WI: No back-to-back Star Trek?

[trekchu]

Arguably what killed pre-reset Star Trek was a mixture of Rick Berman's (boo, hiss, spit) seemingly free hand and the fact that after 18 years of uninterrupted Series after series new ideas were getting thin on the ground and the public was saturated.

Now, what if after the desicion was made to end TNG after Season 7, instead of starting to develop Deep Space Nine Paramount decides to concentrate on the big screen for several years and as a result alt-DS9 or some other show doesn't hit TV until 1995 or even a year later, riding on the wave of alt-First Contact?

What if this sets a precedent that says that between shows there must be a gap of either two or three movies or several years? By this math the third show (counting TOS) wouldn't end until 2002/2003 and the fourth wouldn't start until 2005 and so forth? With that ALT-Voyager would probably be better (though overall I still like it more than Enterprise) since Berman would still manage to get himself retired sooner or later.

 

[Dathi THorfinnsson]

Umm...

I don't think this would work.

The whole POINT of DS9 was to introduce a whole new set of viewpoints and ideas. Stationary spacestation instead of traveling ship, etc.

As for leaving a gap, look at how successful Enterprise was, as in NOT. I think having no new shows is more likely to let the fan base drop, rather than regenerate interest.

I could be wrong, of course.


Killing off Voyager, or actually making it work (see that thread) would do a lot more for the series than carefully planned gaps.

IMO, YMMV

 

[e of pi]

As for leaving a gap, look at how successful Enterprise was, as in NOT. I think having no new shows is more likely to let the fan base drop, rather than regenerate interest.

I could be wrong, of course.

I don't know that you're necessarily wrong about a gap's effect, but there was no gap between VOY and ENT. Voyager ended in May of '01, and Enterprise premiered in September of the same year. In television terms, that's continuous.

 

[trekchu]

What I meant with "Gap" was with Star Trek on TV. We'd see films in those gaps.

 

[Grey Wolf]

Deep Space Nine was most often the best of Star Trek.

What you need to prevent is VOYAGER! It had no real purpose and the whole idea behind it was based on a misconception of reality. There was a way to make it work, but that would have undermined all of Star Trek's glorious "ethics", but would have been the only realistic way.

Instead of Voyager, blend the DS9 and STTNG casts to make a story arc of films (akin to how the original cast had ST II and ST III as a mini arc)

Best Regards
Grey Wolf

 

[Dathi THorfinnsson]

I don't know that you're necessarily wrong about a gap's effect, but there was no gap between VOY and ENT. Voyager ended in May of '01, and Enterprise premiered in September of the same year. In television terms, that's continuous.

??
Wow. I remember a long gap. That's probably because I'd totally given up on Voyager by then.

Thanks for the correction.

 

[trekchu]

Deep Space Nine was most often the best of Star Trek.

What you need to prevent is VOYAGER! It had no real purpose and the whole idea behind it was based on a misconception of reality. There was a way to make it work, but that would have undermined all of Star Trek's glorious "ethics", but would have been the only realistic way.

Instead of Voyager, blend the DS9 and STTNG casts to make a story arc of films (akin to how the original cast had ST II and ST III as a mini arc)

Best Regards
Grey Wolf

This is actually pretty much what I was thinking about. I actually liked Voyager, but that's probably because it was the first Star Trek show I followed from beginning to end (when I got into Trek, DS9 IIRC was already in it's third season in the US). To make Voyager work is beyond the scope of this thread, I'm more interested in the franchise overall.


Movies are a good way to keep the franchise alive between shows.

 

[Mysterion]

The problem with Star Trek, IMO, was not that there were too many series following each other too closely.

Deep Space Nine was the best of the Trek series since TOS, for my money, and it overlapped both TNG and Voyager.

The problem was that both Voyager and Enterprise were just rehashing of stuff that had been done on TNG (or very easily could have been by just changing the names in the scripts).

Voyager and Enterprise both had potentially interesting premises, and in both cases these premises were mostly given lip-service and took a back-seat to broken holodeck stories and forehead-of-the-week stories. and then there is the totally unneeded "temporal cold war" nonsense of Enterprise...

To be fair, Enterprise in it's fourth season made a valiant attempt to put things back on track, but sadly it was too late for the ratrings to be pulled-up to where they needed to be.

 

[trekchu]

I never actually watched Season 4 of Enterprise....


Mind you, I will maintain that getting rid of Berman after DS9 concludes might save Star Trek.

 

[Mike Stearns]

To be fair, Enterprise in it's fourth season made a valiant attempt to put things back on track, but sadly it was too late for the ratrings to be pulled-up to where they needed to be.

