New Animated Star Trek In The Works 343
Philias writes "A new web-based Star Trek Animated Series may be in the works. CBS is considering a pitch by veteran Trek producer Dave Rossi for a 'Clone Wars' style animated series for StarTrek.com. Like Clone Wars the episodes would be just a few minutes long. Unlike the old animated Trek show from the 70s, this one would be with a whole new crew set in a new time period. The setting is to be a war-torn post-9/11-like Trek universe 150 years after the time of Picard." From the post: "The Zero Room team felt that the time was right for a new approach to Trek. The setting is the year 2528 and the Federation is a different place after suffering through a devastating war with the Romulans 60 years earlier. The war was sparked off after a surprise attack of dozens of 'Omega particle' detonations throughout the Federation creating vast areas which become impassible to warp travel and essentially cut off almost half the Federation from the rest. During the war the Klingon homeworld was occupied by the Romulans, all of Andoria was destroyed and the Vulcans, who were negotiating reunification with the Romulans, pulled out of the Federation. The setting may seem bleak and not very Trek-like, but that is where the show's hero Captain Alexander Chase comes in."
Aliens. (Score:1, Interesting)
Who said it? All of the aliens on Star Trek look like humans with Elephantitis.
They got it, but they don't know how to handle it. (Score:5, Interesting)
What the fuck? They have an entire section going trans-human with Borg technology
Instead
That makes no sense what-so-ever.
And
Captain's Log, Stardate 2528 point 4. I have beamed half the crew into space during a mutiny. They had forgotten that this was a Star Fleet vessel and not a Democracy. I will
Stardate 60418.6: Dead Horse Nebula In Sight. (Score:5, Interesting)
I didn't watch ANY of the spin-offs after they stopped making ST:TNG.
Why?
I recognized the horse, as it were, was dead. Sometimes, even most times, it's better to let the thing rot and disperse back into the environment, instead of resurrecting it over and over again. It's looking a bit tatty now.
Re:Why not any other series? (Score:3, Interesting)
Old franchises never die. They just go on hiatus.
Consider Battlestar Galactica. The new series is pretty good, but does it really make sense for it to be a remake? From a storytelling point of view, the answer is a definite No: they made so many basic changes, they might as well have started from scratch. But that's not the way Hollywood works. It doesn't like taking chances, and even a remake of a lame Star Wars ripoff is "safer" than a totally new concept.
That's why Berman was able to retain control of Star Trek as long as he did: he was a known quantity, and the people with the money like known quantities. The fans hate him for his unimaginative stories, but to the money people, imagination is risk, and risk is evil.
Even outside Hollywood, any franchise with an established fan base is unkillable. Prime example: Sherlock Holmes. His creator was utterly sick of him only 6 years after creating him. But he couldn't fight the rabid (and in my opinion, rather lame) fan base, which still exists 130 years later.
Hard Reset (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:"The franchise is dead, Jim." (Score:3, Interesting)
Not at all; they haven't even meaningfully tapped the universe. What they have done is exhausted the "human space jockey" plotline.
All kinds of potential new stories still exist, just centered on one of the other major players. What about a Klingon centered series, for example? Or the backstory on the Vulcan/Romulan split? The origins of the Borg?
Plenty of interesting ideas--too bad no one will do anything that isn't a repeat of the previous however-many iterations of ST that have already aired.
Yes, it's dead/dying, but it has future potential (Score:2, Interesting)
However, over the decades, Star Trek has had many memorable themes, characters, settings, etc. If the IP holders would be willing to consider not turning a profit on Star Trek in the short term (and that's a big if), I believe, one or two decades down the line, an entirely new Star Trek series that drew on the best and brightest ideas throughout "Trek history" could possibly prove financially and artistically viable.
Religious Conservative calls Federation "Fascist" (Score:3, Interesting)
Wow. Just wow. That was just... horrible.
The author of that critique seems to be some kind of religious conservative who takes offense at the fact that the Federation doesn't use money and talk about God all the time. Nevermind the fact that they have replicators and thus there is no scarcity and no need for money OR for communistic redistribution of wealth - just throw your garbage into the recycler and replicate whatever you want. In the Star Trek future, everything is as plentiful and reusable as air, and so there is no more need for any economic system to regulate it than there is to regulate the distribution of air here today. We don't have air banks or air credits because we don't need them, and neither to we strictly ration out the use of air in equal parts, because there's plenty of it and people can just take whatever they want. Economic systems are just a solution to problems of scarcity - where there is no scarcity, economics disappear.
But what really gets me is that the author seems to be somehow offended by the notion that you might have a nontheistic society. Not militantly atheistic - you don't see Federation people ridiculing anyone for their religious beliefs or trying to convince them that God doesn't exist. They just don't seem to have many such beliefs of their own. I'm sure there's still philosophy classes in their academies, and old religious are taught as history... but this whole thing sounds like some old polytheist complaining about our (contemporary, western) society because we don't sacrifice livestock to the local fertility gods. So? What's the problem if we don't? And what's wrong with "explaining away" disembodies entities as "energy beings" or whatnot, if that's a real explanation in the (fictional) science of Star Trek? Should they just ignore their scientific explanations so that there are still some mysteries to "wow" people?
He seems to think that without such mysterious religious doctrine, and without some sort of capitalist economic system, everybody would have nothing better to do than... well... join the military I guess. The series is set on a military ship, of course you're going to see military lifestyles there! But the ordinary people living planetside, in a world of plenty with no scarcity - what, you think they won't have anything interesting to do? What about art or science for it's own sake, not for profit? Taking up some occupation that you enjoy doing for it's own take, like cooking, designing clothes, writing software, etc? In a world of plenty, people don't *need* to be paid to do things - they'll do whatever they enjoy doing, and if something needs doing, someone who needs it done will do it, if someone who enjoys doing it hasn't done it already. Heck, what about just playing games for fun?
