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New 'Star Trek' Series Set For Fall
demaria writes: "Executive producers Rick Berman and Brannon Braga of ST: Voyager are at it again, and we can expect another Trek series in the fall, according to this article. Rumors are that it'll take place during the early days of the Federation. I wonder if they'll make the bridge have the same cardboard/buttons glued-on look as TOS did." Just my luck -- the more Star Trek spinoffs there are, the more toys I have to buy for Trekkie friends, and I'm always a few shows behind. Hopefully this one will have some cool merchandise. ($15 MP3 playing "communicators" for kids?) So send in scripts early, if you want to counteract an expected writers' strike. Note that Rick Berman specifically denies the "early Federation" rumors.
Rick Berman doesn't know good Trek from a hole in the ground. What we really wanted was Excelsior! Get it straight, Berman!
I'm personally fed up with the over-merchandised crud that's being pushed on us under the guise of Star Trek nowadays. The quality of the series has been consistently declining since TNG. Even the low-budget TOS (my personal fave because it's the original) beats DS9 and VOY.
Constitutionally Correct
Ar Trek Series Set For Fa-
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L Posted by timothy
on Monday Februar-
Y 19, @03:13AM fr-
Om the v-
Ulcans-in-tight-skirts dept. dema-
Ria writes: "Executive producers
Rick Berman and Brannon
Braga of ST: Voyager are at it again,
And we can expect another trek serie-
S in the fall, according to this articl-
E. Rumors are that it'll take place
during the early days of the Feder-
Ation. I wonder if they'll make the b-
Ridge have the same cardboard/buttons glu-
Ed-on look as TOS did." Just my luck -- the more Star
Trek spinoffs there are, the more toys I have to
Buy for Tr-
Ekkie friends, and I'm a-
Lways a few sh-
Ows behind. Hopefully this o-
Ne will have some cool merchandise. ($15 MP3 playin-
G
"communicators" for kids?) So send in scrip-
Ts early, if you want to c-
Ounteract an expected writers' strike. Note that Rick
Berman specifically denies the "early Federation" r-
Umor-
S.
-- Optimal, minimum-bandwidth solution, found by dynamic programming for your viewing pleasure. --
It's from the intro sequence of an old SNES game called Zero Wing, where all the english is apparently the result of a horrible mistranslation job.
You can see an animated gif of the intro sequence here.
Civil liberties are dependent on grass-roots-level solidarity (ooh, scary word that); just as militias and insurrections are our defense against the depredations of a corrupt government (see Yugoslavia, the Phillipines, Indonesia, etc.), unionizing, strikes, walk-outs etc. are our defense against the depredations of corrupt corporations.
I mean, the sides are writers who are ST geeks vs. UPN aka Viacom/Paramount etc.
Hooray for megacorps. BTW, the Viacom boardroom is sweet, let me tell you.
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Make mine methylphenidate.
I'm curious to see how they handle presenting the "future's past." Star Wars Ep I did a pretty bad job of making the past feel like it was actually earlier. As CGI techniques improve, it's harder to apply them without making things look more futuristic. Even the DS-9 tribbles timewarp episode spent half its efforts in getting the color palette right and making up for series discrepencies.
I bet they go for an earlier time, somewhere between first contact and The Enterprise. It could make for an interesting series, where more impactful discoveries are made than just another 'subspace anomaly.' It's been a long time since I watched an ST creation and actually felt like they were "boldly going where noone has gone before."
Will they change it back to "no man" since it's set earlier? Will Guinan guest star? Will Q?
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
The biggest problem facing the writers in Star Trek is that the technology can do so many different things. If the characters are in trouble, why not just beam them out? If a friend is fighting an enemy and you can't get a clear shot at the enemy, why not just stun them both? If the Federation had a cloaking device that not only made things invisible but could actually make things slide through solid matter, wouldn't they have done something with it when fighting a major war?
The current answer is just to handwave with silly made-up words: "We can't use the transporter right now because there is a cluster of verteron particles in the area." (At one time there was a "Particle of the week" web site, updated whenever Voyager introduced a new particle, which was about every week.)
A series set in the early days of the Federation would let them put more limits on the tech. They might go as long as a month before introducing a new particle to us.
If I were somehow put in charge of Star Trek, I know what series I would make. We know that when a civilization invents warp drive, the Prime Directive ends and they are invited into the Federation. We know that sometimes the Federation sends in a covert team to make sure things go smoothly--remember the episode where Riker was undercover and that alien chick was blackmailing him for sex? So, the series I would make is about a covert team that goes from planet to planet, helping smooth the way as each planet makes the final leap and joins the Federation. Because they are covert they can't just run around with phasers, communicators, and other gadgets, and they can't just beam out whenever they feel like it. Ideally it would have a story arc like Babylon 5 had, where it would take multiple episodes to resolve all threads in the plot and get the planet introduced to the Federation; over a 7 year run we might see 10 planets helped in this fashion. I wanted to call this "Star Trek: First Contact" but they used that title for a movie.
