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Babylon 5 Creator Pitches Trek
pdawerks writes "According to Sci-Fi Wire, Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski told fans on a B5 Usenet group that he and Dark Skies creator Bryce Zabel have put together an idea for a new Star Trek series, which he said would revive the ailing franchise. 'I got together [with Zabel] and wrote a treatment earlier this year that specified how to save [Star Trek] and develop a series that would restore the series in a big way,' Straczynski wrote. 'I actually think it could be a hell of a show. Whether that ever goes anywhere with Paramount, who knows?'"
"Captain, it's a planet where they allow men to marry men and women to marry women!"
"Well, that's something Earth had to recognise as a fundamental human right..."
"But, Captain, they're doing it in polygamus unions!"
"WHAT!?!? Helm to starboard! Weapons officer, load all topedo tubes! Raze their capitol!!"
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
As the series centers around Wesley's travels around the galaxy as a higher being.
-- Not Wil Wheaton
If the writers are reading this I have an idea for the pilot.
Captain Archer of enterprise saves the life of a crew mate and SUDDENLY disappears in a flash of blue. He awakes to find himself trapped in the past, facing mirror images that are not his own...
I know what you guys are thinking...
"OH.... BOY"
...have Rick Berman shot, drawn, quartered, and then really hurt. That man has done nothing but ride the noble stallion, passed on by Roddenberry, that was once Star Trek to death, and after the horse died, Berman has been beating the fucker with a stick for a few years.
--
I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
that this is going to ride the wave and give us:
Str Trek:CSI
I really need to sell my TV.
Bab5 guy first went to Star Trek guys with the idea of Babylon 5. But they didn't accept the "space station" suggestion at that time, so Bab5 was born independently.
Later Star Trek guys came up with DS9. (no comments here)
Now, I wonder what will be different.
JMS once talked about his doing a trek series. It was back in the hieght of B5 and someone asked him what he would do if Paramount handed him a Trek series. He said something along the lines of (can't find it on Google Groups right now): I'd start by getting away from the federation. Kill off a few people so the fans know that this is not going to be the same-old and then start to tell some interesting stories.
It was funny because he said that before Voyager and Andromeda (which was originally a Trek series about the fall of the Federation as Rodenbury had pitched it) came out, and the good points of BOTH of those series were exactly that: getting away from the Federation and establishing their own stories. Woefully Voyager just entrenched itself in its own static mythos and Andromeda as plagued by execs that couldn't stand how dark it was.
Personally I don't see JMS being able to play ball with Paramount. I think he'd last 3-6 months tops before he blew up at them and walked. He's just not enough of a political animial (his detractors would say he's too much of one) to be able to put up with it.
Come on Malda, this is "News for Nerds"! Trek is large enough to deserve a separate category icon (even dispite of "Star Trek: Enterprise").
I suggest either a picture of the Original TOS Enterprise (NCC-1701 without any suffix) flying towards the user or a Starfleet Emblem.
You know it makes sense!
"Oooh, does that mean we get to kick some puffy white mad zionist butt?"
Fascinating.
Does that mean he'll solve that pesky "The universe resets at the end of every episode" bug?
And will be get the "Non-trivial character development" patch?
Cool.
My lord, this would be cool. A Trek Series with a plot.
We haven't seen that in ages.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
Unlike others who think that Star Trek needs to go on 'vacation' I don't agree. There is little value to bringing Trek back 10 years from now if its going to be the same as it is today. Berman and Braga are a plague on the Trek franchise that needs to be removed. It is clear that they are too burned out on this franchise do anything useful. For goodness sakes, they have reduced the process of the founding of the Federation into a romp through time. Yeah, creating this massive Federation 'empire' is just too damn boring. I mean all the species, conflicts and technologies that would have to be created would just be too bland to watch.
:)
The problem is with the writing, not the franchise. Its just not interesting anymore - and this latest travesty (Enterprise) is just adding insult to injury. Blue alien nazis? Someone get these clowns outta here
BEEP! Wrong!
Think back to when ST:TNG came out. It was slick to look at, but the stories were very tame and seemed to dwell heavily on gizmos and soap opera moments. Time did the show no favors. After the first season I gave up on following it regularly, and checking in from time to time found it getting scarcely better (about 20 minutes of material stretched into 1 hour show most of the time.)
It needs to get back to its roots. Let the characters have flaws, let them make mistakes. Put irony and humor into it in difficult situations. Make the leaders make difficult choices. Make it interesting again with good stories, not practically perfect people and a lot of references to Shakespeare.
Heck, Klingons were a cold-war type adversary -- make up some nasty race like Al Qaeda and have the characters discuss how the federation got into a mess with them and try to find a way out of it.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
When the Enterprise is facing yet another crisis and someone suggests rerouting the coffee machine output through a highly focused baryeon ray and then reverse polarizing it through the deflector dish, instead of the usual "Yes that might just work" whats really needed is for more of the other crew members to adopt completely bemused expessions and ask "What the Fuck are you babbling about????", "Is this another one of your loon ideas that involves writing a subroutine in less than 3 seconds with your left hand?", or "through the what dish?, will that affect Sky Sports reception?". Why does no one ever says "what?" on Star Trek, no matter how preposterous the proposed solution, enquiring minds want to know.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Well, there's a limit to how much I'm going to build up the myth of Roddenberry. After all, his insistence that there were no sane villians or informed disagreements -- Roddenberry insisted all conflict was caused by insanity or ignorance -- meant that Next Generation was pretty dull in the first two seasons.
