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Star Trek XI: Romulan Wars?
Tycoon Guy writes "TrekToday reports that the next Star Trek movie will deal with the war between Earth and the Romulans that led to the founding of the Federation. According to Rick Berman, the film will be 'set before the time of Kirk, but will not be connected with Enterprise.' So how will they make this fit with the Classic Trek episode Balance of Terror, in which we learned that no human ever saw the face of a Romulan during the Romulan Wars?"
Maybe the Romulans wear Vulcan disguises?
paintball
So how will they make this fit with the Classic Trek episode Balance of Terror, in which we learned that no human ever saw the face of a Romulan during the Romulan Wars?"
Perhaps no human that saw a Romulan made it back to Federation space to report the fact?
Trolling is a art,
Just make sure whomever does, dies. Sheesh.
Were that I say, pancakes?
Heh, further proof thatBerman couldn't get an original idea to save his life.
:\
:P Always remember to keep a reliable backup of your Data. ;)
Okay, so it's not EXACTLY the same, but dang, how close can a guy get? Anyway, sounds to me like this would be better 'experimented' as a TV miniseries, as you're going to have to introduce characters, do character development, plot development, and plot resolution all in a single flick. In a miniseries, you'd have more screen time to work with, and wouldn't have to rush through it all.
Oh wait, this is Berman we're talking about. Then again, we'd be bashing him if this were announced as a miniseries talking about how much it's going to suck.
My personal feeling is that until they return to the TNG timeline, come up with a believable story plot, and give the Berman team a rest, things aren't going to get better. Perhaps dropping the franchise altogether is the answer, but not so long as the cash flows is that going to happen.
I know! Captain B-4 of the Starship Enterprise-F!
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
One way to handle this would be to work the plot out so that Romulans are actually seen by Terrans and/or allies, but that those who see them are either a) all killed or b) that it's all hushed up (I like this latter option, as there are all kinds of cool foreshadowin things which could be done).
1: Facial cloaking devices that bend light around the head
2: Bandannas ("this here's a stick-up, human")
3: Big helmets!
4: The hero slingshots around the sun, goes back in time, and unveils Romulan faces, negating the old episode. Yes, it's a time paradox, but if "First Contact" could get away with telling Zeffrem Cochran about his future...
5: Ignore old Trek on the assumption that only the geekiest fans would remember that episode and the rest wouldn't care.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
They should have let Trek die the graceful death it deserved instead of mutilating it into "Enterprise". I don't think there's any hope for this movie, connected to Enterprise or not.
Speak truth to power.
"Ah yeah well, whenever you notice something like that, a wizard did it."
-"But in episode AG4..."
"WIZARD!"
Because the audience can see the Romulans doesn't mean the Earthlings will.
Perhaps they'll tell the story from the Romulan point of view. Now, that would be a change.
More realistically, fighting an enemy you can't see is a pretty good dramatic device.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Rick Berman obviously never saw any classic Trek, so anything that happened there never really happened in the Bermanverse. :)
Slightly more seriously, I'm glad to see uncharted ground. With the removal of Brannon Braga as "show runner" on Enterprise (replaced with Manny Coto), it may well step up a notch. If he brings in someone else to handle the Romulan movie, not an unreasonable thing to do for a completely new aspect of Trek, it may be done well. (Is it possible that this was the treatment Joe Straczynski and... uh, whassisface from Dark Skies? turned in?)
After all, remember, Berman was in charge even through the hey-day of TNG and early DS9. Berman's problem may not be that he doesn't know decent science fiction from a hole in the ground; it may be that he can't seem to hire people who know decent science fiction from a hole in the ground...
-JDF
"They will just do what they normally do, ignore continuity."
The whole point of the series is that the timeline was changed, thus altering the continuity. Most episodes make a reference to this, but there are still some thick people out there that keep missing that. One of ST's most popular movies touched this off, yet a gaggle of people keep missing it and whining about continuity.