Anyway, setting the show in the wild-and-wooly early days of the Federation might work out well. But I still don't expect them to take any actual risks with the new show. It will be more of the same, but just a little bit different.
Hmmm, let's extrapolate from the past: white male starship captain, older starship captain, black starship captain, woman starship captain... I figure the next one up will be an older, woman black starship captain. Probably not bald, but we can't be sure.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
My first reaction to the headline was "yes, very probably true". Then I remembered that fall is the US word for autumn.
Unionizing and strikes are fine, but they aren't inherently good any more than all corporations are bad. In recent decades unions have done as much to harm some workers as they've done to help others. As an example, the closed shop concept, in which you aren't allowed to get a job at a given employer unless you join the union. Well, what if I am opposed, diametrically, to many of the things the union supports? Well, if I want to work at that job, I still have to join the union. Are you telling me there are *no* Republican middle-class workers? As one myself, I'd be outraged to have my dues going to fund a party I don't usually vote for. Fortunately, I live in a state where closed shops are outlawed--but my state is, if I recall correctly, in the minority. Often, non-union workers are just people trying to make a living in their chosen field without having extra money siphoined from their paychecks, and used for political purposes. Unions often try to squash anyone who isn't a member, and act as bad as any strongarming corporation.
So, don't whine and boo-hoo about someone making a joke at a union strike. Non-union writers have every bit as much right to work as union members, and probably deserve more respect since they don't try to bully people into unionizing just to work and paying a union-tax that gets used for PAC money whether the worker forced to pay union dues agrees with it or not. Now, legally, union members don't have to pay the portion of dues used for political bribery--err, lobbying--but Big Unions managed to successfully defeat a bill that would have required union shops to post this information, so few union members even know this. Kind of reminds me how slimey megacorps buy legislation, eh...
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
About once a week, the writers and producers would get together and have a big brainstorming session. Ideas are tossed out at these meetings. The group as a whole thinks about continuity and character development: What areas haven't we explored lately? What interesting things might we do next? What overall direction should the show take, what relationships should we develop? What are we doing wrong that we could do better? That sort of thing.
Anyway, one fine week at the writer's meeting the chief Suggestion From On High was: "Hey, what about Wesley? We haven't really done much with that character. He's around, but we don't have much sense of who he is as a person." Everybody agreed, so that was the closing thought that a half-dozen Star Trek writers went away with.
And what's the easiest way for the audience to learn more about and identify more with Wesley? Have him save the ship! Arrange things so that some unlikely danger comes along that only Wesley's special talents are capable of recognizing or defending against. So what comes back is a slew of "Wesley saves the ship" scripts.
Most of these scripts were actually pretty good as individual scripts, but you wouldn't want to use them all sequentially as a matter of balance. Rather, in an ideal world you'd want to slip in a "Wesley saves the ship" script every now and then among the more traditional "Picard surrenders the ship" or "Geordi dislikes being blind" scripts. Use the better Wesley scripts first, send the weaker ones back for a rewrite or keep them around for a rainy day. No two consecutive episodes should be allowed to seem too similar.
But then the writer's strike was declared. When you've got a show to film and no new scripts are coming in, you use the scripts you've already got, regardless of whether this makes for a balanced presentation. Therefore, Wesley got to save the ship every other week, no matter how annoying it was to the fans who watched the show religiously. Thus, the "die-wesley-die" phenomenon.
[my best friend's godmother produced some of the ST:TNG episodes]
I play Nerd-Folk!
Merchandise? From Paramount? Not likely. Call Paramount a lot of things... but not sellouts.
Nosiree - Paramount has been careful about who it licenses the Star Trek name to. So far, they've carefully limited themselves to posters, books, flashlights, magazines, pencils, cereals, pretend phasers, Christmas ornaments, lunchboxes, action figures, clocks, calendars, buttons, feminine napkins, crappy ceramic figurines, decorative plates, jackets, cheese doodles, pretend communicators, aerosol sprays, hot water bottles, trading cards, toothpaste, children's vitamins, AOL CDs, video games, role playing games, board games, snow domes, playing cards, cheap jewlery, dolls, hats, keychains and mugs that make Mr. Spock disappear when you add hot water. So don't expect them to start licensing the name to just anyone who offers them $20 and a bottle of Jack Daniels. The asking price is $40 and two bottles.