There is a general consensus among Trek fans that if Enterprise had started with the Xindi Arc, which was awesome, Enterprise would have easily run for seven or eight seasons.

 

[Mysterion]

I never actually watched Season 4 of Enterprise....


Mind you, I will maintain that getting rid of Berman after DS9 concludes might save Star Trek.

Getting rid of both Berman and Braga certainly wouldn't have hurt, I'll grant you that.

As for the fourth season of Enterprise - if you get the chance (library, borrow it from a friend, etc.) I recommend you giving at least one watch-through. There are some stand-out Trek episodes to be found there, including a three-episode Vulcan arc, a revisit to the Mirror universe, and an explanation as to why there are two different kinds of Klingons.

Fair warning, though: the series finale episode is toxic and is to be avoided at all costs!

 

[Mike Stearns]

Fair warning, though: the series finale episode is toxic and is to be avoided at all costs!

Yeah. I liked the idea of setting an episode inside an episode of another series, but they should have been linked somehow and they weren't and Trip's death is fucking retarded. And they never do explain how the kidnappers mange to catch up to the Enterprise.

 

[trekchu]

Getting rid of both Berman and Braga certainly wouldn't have hurt, I'll grant you that.

There's a reason why they eased out Roddenberry in TNG even before he got seriously ill. The quality of the show improved markedly.

As for the fourth season of Enterprise - if you get the chance (library, borrow it from a friend, etc.) I recommend you giving at least one watch-through. There are some stand-out Trek episodes to be found there, including a three-episode Vulcan arc, a revisit to the Mirror universe, and an explanation as to why there are two different kinds of Klingons.

Fair warning, though: the series finale episode is toxic and is to be avoided at all costs!

uuuuh. Mirror Universe, I like. Gonna give it a look-see then.

 

[trekchu]

There is a general consensus among Trek fans that if Enterprise had started with the Xindi Arc, which was awesome, Enterprise would have easily run for seven or eight seasons.

That's a very good point actually, though Broken Bow itself wasn't that bad. I liked the Cocrane reference.

 

[pompejus]

The problem with Star Trek was in my opinion that with the exception of DS9, they tried to recreate TNG with a poorer cast and writing. Voyager and Enterprise should have kept their premise of a respectively a strip with two factions stranded 75 years from home and a prequel series with a lower technology. Instead they played it safe and recreated TNG.

Also something that might have worked would be only 1 series at the time and not split the creative teams. The much maligned Braga (often in combination with Moore) created some of the better episodes in TNG and Berman was one of the people responsible for the new direction of TNG when Roddenberry left. So basicly first TNG then DS9 when DS9 ends Voyager (while actualy using the premise) and then the prequel Enterprise.

PS the 4th season of Enterprise was certainly worth watching. It was easily the best of the series and you could finally see the potential Enterprise had. If the 4th season actually had been the first season, Enterprise could have become an actually good series (if they would have kicked T'poll out of it, I realy hate her). But I think the mirror universe arc although cool, was 1 episode too long.

 

[Brady Kj]

I'm not familiar with Enterprise, but didn't the very existence of the Xindi contrast with a lot of canon? Why was there this race at war with the Federation, that was never mentioned a century later?

 

[Emperor Norton I]

To quote roughly James Cawley, it wasn't fatigue that did Star Trek in I don't think. It was that the production wasn't doing good things or good stories, and was being ignorant and ignorant of the fans.

 

[lukedalton]

Getting rid of both Berman and Braga certainly wouldn't have hurt, I'll grant you that.

Honestly Braga is a good writer, the problem is that as producer it's not up the task, and frankly seeing as he worked in Voyager keeping him up with Enterprise is not really smart.
Berman had done good things for the franchise and in his day was a fine helmsman, unfortunaly after so much season was letteraly burned out.
Taking someone who was not so insular and saw how the sci-fi scene were evolving (X-files, Stargate, Buffy, Farscape) and adapt instead to cling to the usual formula like there was no tomorrow is a good move, better if is one who, like J.J. Abrams, is not really a fan.

Fair warning, though: the series finale episode is toxic and is to be avoided at all costs!

Why? The Terra prima two-parter is very good, a fine finale for Enterprise (sorry but for me the 'other' finale simply don't exist...a valentine for the fans my...)

 

[The Doctor]

I would have been interested in a series based around a planet in the Federation or one trying to get admitance.... It would have been interesting to get a non Federation look at the Federation.

 

[Mike Stearns]

I would have been interested in a series based around a planet in the Federation or one trying to get admitance.... It would have been interesting to get a non Federation look at the Federation.

Deep Space Nine kind of touches on that early on....