I don't really care if people like Enterprise or not. But to keep running around in circles with a less-than-legitimate complaint is getting rather nauseating. Complain about the show being boring, or that the theme song irritates your stomach, but for the love of you know who, stop complaining about a problem that doesn't exist.
"Derp de derp."
XI - that would make it another odd numbered star trek movie. I hold no hope for it....
-- oldthinkers unbellyfeel ingsoc
Why don't they just give B&B something else to do and give JMS free hands like Warner Bros did with B5.
The owls are not what they seem
(Of course the director's cut went off and added a whole bunch of cheasy plastic model in a green tank of water shots. Bastards.)
Frankly, you don't really need to see the face of your enemy in a space battle. They are a blinking set of lights a few kilometers away. It's just a question of turning that blinking set of lights into a fireball before they turn you into one.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated...
Urge to post... fading... fading... RISING!... fading... fading... gone.
They killed Data the same way they killed Spock. Death is, more or less, an abstract concept when dealing with major characters in the Star Trek universes.
How the first Romulan we saw was Spock's daddy.
-EB
Do you ever walk alone like a drifter in the dark?
Some clarification on the historical documents you refer to:
a) there has been discovered a historical error of 4 yrs in the records, WWIII in fact began on 2001
b) over the years the dialect changes of BASIC has caused some confusion. Recent discoveries have also shed light that the war did not start "after Khan" but rather in "Afghanistan"
Just as our historical documents (textbooks, films, etc) are full of errors so are the ones of the 23rd and 24th centuries...
You're on Slashdot. The Nerd Alert is unnecessary.
Did you think this was "News for Normal People, Stuff that Isn't Geeky"?
We DID eventually get to see what the Chigs looked like in S:AAB though. I think it was the last two episodes (23: "And if they lay us down to rest..." and 24: "...Tell our moms we done our best") where they landed on the Chig moon and ran around in the swamp chasing the nursery-chig. Kinda reminded me of a predator, but without the dreads or funky jaw. Deep eye sockets, low snout, kind of a droopy mouth. They had gill-like things too (I think you got to see that in one of the very first episodes when they capture a chig). And of course, like all good Chigs they made them incessant clicking noises non-stop.
;)
Course, then the heroes screwwed things up by warning the nursery-chig of the attack... the diplo chig goes suicide bomber, and all hell breaks loose while the 58th are out exchanging prisoners. I wont ruin the ending... but damn. What a way to end a show. It's almost been a decade and I still miss it (luckilly I have all 24 eps on CD).
In the immortal words of Wang: "HU-RAH! GET SOME!!"
Now I know why I absolutely loathe Rick Berman and what he has done to Star Trek. TOS is the root from which the entire Star Trek Universe sprang. Cheesy or not, it is the model for everything that came before it.
Someone yank the ST franchise from Berman's grubbies and put it on hiatus for a while. Voyager and Enterprise suck runny eggs. It's time to put it to bed. Maybe give it to Stracynski (sp?) after a few fallow years.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Star Trek TOS got it wrong. They had the official story. In reality, humans will see Romulans a couple of times during the war. The Vulcans will engineer a cover-up, destroying records and doctoring memories with mind-melds.
Alright, so it's offtopic and I'm sure there's probally already a hundred posts about it below my threshold, but what about DS9? I'm not much one for prequels or even the TNG timeline. TNG was really "white bread" with it being extremely predictable episodes with flat (but sometimes lovable) characters resolving the given situation inside the episode to make for good syndication material. Oh, and throw in some Borg/combat oriented episodes towards for the season premiers and finales to try to hook people in and resolve it like any other syndicated episode afterwards.
Anyway, enough of my dorky rant, here's what they should be doing:
1.) Screw alternate time lines and particles and such. Don't even mention the possibility of it. Sure, it'd kinda annoy Star Trek dorks like me who have kept up with multiple series and like to compare them (god knows what Voyager did, haven't seen much of it myself) but if you just plug your ears and say lalala then it'll be okay. I promise!
