r/startrek

I’ve been thinking lately about what I would like to see from whatever comes after Strange New Worlds and Starfleet Academy.

First, this isn’t a “new Trek sucks” post. I love Strange New Worlds, and I enjoy Starfleet Academy. I’m glad we’re still getting new Star Trek.

But there’s something TNG, DS9 and Voyager gave me that I don’t get as much from modern Trek.

Those shows made me feel like I was actually part of Starfleet.

I’ve rewatched them countless times, and I think a huge part of it is how much time we were allowed to spend simply living with these crews.

Quark’s felt like the local bar. Ten Forward felt like somewhere you could actually go after your shift. Voyager’s mess hall, sickbay, engineering and holodecks became familiar places. The holodeck could take us somewhere completely different every week, but somehow it still felt like part of home.

Not every episode needed to be a major event or cost 15 million.

Sometimes the ship encountered a weird anomaly. Sometimes there was a medical problem. Sometimes somebody screwed something up on the holodeck.

And because we spent so much normal time with those people, when something truly massive happened, it mattered more.

That’s what I’d love to see Star Trek return to.

Give us a completely new ship and crew. No Enterprise. No famous captain. No requirement that every character connect back to someone we already know.

Set it far enough in the future that Starfleet can build something we’ve never seen before.

Imagine a ship incorporating some of the incredible technology we saw in Discovery’s far future: programmable matter, extreme automation, self-repair systems, enormous fabrication capability and enough redundancy and resources to operate independently for years. And don’t forget the new state of the art weapons systems.

Basically, Starfleet builds the most advanced long-range exploration vessel it has ever constructed. Possibly not even a ship, maybe a star base with engines. A huge crew compliment.

And then they give the crew one order:

Go farther than we have ever gone.

Unlike Voyager, they aren’t stranded and desperately trying to get home. This is exactly where they’re supposed to be.

Their mission could have some enormous long-term objective. Maybe Starfleet has discovered evidence pointing toward one of the oldest surviving civilizations in the universe. Maybe they’re following a signal or trail that could take years to understand.

Whatever it is, DON’T make reaching it the entire plot of every episode.

Let it simmer.

Maybe we get another clue every five or ten episodes. Maybe we go an entire season without understanding what they’re actually following. Let that mystery carry through several seasons.

Meanwhile, give us what Star Trek does best.

First contacts. Strange civilizations. New enemies. New allies. Scientific mysteries. Planets nobody has ever mapped. Shipboard emergencies. Engineering problems. Medical mysteries. Moral dilemmas where there isn’t an obvious correct answer.

And please give us some lower-stakes episodes.

I don’t need the Federation, Earth, the galaxy or all sentient life to be facing destruction every season.

Sometimes I just want to watch Starfleet encounter something nobody understands and spend 45 minutes figuring it out.

I’d also bring back longer seasons. They don’t all need movie-level budgets and hour-long runtimes. Give us 15–20 episodes and allow some of them to be smaller.

Most importantly, give the ship a home.

Give it its own Quark’s or Ten Forward. Give us a recreation area, bar, restaurant, holodecks or whatever fits this era. Then actually let us spend time there.

Show the crew eating together. Drinking together. Dating. Arguing. Playing games. Celebrating birthdays. Being bored between missions.

Let us learn who the bartender is.

Let us know the nurse who isn’t a main character.

Let us recognize the engineer who always seems to be working the night shift.

By Season 3, I want to feel like I know where everything is on that ship.

Because when I think about why I still go back to TNG, DS9 and Voyager after all these years, I don’t think it’s because their special effects were better or because every episode had enormous stakes.

It’s because those shows gave us enough time with their worlds and characters that they eventually stopped feeling like places we were watching on television.

They felt like places we’d been.

That’s what I want from the next Star Trek.

Give us something completely new.

New ship. New crew. New civilizations. A part of the universe we’ve never explored.

Then give us enough time with them that, eventually, it feels like we’re part of Starfleet again.

Listen, I get it. The show is the show. We have to keep the cast together. Now that I've said that...

This canon test is decades old but from what I remember they lost 39 ships and 10k personnel (sidenote: do I remember Sisko escaping with Jake in a recap episode? Why didn't the effing Admiral get everyone off these ships that wasn't actual Starfleet? Surely they could have spared runabouts or a few dozen shuttle craft with warp capabilities to get these people away from an active battle zone if they couldn't spare a ship).

First answer what I THINK would/should have happened: Picard would be promoted to Admiral soon thereafter, maybe within 6 months post the episode with his brother (Home?). And Riker's field commission would become permeant almost immediately. I mean this fucking crew saved the damn quadrant, not just Earth.

Lore answer and the only one that makes any effing sense to me: Starfleet promotion system is not externally set but rather self-deterministic. They asked Riker what he wanted to do and he was like "Hang out with Picard and all my buddies on the Ent-D. Why would I leave?"

He was debating promotion in BoBW part 1 anyway. Okay, so they don't have any ships for him for a few months because the fleet is getting rebuilt? Fine. But certainly if Picard wants to stay on the Enterprise then Riker would have carte blanche regarding his ship posting, and specifically being a captain.

The last time we see the crew is in Nemesis, over a decade after the events of these two episodes. And Riker is still first officer, for that matter the rest of the crew is exactly the same. I would think they would get a reputation for being lazy.

