Download the JMS/Zabel Star Trek treatment

[DreadPirateMurphy]

Personally, I would hate that series, unless it were done extremely well. I just don't like Trek's time travel episodes.*

* The one exception, to my chagrin, is the Voyager Year of Hell episode. I thought that one worked out very well, and made internal sense. Most ST time travel shows don't.

As for being done extremely well...please note the way JMS integrated the Babylon 4 plot line across multiple seasons of B5. If anybody could have kept the complexities of time travel sensible, it would have been him. Having said that, I agree that it could easily be done poorly in other hands.

I still think Yesterday's Enterprise is one of the coolest time travel eps. It has these things going for it:

1) It retconned one of the lamest character deaths in sci-fi TV history.
2) It didn't somehow involve the 20th century.
3) It actually touched on a plausible "change event" in the history of the Star Trek universe.
4) It didn't grant everybody a happy ending where nothing really happened (at least not the Enterprise C crew).
5) It gave us a dark, broody, and warlike Enterprise-D where everybody carried sidearms and there were no children.
6) We got to see Klingons as dangerous adversaries instead of soap opera fodder.
7) Riker takes it in the neck.
8) We get to see a female captain actually captaining for the first time in Star Trek, years before Janeway.

All those reasons make me give it 4 stars. Feel free to disagree.

 

[DreadPirateMurphy]

My own vision would be a Star Trek: Elite Force series, based just after the events of ST: Nemesis. The Romulan Empire is collapsing into civil war with the death of its leadership, the Federation's still in rough shape after the Dominion War & several Borg incursions, Cardassia is rebuilding, the Klingon empire unstable... it's a galaxy ripe for border wars and intrigue. Thus, the Federation Elite Forces are deployed along borders to try and act as peacekeepers, while also being employed in more covert operations for some unseen goal. It'd be a small team of people we follow, as they deal with the conflict between the Federation's utopian ideal, and the harsh reality of a galaxy in conflict.

This, like pretty much anything, also could easily suck. It could devolve into "SWAT in space," for example, with a predictable action sequence each week. Or worse, it could become Starship Troopers, where supermodels fight and die in space, where nobody can hear you overact.

 

[Kesh]

As for being done extremely well...please note the way JMS integrated the Babylon 4 plot line across multiple seasons of B5. If anybody could have kept the complexities of time travel sensible, it would have been him. Having said that, I agree that it could easily be done poorly in other hands.

I still think Yesterday's Enterprise is one of the coolest time travel eps. It has these things going for it:

1) It retconned one of the lamest character deaths in sci-fi TV history.
2) It didn't somehow involve the 20th century.
3) It actually touched on a plausible "change event" in the history of the Star Trek universe.
4) It didn't grant everybody a happy ending where nothing really happened (at least not the Enterprise C crew).
5) It gave us a dark, broody, and warlike Enterprise-D where everybody carried sidearms and there were no children.
6) We got to see Klingons as dangerous adversaries instead of soap opera fodder.
7) Riker takes it in the neck.
8) We get to see a female captain actually captaining for the first time in Star Trek, years before Janeway.

All those reasons make me give it 4 stars. Feel free to disagree.

Hm. Yeah, that was a good one. I stand corrected.

This, like pretty much anything, also could easily suck. It could devolve into "SWAT in space," for example, with a predictable action sequence each week. Or worse, it could become Starship Troopers, where supermodels fight and die in space, where nobody can hear you overact.

Quite. I never said it'd be a guaranteed win.

 

[Ranger REG]

8) We get to see a female captain actually captaining for the first time in Star Trek, years before Janeway.

Wasn't Geordi's mother a starship captain in TNG?

Personally, I like the lady captain of Columbia, Enterprise (NX-01) sister ship.

 

[DreadPirateMurphy]

Wasn't Geordi's mother a starship captain in TNG?

Personally, I like the lady captain of Columbia, Enterprise (NX-01) sister ship.

The first female captain we saw on television was in Conspiracy in the first season. However, you never actually saw her or Geordi's mother in the captain's chair. Yesterday's Enterprise was in the 3rd season, and you actually got to see the captain giving orders in a combat situation.

I'm talking real-life chronological order, not universe history order.

 

[Richards]

Well then, technically, wasn't the first female starship captain none other than James T. Kirk, when he got "body-swapped" with a woman, Dr. Janice Lester, who wanted to be a starship captain but wasn't allowed to under Starfleet regulations? (The episode was "Turnabout Intruder," the very last episode of the original series.)

Johnathan

 

[DreadPirateMurphy]

Well then, technically, wasn't the first female starship captain none other than James T. Kirk, when he got "body-swapped" with a woman, Dr. Janice Lester, who wanted to be a starship captain but wasn't allowed to under Starfleet regulations? (The episode was "Turnabout Intruder," the very last episode of the original series.)

Johnathan

Ugh, that ep is blotted from my mind as one of the most nonsensical examples of sexism on TV. Star Fleet doesn't allow female captains? Wow, what a progressive attitude in our future utopia...which is contradicted repeatedly in both canon and non-canon sources. It is barely more tolerable than Spock's Brain.

 

[Ranger REG]

The first female captain we saw on television was in Conspiracy in the first season. However, you never actually saw her or Geordi's mother in the captain's chair. Yesterday's Enterprise was in the 3rd season, and you actually got to see the captain giving orders in a combat situation.

Oh, yeah. I forgot about that bug episode.

 

[Ranger REG]

Ugh, that ep is blotted from my mind as one of the most nonsensical examples of sexism on TV. Star Fleet doesn't allow female captains? Wow, what a progressive attitude in our future utopia...which is contradicted repeatedly in both canon and non-canon sources. It is barely more tolerable than Spock's Brain.

Wasn't Gene's fault. It was the 60's, and NBC told them to get rid of the character, Number One (the female XO) when they saw the unaired pilot episode, "The Cage." The footage from that episode was later used in the two-part aired episode, "The Menagerie."

 

[LightPhoenix]

So I read that, and I'm a little amazed that everyone is so enthusiastic about it. Honestly, it felt too much to me like I was reading a brief synopsis or an early treatment of Babylon 5.