2.) Go back to DS9 era and explore what happened there. All three major powers (fed, klingons, romulans) of the Alpha quadrant are recovering from a long and costly war from a powerful adversary that was basically the anti-federation from the Gama quadrant. I'd love to see how the Dominion would deal with the aftermath considering it comprised of a variety of genetically engineered races to fulfill specific jobs. Now that their founder "gods" have been defeated, will that shake the Dominion to the core? If so, what happens?
Hell, Sisko is still living in the Wormhole and with the Prophets, can we give him a resolution? I'm sure he'd come back and be part of the main story.
3.) Don't involve Berman/Braga in the creative aspect. They're okay producers just bring back the DS9 writing team and people like Ira Steven Behr.
4.) No fucking cameos. I'm sick of TNG cameos and the feeling that it needs to be done to somehow validate the series. Take a goddamn risk every once in a while. DS9 did it and it was succesful in a lot of regards. It didn't get the same ratings as TNG, but considering it was overlapping with Voyager and TNG towards the beggining its no suprise. I'd love to see a relaunch of this series after Enterprise is put to rest.
Episode I: the first meetings and skirmishes, forces set in motion, characters introduced, we briefly see a young Kirk set on a trajectory to join Star Fleet. Earth (Federation?) scientists given a mandate to create technologies that will be needed in what is seen as the looming battle to come (ala the Manhattan Project, with many of the same moral dilemmas)
Episode II: the Romulans posed to take over Earth, only support from Vulcans and other reluctant allies averts disaster.
Episode III: a valiant counterstrike that forces the Romulans to withdraw with plot twists leading the power balance between Romulans, Federation and Klingons in TOS.
Do it like LOTR and have the 3 episodes come out 1 a year as a planned, and make sure the fans know its all one story to be released as such, not a GEE-If-we-make-money-we'll-think-about-another-mov ie-in-3-years.
Don't obsess on continuity, just make it a good story that half way sets up the Star Trek universe we know.
Letter To Iran
Great. Balance of Terror is, in my opinion, one of the best episodes of TOS, and ranks up there amongst the best in the series- namely for the reaction of Spock to the sight of a Romulan, and especially for the reaction of the entire crew to Spcok after the sighting. That episode dealt strongly with racism, and was damned entertaining.
So now Berman's gonna take a shit all over one of the few uncorrupted Trek elements, and do it with a no-name crew?
Why exactly does this guy still have his job, again?
in which we learned that no human ever saw the face of a Romulan during the Romulan Wars?
This is easily explained. All of the witnesses of who saw the Romulans were wearing read shirts.
an ill wind that blows no good
- Star Trek X: Leopard
- Star Trek X: Puma
- Star Trek X: Jaguar
- Star Trek X: Panther
- Star Trek X: Tiger
The trick is to not vary the modulus of the version number but to vary the fur color instead.>Let me guess....you use emacs, right?
And there, at first unnoticed in a somewhat offtopic thread on /., it happened. The combination of two flamebaits, the Star-Trek-TOS-vs.-later-series and vi-vs.-emacs debates. Little did the original posters know about what they unleashed, a critical flame-mass triggering the worlds first thermonuclear flamewar. Centuries did it take for historians to recover the way of events from mostly degraded hard disks. Up to now it is heavily debated in the scientific community, whether "frist ps0t!" had anything to do with this, and what kind of deities the mighty "vi" and the world-shattering "emacs" represented...
This comment does not exist.
They use boilerplate story programs:
"The Crew of the _______(insert catchy ship name here) finds out that the _________(1.transporter 2.holodeck 3.matter-antimatter thingy 4.dylithim crystals) has/have gone haywire and they only have 5 seconds to respond or be destroyed.
During the crisis, they find the only way to save themselves is to _______(1. go back in time 2. somehow create a time-warp to go back in time 3. Accidentally go back in time 4. Have Q come to the rescue and send them back in time.)