Trek has always had a penchant for didactism throughout the franchise, some cloaked in heavy allegory, some more direct, some just enough with the details smudged, whether it's Let That Be Your Last Battlefield or The Outcast or Voyage Home. Some consider it preachy, others consider it the heart of the franchise.

My favorite remains Undiscovered Country, this wonderful story that challenges us as a Cold War audience to try to do the same as the crew in overcoming old biases, the collapsing Soviet Union for us, the collapsing Klingon Empire for them.

There won't be a big list but here are my top 3:

1. Sisko took over the Defiant from Smiley and took on the Klingon Battle cruiser and kicked it's ass in the mirror universe
2. Janeway took Voyager and flew it between a binary pulsar to shake off aliens in "The Scientific Method"
3. Picard took the helm and navigated the Enterprise threw a booby trapped minefields using only 2 thrusters..

Thoughts?

Update: Add Kirk flying the USS Constellation in "The Doomsday machine"

For me, I grew up with a lot of outdated hand-me-down stuff, and I've acquired many retro items, including some boxy portable computers. I also grew up on the Three Stooges, Original Star Trek and TNG, and old Disney movies, to name a few. Since around 2011, I also love classic Doctor Who, MST3K and the hammy old-style serials and movies they show, as well as the vintage shows that MeTV airs.

I have a few digital-electronic CRT TVs, but what I'd love to have is a vacuum-tube TV set (B&W preferable) similar to the one that Tom gets from B'Elanna in "Memorial", and do what he does: just sit down to relax after a long day, watch some wholesome, old, fun, now-public-domain television programs from the internet piped in from a computer adapter, and have a bowl of popcorn. (Seriously, when did modern TV shows get so gritty and grimdark?)

I’m pretty sure the answer is no as we get less alternative media these days but was their any books and such that continued the prodigy story ?

We get Crusher saying that the reason the crew must stay together hasn’t happened yet … then nothing.

Star Wars gives every side character a series and plot hole a movie. Star Trek has some of the most interesting characters just sitting there not being used while the writers keep retelling different versions of Star Trek history. I need more of Commander Shran yelling about how much Archer owes him. Forget the pink skins and show us what the Andorians did in the creation of the Federation. Now that I’m thinking about it, if they need to keep revisiting the well for origin stories, give us a show where each season retells how a race initially comes into contact with the pink skins and how the relationship develops.

I'm tired of these showrunners screwing up Star Trek. Who wants to help me create a Canon Star Trek show done right? I already know the broad strokes; but I also know this can't be a solo project. Among the millions of fans I know we have enough Starfleet Officers to form a Film Crew. Who wants to help show these Studio Execs how it's done?

The Broad Strokes: The show will be set on a new ship during the Dominion War and will explore the unexpected costs of war. We all know war will take our friends and our innocence; but what else will it take? More details available on request.

My favorite episode had been Faces, the episode where Torres is split in two. But I watched Tuvix for the first time and that ending shattered me.

This exploration of duality within one's identity is a topic I love, not just from a cool sci-fi or character writing standpoint, but connecting it to my own internal stuff too.

I think it's interesting the way that attachment to the status quo clouds people's sense of morality. Like if Faces hadn't ended with one of them getting shot, I'm still not sure that taking life away from two beings, Klingon Torres and Human Torres, to give life back to one being, the original Torres, would have been presented as potentially immoral, yet it was presented as almost a given that the moral thing to do was to sacrifice Tuvix to being back Tuvok and Neelix.

Maybe I'm biased because I find Neelix very annoying, and Tuvok is a pretty boring character in most episodes, and I personally found Tuvix far more likeable and relatable than either of them. It's also funny because Faces was this profound and beautiful character development for B'Elanna Torres, even though technically her character wasn't on screen almost the entire episode, while Tuvix did almost nothing to develop Tuvok or Neelix other than to serve as a reminder that they're two of the weaker Star Trek characters but that they'd be really cool if they were merged

Looking for an obscure 1980s Star Trek comedy song: "Twenty Years of Pointy Ears" by Sid Terror

I'm trying to track down a recording/lyrics for an extremely obscure Star Trek song I heard at a science-fiction convention in the mid-1980s. I believe the song is "Twenty Years of Pointy Ears" by Sid Terror. I've since discovered that it appears to have been released on the 1987 independent album Star Trek Comedy: The Unofficial Album, apparently on Vince Emery Productions (VE-02-LE), track B3.

I don't have my original tape anymore, and I have been unable to find an audio recording or complete lyrics online. I remember quite a bit of the song. Some of the lyrics included:

"From '66 to '69, there was a show / About the starship Enterprise / As we all know..." and later:

"Paramount told them 'go to hell' / Though they found Star Trek toys sold well / But there's no money in sci-fi films today. / The highest grossing movie in the world is called Star Wars..."

There were also spoken comedy bits along the lines of: "It's making money! Quick! Make another one!" I also remember a section about Sulu and something involving "Genesis is a b*mb that's lots of fun/ Unlike Star Trek 1"

Does anyone remember this recording, own the LP/tape, have a digitized copy, or know where I could hear it? I'm especially interested in getting the complete lyrics.

I'm particularly hoping someone who was active in the 1980s Star Trek convention/fan scene might recognize it. It's been stuck in my head for 20 years and it's driving me crazy!

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