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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 9729454" data-attributes="member: 6877472">I think that's really the problem with Star Trek as a series.  Most episodes are written with the idea of "wouldn't it be cool if they encountered this?" but all too often, actually delving into how these new discoveries would completely change the franchise runs into immediate problems from a storytelling perspective.Like, think of how many episodes have been devoted to people wanting to extend life.  Then remember, way back in TOS, how Miri's people figured out how to make children live for centuries.  You could have an entire society where everyone stops aging permanently just before puberty, but then we'd have to have a show full of child actors!  Can't have that!Why bother with an emergency medical program, when you can ask the holodeck to create a fully staffed sickbay with advanced AI doctors? Heck, why not have entire crews of holograms, in holoships?  We've seen how advanced Vic Fontana is, and he's just a lounge singer, let alone Moriarty!  And they can live forever!  (Wait, I think Red Dwarf did that first).Instead, almost everything has to be a one-off and status quo is god, because massive changes would be too hard to produce/write for.  Yet Star Trek suffers from a form of "power creep" where each new iteration has to somehow top the last in terms of scale.  So just like a trading card game, you introduce powerful new concepts then have to ban or rotate them out of the game so they don't warp the entire thing around them.I mean, think about it.  How many episodes of Trek have you seen that could have spawned entire new series by themselves, with the concepts they introduced?  I'm going to guess almost all of them, lol.But I can't fault anyone for not making a series that constantly mutates in response, as much as I'd love to see it, because I think for a lot of people, it'd be hard to watch if you miss two episodes and suddenly everything's changed!Or try to get back into the franchise after a hiatus and wonder why nothing is familiar anymore.That having been said, you can have a series that has primarily the same writing team and a tightly plotted narrative (Babylon 5, for example), but even that show would often introduce something world-shattering (wait, souls and reincarnation are real?) and just kind of gloss over it and keep on rolling, lol.</blockquote>

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