There is a middle part of the story that we'll just make up as we go until then end where right at the last moment, when things seem that the ship is in certain doom and with the added pressure of the entire known universe in jepardy, they simply reverse the _________(put techno speak thingy there) with the ________(place another techno speak thingy here) and in theory it should put everything right, but only after the huge time counter on the bridge counts down to 1 second left.
Last line of course is _______(put in old literary sea-faring reference here)."
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
We fans have to realize that when the writers generated the orginal stories back in the 1960s, they had to take into mind the current politics in the US, what advertisers wanted, what the network wanted, what budget they had, last seasons ratings, etc.
Every subsequent installment of StarTrek has to deal with this. For example, some fans complain about the Klingon's faces changing. Back in the 60s, it was either impossible or would have cost way too much to have full face costumes that wouldn't face looked fake or stupid. Or what about that really stupid episode where Kirk and et. al. find some planet full of American Indians who worship the US flag or something? I think we'd all agree that one ought to be dropped out of the story arc.
Another thing is StarFleet itself. The 60s show had a mostly all white, crew-cut, "Right Stuff", NASA with bigger ships ethic. Women went around in mini-skirts bringing coffee. No problem with the miniskirts for me ... However, a show or movie with that kind of environment just wouldn't make it in these PC times. Half of the potential audience would be offended by it and advertisers would definitely keep well away.
I'm not sure why people hate Enterprise so much. To me, it seems reasonably "realistic" as to how things would be on a small ship like that in close quarters months at a time. People argue, have fights, boink a lot, things don't work right, things stink, people make bad decisions, etc. It isn't a perfect show, of course, because, again, it has to conform to ratings, what is "PC" at the time, etc. (There's still the problem of how everyone in the entire universe happens to speak perfect English all the time ... but all SF shows have that problem, especially StarGate. But that's a different rant ... and an unavoidable problem without out making actors playing aliens have to emit nonsense phrases with sub-titles, which would be like watching some obscure East European art film or something.)
I view StarTrek as less of set series of stories than a generally close, but not always connected series of tales. In the future, with better, cheaper effects it might be possible to take the old StarTrek episodes, run them though a PC and make them look like they have whatever the latest in effects can do and maybe even adjust the plots to create a more unified set of stories.
> So how will they make this fit with the Classic
> Trek episode Balance of Terror,...
The answer is: "It won't fit."
We're talking about Berman and Braga, who appear to believe that:
a) classic episodes are best ignored,
b) continuity is an annoyance,
c) suspension of disbelief is the responsibility of the viewer, not the creative staff.
Alien Resurrection 1) wasn't really Joss' story as written (though MORE of it was his than X-Men, from which they kept only 2 lines and the actress butchered 1 of them... the other was one of the best lines in the movie) and 2) was a fairly decent story that I think was somewhat poorly directed (if I had READ that story, I think I would have liked it a lot more than I did) and 3) mostly failed in the box-office because Cameron had done such a good job of transforming the series into a testosterone-fest that anything less was going to be a dissapointment.
... judge for yourself where I belong in that spectrum).
As director of the Firefly movie, we're more likely to get a solid Joss story told and translated well onto the screen. Perhaps that will suck, but I doubt it.
That said, no Joss is not perfect. Fan-boys (and girls) who say he is are... well, fan-boys, so what can you expect (by fan-boy I mean the gushing, "my hero can do no wrong" sorts of fans, not the run-of-the-mill enthusiast
On the other hand, his work is often far more compelling than 90% of what we see on television (so much so that after swearing off the entire vampire genre and with a title that made me groan, B:TVS pulled me in and made me enough a fan to buy and watch the seasons that I had missed).
If you want to know Joss' highs and lows look at the first two seasons of Buffy and then look a the last season (7). There it is in a nutshell, and while I found the seventh season to be far below the level of what he did in the first two, I'd still rank it well above most of what's on TV.
