Mine is that Discovery should have been a series taking place in the Picard era.
TNG is boring as hell, genuinely, and a complete abandonment of the space opera formula that gave TOS its charm. The entire TNG cast is dull and equally as robotic as Data, who gets far too much emphasis every episode. It’s exhausting and repetitive to constantly show Data making the same head and eyebrow movements, demonstrating emotions like irritation while everybody pretends he doesn’t have emotions, and everybody prefacing every sentence with “Captain…” Frankly I think TNG was written to appeal exclusively to nerds who get off on watching people do things robotically. The only interesting character is Q because everybody else’s dead performance makes him look like a superstar.
Keiko wasn’t that bad of a character. She wasn’t a great character, but the biggest problem was that her actress, Rosalind Chao, had very poor chemistry with Colm Meaney, who in turn had great chemistry primarily with Alexander Siddig, and also with several other actors. This wasn’t a problem when she was cast in “Data’s Day” as the bride to be with nervous bride energy, if anything that’s an asset in such a short time frame. But then expecting that to work in what is supposed to be a long-term marriage is what led to perception of her being all MIIIIIILES all the time.
Now, I don’t know that mid to late 90s Star Trek producers would have been on board, but they should have written an amicable divorce plot for the O’Briens. Miles and Keiko clearly grew apart from each other over the course of the show. Between her extended trips to Bajor and the way she all but threw Miles at Kira, they were already about 85% of the way there anyway. A divorce would have been a great way to resolve that issue, and use Star Trek as it was always intended: to explore real life issues in a scifi universe.
They need to actually give a full look into the economics of the federation. Yeah, it’s space communism. But I want more specifics.
There’s a recent episode in Lower Decks where they liberate a planet from capitalism… by essentially taking all the “worthless” gold and jewels and giving it to Space Pirate Royalty to broker a peace deal between them and the Federation.
I don’t doubt that the majority of the occupants of said planet are now happier not having to grind for capital…, but apparently having capital is still an immensely useful resource that the Federation is happy to, uh, quietly commandeer in lieu of payment for its, uh, services to the planet(?)
Energy-to-(organic)matter conversion + futuristic power generators makes feeding your population a triviality. That simplifies just about any economic system, which takes a lot of the complicated stuff out of government and class hierarchies.
But Star Trek is a fictional utopia, much like Communism.
In reality, corruption would still mess up government in a “real world” Star Trek. I’m a casual Trekkie, but I don’t recall much detail about the Federation’s or Earth’s government structure. Do people still vote? Is it a benevolent military dictatorship? Who knows? And who cares? It’s not really relevant to the themes of the shows.
Star Trek is founded on liberal ideas popular in the mid-20th century that humanity could achieve unity and peace if it just cast aside superficial differences like race and gender, allowing us to focus on exploring the universe once we’d gotten over fighting each other. That’s the very core of the entire franchise and I’m fine leaving it that way, unscrutinized, since it clearly doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. It’s like how the force is best left a mystical property of the universe in Star Wars, rather than science-ized with medichlorians.
That simplifies just about any economic system, which takes a lot of the complicated stuff out of government and class hierarchies.
Right, but they very clearly don’t get all of their food out of a replicator, nor do they use the holodeck for things like hair cuts. There is still people who serve as cooks, waitresses, barbers, etc despite the technology being there to not need those jobs.
And that’s what I want explored in more depth.
I’m a casual Trekkie, but I don’t recall much detail about the Federation’s or Earth’s government structure. Do people still vote? Is it a benevolent military dictatorship? Who knows? And who cares?
I’ve been dipping my toe in the books. At least in the first book for PIC, The Last Best Hope, they very clearly still have political struggles for power, corruption, tribalism, and voting. It ain’t a dictatorship, but the goals and views of the government leaders aren’t wholey benevolent.
A particularly good example was the Federation council member Olivia Quest. She’s a rep from a border planet, whos been facing some issues with the romulan star going supernova, and all the immigrants that are mayhaps being sent their way. So she raises a big stink over any and all help towards the romulans. It’s self serving, selfish, and tribalism, but she was voted in and she wasn’t alone.
All of this is very familiar to real life. But it’s the exact kind of details I want, but on one of the shows. They made it interesting in the books, they could just as easily make it interesting in the show.
That’s the very core of the entire franchise and I’m fine leaving it that way, unscrutinized, since it clearly doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
Maybe the tech of replicators/transporters/holodecks should be left unscrutinized, because ultimately it relies on technobable for it to be compatible with a suspension of disbelief. But I don’t think the same goes for the societal structures of the federation. It worked in the Last Best Hope, I think it could work on the screen.
Porgs > Baby Yoda
As much as it is fun to revisit legacy characters and settings, they need to do a complete break, TNG style, and set a show somewhere where we can have new adventures with new characters. Lower Decks is somehow the closest to doing this and it’s a member berry show. The constant revisiting (and retconning) is slowly suffocating the franchise.