I have to wonder if this person's vision of heaven is of some job where he gets to work really hard and gets paid lots of money which he can then turn around and give straight to some incomprehensible mysterious God, who he spends all of his free time worshipping. Seems like it must take a serious lack of imagination not to be able to envision enjoying a life of luxury where money isn't needed, where everything is there free for the taking, and nothing is an indecipherable mystery that couldn't be solved with sufficient investigation. Wouldn't that be nice? It's a stretch of the imagination to think that it could practically happen, but in Star Trek the basic premise is that that HAS happened - and look at the awesome society that has followed. How could anyone think that such a society is bad?
A Fair Critique (Score:3, Interesting)
As for the lack of capitalism, he's right to note that the main Trek species that has recognizable business dealings is portrayed as a gang of sniveling pirates who somehow don't even have banks or letters of credit. Maybe you'd get a utopian society in the Federation if "replicator" technology were perfected, but it's strange that the show seems contemptuous of civilizations where people actually have to work for a living. Also, Trek doesn't need a magic fix-all-economic-problems technology. Wouldn't it be more interesting than the current setup to say that the Federation actually needs to explore space to create continued opportunity for a growing, ambitious population that still has poor people in it?
Replicator tech is itself implausible due to how it's handled. It seems to be an unlimited matter/energy conversion gadget! With such a device, who needs a matter/antimatter reactor or a phaser? Just throw a rock into the replicator and get all the energy you need! Even if that's not how it works, the Federation seems able to manipulate matter on the particle scale (for transporters at least), so why does their technology look as though it's built by conventional manufacturing methods? Why aren't there lots of privately owned mini-spaceships mining Jupiter for raw matter and building space habitats and ringworlds all over the place? Instead of an unprecedented explosion of human creativity and freedom, Trek seems to be about a central authority dominating all activity and building a benevolent empire no more imaginative than the average 4X space game. Sure, the shows' focus on military life gives us a skewed view, but why is there such limited imagination in looking at the implications of its technology?
An Inconsistent Utopia (Score:3, Interesting)
However I will completely agree with you that the existence of their level of technology seems a bit discontinuous with the rest of their apparent level of development and social structure. Their transporters, replicators and holodecks seem to imply that they can create and manipulate mass and energy on a very fine-tuned level (and have AI advanced enough to do these things automatically and fill in the details as needed, as they can just request the holodeck to "create a chair. make these changes to it." etc as I recall from some Voyager episode). With that kind of tech it seems like the only limit they should have is available mass-energy to manipulate, and available computing power; and given enough of those, everything in the real would should be as manipulable as things in a virtual world would be. Replicate a huge biosphere in space, tell the computer to make landscape that looks like so-and-so, keep the weather like such, gimme a nice house designed to these specifications, and take a scan of those three hotties over there, make these modifications to them, and give me some repli-holo-copies of them who like to play in the field all day, dance naked in the rain and have hot foursomes all day long. Oh and computer, keep the house cleaned up, and feel free to repair any wear and tear that happens to by body - don't want to be getting old now, eh?
Heck, with that level of technology the computers should be able to interface directly with people's minds (scan the brain-state and interpret appropriately), so you wouldn't even have to ask the computer for something - you just will it to be and it's replicated for you. Combine that with their equivalent of the internet and you could get an interesting, non-collectivist sort of collective consciousness - you just wonder some question to yourself, the computer(s) check to see if anybody knows the answer to that and isn't keeping it a secret, and then tells you the answer. (I'm assuming the computers here are as they are portrayed in Trek; very capable systems that can accomplish pretty much anything processing task you ask of them, even creative ones as per the holodeck example in my first paragraph, but which have no independent will or motivation of their own). You wouldn't get a borg-like hive mind, but it would be like... like everything you ever thought was automatically blogged, except the things you didn't want to be public knowledge, and everybody had a direct neural link to a search engine which automatically scanned all these blogs for whatever you asked it to, and presented that information direct to your mind. You wonder a question, and "recall" an answer as though it was just something you had momentarily forgotten. It's just be a much faster, more comprehensive version of the sort of information exchange that we already do with the internet, and with journals and books before that.
Even in this fantastical setup, there would still be perfectly good reason to have spaceships going about and exploring: novelty! Exploration for it's own sake! Boredom is the bane of the well-off, and so these incredibly well-off people would be searching for new cultures, new phenomena, new anything to occupy their interest. You can only do so much creative art sitting at home by yourself before you need more inspiration, and you can only do so much science when your observations are only of a limited area - and what's left to do in such a utopia (besides satisfy your basic desires whenever they come up) other than art and sci
Re:Racism in Star Trek continues apace (Score:3, Interesting)
Personally, I think you've put way more thought into it than the collective of the writers, and while I can't guarantee that perhaps one of the writers has thought it through to the extent you have, I've never seen any evidence of this. (To be fair, I have only seen about the first third of Enterprise. If I'd found out they were actually grappling with the philosophical problems of the putative Vulcan philosophy, instead of continuing to carry on the false image of cold, sterile logic perpetuated since ancient times, I'd have been more interested; I'd love to see some evidence of a Vulcan that at least wonders about this.)
Mathematicians abandoned the idea of a single, all-encompassing sterile logic from cold, hard mathematical principles at the beginning of the 20th century. Maybe by the middle of the 21st that'll manage to propagate out to the general culture.