As for movies... the bar is higher. Science Fiction has seen some real winners (Forbidden Planet, 2001, Star Wars, Alien, Blade Runner, Empire, The Matrix)... and living up to that standard is a lot harder than living up to the standard of American TV (which has a few major winners like Twilight Zone, Star Trek: TOS and Babylon 5 and a handfull of fast-from-the-gate shows that couldn't hold it together or got cancelled like Andromeda, Firefly, Jerrimiah).
In the end, I'll go see the Firefly movie and just try to enjoy it and judge it on its own merits. We shall see....
Just because no human in the Star Trek world saw the face of a Romulan during the whole length of the war, does not mean that we in the audience can't see the face of a Romulan during the whole length of the movie. I think they call that "Dramatic Irony".
But for the life of me I can't remember the name/author...
The general premise is that an earlier prototype of the Constitution class is on a maiden voyage (or something) and encounters the Romulans.
Some of the book IS from the Romulan standpoint. There is a mutiney on the Romulan ship and the Romulan captain (who is the honorable elder statesman-type) defects. The Romulan (evil) second in command presses an attack on the Federation ship.
The Federation captain learns from the Romulan captain that the Romulans have broken ALL of the Federation codes, so the Federation captain uses a ruse... PRETENDING that the Federation has invented a cloaking device and that there are other cloaked ships waiting for a general attack.
The visible ship (our heros) has a "cloaking unit that has failed" and radios home in "theoretically unbreakable" code (that they know that the Romulans will intercept) that they (our heros) have compromised the general attack and to call it off.
The Romulans KNOWING that there are additional Federation ships about (after all it came across in high priority code) break off their attack on our heros.
So at the end of the book the Federation undergoes a crash program to improve their codes, while the Romulans break their balls trying to discover the "cloaking device" because "obviously the Federation can do it, why can't we..."
It was a REALLY good read. Too bad I can't remember the title...
Help? Older slashdotters?
Line Grunt.
Cowboy Bebop is a show that has a solar system populated by humans, and it's probably the most believable one I have seen yet. There's a show that recognises that technologies that we have today (like wheels, for example) aren't necessarily going to be obsolete a few hundred years into the future. Again, there are no language problems there, at least none as complex as those that exist today on Earth. In that show, everyone speaks perfect Japanese!
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Well, they'd never do it. Just because jms managed to pull a five-year "novel for television" out of his hat on half the budget of TNG (has anyone else managed to make a drama series---not a soap opera---with that level of continuity in any genre?)... just because he consistently wrote critically acclaimed work... you think someone would actually employ him?
Come on! He enforced a "no cute animals, no robots" rule for B5! How would the small-minded Paramount execs manage to get him to put in big-boobed women in spandex?
"And I don't go to bed until I've made some very bad decisions."
Kidding aside, since it'll never, ever get made, I'd like to see his treatment of it. It's easy to backseat-drive ("they should have wrapped up Buffy Season 6 without the dead and evil lesbian cliche!") but more difficult to actually come up with something better. ("Here's a plot outline in which not only do I avoid cliche, but I tell a better story. Ha!")
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Think about it!
The concept is, "War in Space." --Humans versus the Romulans. That's it!
No, "And every cast member of the popular television series except Wil has to have at least X minutes of screen time regardless of how irrelevant to the plot it may be."
If the writer is a good one, if the director is a good one. . , why this could be the best thing since 'Kahn'. --Because we need something. Everything since Kirk left us has been idiotic garbage.
In general. . . Star Trek movies suck when: Huge ensemble casts are scripted by Ricky-"Let's kill Picard's nephew, blow up those two Klingon sisters, make Data say, "Shit", and then crash the enterprise regardless of how little any of this has to do with anything even remotely story-related, cuz we can and it's cool in a college Jar-Head Whoop! Whoop! Whoop! sort of way,"-THE ASS-HAT Berman.
Berman is one of the hugest wannabes in show-biz today. He should stay firmly socketed in the producer's chair and stop pretending that he can write.
So barring his creative involvement, a new Trek film with some new blood and some real talent might just be the best thing to happen to Star Trek movies in over a decade.
-FL