Amph [NERRRD] Observations, rhetorical questions, comments & 55 Years of Star Trek (General Thread)

Oh, with all the talk of Death Wish, I think you have to add "Q Part 2" to the list of VOY threads, even if it amounts to only 3 episodes. Still a significant arc with a beginning, middle and end (even if they end up being more lighter than sinister).

 

The S1s of almost every show really just didn’t know what the show was supposed to be, or what it would become. They all started out as one thing and ended up being something else. They found their footing over the course of seasons. SNW is probably the only live action series that knew what it wanted to be from the start- but even that had the benefit of DIS S2 soft launching it.

 

Oh, elements are always there for the later seasons to pick up. There probably isn't a single Trek series that doesn't reference or make great use of something from their first season during their final seasons. But DS9 was definitely still figuring itself out in the shadow of TNG during that first season. Several TNG follow-ups, but not much in the way of solid character directions. It's not until towards the end of Season 1 that we got Duet that found/really leaned into what DS9 would become. Even general notions like Odo's search for his people and the Dominion were held back in a way that they could pivot away from them.

 

Skin of Evil is fun . One of the few S1 episodes I saw when it originally aired (probably that and Conspiracy- not episodes to watch at night in the basement as a kid!).

S1 of VOY is better than TNG S1 for sure. TNG tried to kick off being an effort that "recaptured TOS", with no returning races. But all that was eventually abandoned by the end of Season 1 as TNG desperately needed to find its own voice instead of becoming a pale imitation. It mostly amounted to trying to continue themes from TMP and blending in recycled phase 2 scripts.

Then VOY kicked off with the intent of "recapturing TOS" with a lone ship out in the frontier, but also being the TNG-style show to feed to the fans upset about DS9 being too different (and, eventually, the more episodic one afraid of exploring serialized storytelling [much to its detriment] vs DS9's embracing of more serialized approaches). And that really shows with their "The Next-Next Generation" vibe that they approach a lot of those early challenges with competence based on past TNG missions now being common training knowledge. That TOS effort fell by the wayside pretty quickly though, and the series eventually slide a few paces away from TNG while still staying within arm's reach.

Then ENT would kick-off with the intent of "recapturing TOS" with a lone ship out in the frontier (but with less advanced tech). But that would eventually fall by the wayside yet again for their shift towards being relevant to the post-9/11 events.

The moral of the story: Stop trying to recapture TOS. It's a bad idea! Yes, SNW has kinda pulled off, miraculously. But that's one show after 35 years of failed attempts!


EDIT- And now I'm about to finally finish my VOY watch with what I believe is my first rewatch of Endgame in its entirety since it first aired. I've seen clips over the years, but this'll be the first one end to end since then, as well as the first one in context (as I didn't watch anything else of Season 7 when they aired, outside of maybe the premiere). This also concludes my watch/rewatch of the 24th century-set shows, leaving only ENT, TAS and 2 episodes of TOS left to rewatch before my long-term project comes to a close.

 

Kurtzman talks the Setting of Starfleet Academy.

It begs the obvious question – why set it at that point rather than a more familiar time to Trek fans like the 23rd or 24th century? As Kurtzman explains there’s a specific reason for doing so:

“There’s a specific reason for that. As the father of a 17-year-old boy, I see what my son is feeling as he looks at the world and to his future. I see the uncertainty; I see all the things we took for granted as given are not certainties for him.

I see him recognizing he’s inheriting an enormous mess to clean up and it’s going to be on his generation to figure out how to do that, and that’s a lot to ask of a kid.

My thinking was, if we set ‘Starfleet Academy’ in the halcyon days of the Federation where everything was fine, it’s not going to speak to what kids are going through right now. It’ll be a nice fantasy, but it’s not really going to be authentic.

What’ll be authentic is to set it in the timeline where this is the first class back after over 100 years, and they are coming into a world that is only beginning to recover from a cataclysm – which was the Burn, as established on ‘Star Trek: Discovery,’ where the Federation was greatly diminished.

So they’re the first who’ll inherit, who’ll re-inherit, the task of exploration as a primary goal, because there just wasn’t room for that during the Burn – everybody was playing defense.”​

The result is what he call an “incredibly optimistic” series, one that’s “very funny” and “very emotional” show with the kids representing “what a lot of kids are feeling now”.​

 

Yeah, it's a touchstone effort that most Trek shows have strived for to help keep the franchise relevant. TNG had the cold war, ENT had 9/11. DS9 was more multi-topical, but you can see where things like the events leading to the LA Riots, Northern Ireland conflicts, etc had influence and proximity to certain DS9 stories being produced. SNW kicked off with it. TOS also did several 60's-targeted subjects to seem hip and new. VOY mostly avoided (avoy-ded?) it, though.

 

Especially those interested in spaceships .

Anyways, this is wonderful:

 

It’s my fault that my project ran so long. I didn’t think it would take 20+ years .

 

There are 3 primary possibilities there, I think:

1) We know that the Borg assimilated the tech from alt-Janeway before they were destroyed. So its application against the Borg specifically would be reduced and perhaps limit any rush or need to install it widely. However, this option wouldn't preclude it being implemented against more standard threats.

2) This is something PRO Season 2 will address, as Voyager-A is supposedly decked out with Delta Quadrant tech and, from what we saw in the trailer, may have the armor built into the design.

3) Temporal Prime Directive is preventing Starfleet from implementing the tech. And as the PIC S3 epilogue with the Enterprise-G is still 2 years before the Endgame alt-future, they're not yet at the point where they can open that box without further concerns over changing the timeline. However, as we've also seen in PIC S3, that likely wouldn't prevent Section 31 from studying that tech in the meantime (given the other restricted tech they had aboard that station, like the new Genesis Device, etc).

But, that would also mean that we could theoretically start seeing that tech used in any post-PIC/pre-Burn series or film.

 

Yeah, the TPD is an iffy thing because of how lax its application may or may not have been applied to Janeway and Voyager. At the same time, we've seen efforts to avoid using future tech once acquired or abandoned to Starfleet. They basically do try to limit the changes to the timeline. So if the only thing that changes is that Voyager got back and the Borg were taken down (thus the armor not being a major concern, if the Borg would even use it in the first place rather than just develop countermeasures against Starfleet using it), they'd want to try to keep it limited to those things and not alter the entire tech tree of Starfleet by advancing it 30 years.

 

At the same time, that same SNW arc shows that there are still 27th century (or whenever) time agents keeping things in-check by retrieving tech and swearing officers to secrecy where possible.

Not to mention that Trek has multiple forms of time travel to consider (and acknowledged in-universe by the time investigators interviewing Sisko). Even Endgame kinda changed its mind in the last 5 minutes of the episode, going from what was clearly alternate/branching timelines (where Admiral Janeway would survive any erasure of the future that may or may not occur), to suggesting that the death of Captain Janeway would erase admiral Janeway's existence as well as all of her actions in the present and, thus, save the Borg (at the very least, this is what the Borg Queen believed on her death bed). But that obviously couldn't have been true, otherwise Admiral Janeway *succeeding* would erase herself from the timeline as well. So it's all a bit muddy.