This belief of his is also why Star Trek is chock full of evil madmen, but has few interesting large scale conflicts.
It was only as Roddenberry gave up control of the series that the show became more dramatic. Roddenberry was deeply uncomfortable with the idea of the Borg, and presumably he would have hated the way Deep Space Nine went once the Dominion War began.
I've always thought it would be great if there were a Federation Civil War. After all, the Federation appears to have an incredibly weak central government (that Prime Directive has actually been invoked to describe why the central government can't interfere with a member planet) and the Federation is spread over a large area, with only slow travel between the edges (apparently, it would take years to cross the Federation).
But because of Roddenberry's guiding principles, that'll probably never happen. "Enlightened people of the future will never fight each other."
Yawn.
Check out my blog: My Galaxy is Milky Way Adjacent
How many stories are there, really, that will fit into a one-hour TV slot? The universe may or may not be finite, but plot possibilities certainly are.
Which is why new shows seem like such dreadful, bloodless retreads of old ones. We've seen all the characters and pretty much every idea you could ever squeeze onto the deck of a starship.
There's nothing really *wrong* with ST. It's just played-out.
If ST could learn one thing from Babylon 5, it would be plot and character development. In the original series, the fact that Kirk and the others were flying through space was somewhat incidental. We might have enjoyed it just as much if the same actors had been set in a western.
Perhaps ST could move toward the sort of long-term plot arcs we saw in Babylon 5, and have come to expect from series like the Sopranos. Freed from the format of episodic drama -- and the crushing weight of our expectations -- Star Trek might be free to again explore the Undiscovered Country.
That would be kinda nice.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
As wonderful as it might be to have a new Star Trek series, there is one axiom about this process: It is absolutely impossible for a creative person to efficiently obtain approval for a new project from a large company.
Proof:
Disney turned down Lord of the Rings
Sony turned down Everquest
Electronic Arts tried to cancel the Sims three times
MGM turned down Gone with the Wind
Now, if they don't mind spending $10,000 a day from the moment they make the first phone call, great. Otherwise, find a way to do it without conference rooms, or it's going to be nothing but anguish.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
I think a great movie, if not series, would be all about the Borg. How the first nanobytes took control of the first specieis (species 001) and how the collective was created. No Federeation, no Vulcans, etc.. just BORG.
Nick Powers
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
um, i think they tried it on ENT: they're called, coincidentally enough, the suliban: a bunch of not understood hostiles who attack in unpredictable ways, and whose literal physical flexibillity makes them tough adversaries.
ed
(Opening comm channel to the UPN Flagship Berman...)
"Captain Berman, First Officer Braga. Only one man - J. M. Straczynski - has done battle with broadcast studio executives while being able to produce five years of good science fiction television. He is behind me. You are front of me. If your employer values the deep-space franchise, be somewhere else!"
What you discuss is called "Deep Space 9." Flawed characters, tons of mistakes, terrorist organizations, even a villain who kept reinventing himself.
Shit, they even did a whole PATRIOT Act thing (years before it was topical), with squads of Star Fleet commandos combing the earth in search of shape changing aliens who could be anybody. Sisko broke down into a quivering mass at one point -- his father, stubborn as he was, refused to have his blood tested and the captain was forced to admit he was in way over his head.
That was from season 4. It didn't get REALLY good until the beginning of Season 6, when half the station was working for the enemy and trying to subvert it without detection while the other half was leading the war against them. You haven't seen an episode of star trek until you've seen a thousand Romulan, Kilgon and Star Fleet warships, many of them Constitution class, reduced to smoldering rubble by a combined Cardassian and Jemhadar fleet. That's the kind of gripping, "holy shit Star Fleet isn't perfect" TV that can watch again and again.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
It is not without irony that the best ST series (DS9) was based upon JMS' pitch for Babylon 5 to the Trek folks.
Personally, I think JMS should take that Trek idea and run with it in a new Universe, the way they did with Babylon 5. Bab-5 is by far one of the best Sci-Fi series ever produced, and it came from a rejected Star Trek idea pitch.
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
I think DS9 started off slow but improved and had some great episodes like "The Vistor" #75 (many fathers appreciated it). They introduced the "runabout" (cool ride, kinda like the winnebago of the 24th century) and the "Defiant" (one very bad ass, greatly overweaponed ship). The wormhole allowed for someone interesting plot additions. They showed us how a lot of different species lived, many more than any other ST series.
Not to be forgotten, the "Ferengi Rules of Acquisition" gave interesting insite to greed.
34 - War is good for business.
35 - Peace is good for business.
239 - Never be afraid to mislabel a product.
261 - A wealthy man can afford anything except a conscience.
Morals were well tested. A "former terrorist", Major Kira, became a respected leader while still having a few terrorist traits; interesting when one thinks of the use of the word "terrorist" today. Some "Black and White" morals were shown to have acceptable shades of grey. To many DS9 was as good as TNG. I think the exploration into the psychology of people make it a good show. Different for TNG, but still good science fiction. And yes, the long lesbian kiss.
Imagine what Straczynski and Zabel could done with it though. There's a lot of life left in the ST franchise.
"And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'" - HST
This was a strong theme running through Babylon 5 Seasons Two and Three, which culminated in the secession of Babylon 5 from Earth.
Seriously, all the good aspects that people rave about in DS9, B5 did first. DS9 was just a Paramount copy of B5, quite frankly -- almost to the point of lawsuit.