.
First contact with Vulcans, Andorians and Tellarites happens during this period, they are roughly comparable in technology. The four powers exist as allies. Around 2250 warp drive is invented, a joint effort between them. "The Federation" is formed about 2270, but it's less like the USA and more like the EU, or even the UN.
The show is set in 2290. So there are plenty of people alive who remember the first warp drive, and most adults would remember a time before the Federation existed.
Point being, let's not constantly have to invent alien races who look just like humans, or even like bumpy headed humans. A lot of the civilisations the Enterprise discovers are just going to be flat-out humans. This makes their similarities to us more plausible. And with the makeup money saved on those, you make the relatively fewer aliens you do have look even more alien.
3) There would be no universal translator. But there would be Inter Stellar Basic. ISB is an ancient language whose origins are lost in time. It serves as a common tongue for spacefaring species. ISB is not necessarily the primary language of all spacefaring species as such - just one they tend to have in common. You're not likely to get a job on a spaceship if you don't at least know enough of it to get by. The purpose of this is to avoid the silliness that you can translate an alien language you've never heard before - but you can still have occasions where language barriers are a problem if you want to. ISB is rendered on screen as English via standard Hollywood translation convention.
4) Controversial one - the Prime Directive exists only in the loosest form. Essentially it states that an officer may not interfere in an alien culture without orders from above. So you can interfere... if the government tells you to. And saving people from natural disasters is not regarded as interference. Essentially, the PD just means a Captain can't run his own foreign policy. The PD has been done to death, so let's see what we can do without it.
5) Nothing about humans being "evolved" beyond basic emotions like greed. Nor anything depicting a future in which basically everyone agrees about every political point because one point of view is so obviously right. People are people, and they're not going to stop being people in a few hundred years.
6) Generally a more realistic mixture of technologies. By which I mean, computers way more advanced than Trek typically shows them. Plus lots of genetic engineering, highly advanced medical science, etc. But interstellar travel is relatively new, it's difficult, it's hellishly expensive. I want the Enterprise to feel like its on it's own out there most of the time, in a dark, scary place where help is not usually available. Think about travel during the age of sail, where journeys took weeks, months or even years. No more nipping home for the weekend!
As a consequence of that, the Federation is NOT a post-scarcity society. Yes, money still exists.
7) I'd like to see a more realistic depiction of weapons and their firepower. TOS did this better than anything that came afterwards. Being hit by a ships' phaser bank or a photon torpedo should be like being hit by a nuclear blast. A LARGE nuclear blast. If the shields go down and the ship gets hit again, the ship is vapourised. Totally. And weapon ranges are in the hundreds of thousands of miles - two ships next to one another exchanging fire is something we should never see.
Similarly, decide how powerful your hand weapons are and stick with it. Don't treat a hand phaser like a handheld artillery piece in one scene and a .45 in another.
8) Yes, diversity! Upwards of 80% of the crew should be Chinese, Indian, African, South American. That's just how the demographics of the world are. But at the same time, do not go around making a big deal about it, either in the show or out of it. Starfleet takes recruits from anywhere in the world, no bias, and that's just taken entirely for granted by everyone concerned.
Those are my thoughts... anybody else?