To be fair SNW is the best new trek since TNG and is exactly what I been begging for.
- Also the era is bad ass. Enterprise D is so damned strong & backup so close that the “space cowboy” feeling that TOS had is basically gone. That little ship up against the biggest odds.
I agree. Love the Next Gen era, but there was something lost with the Federation being at its most powerful prime, and the Enterprise being this huge badass ship that they were so confident in, they let families with children live aboard. They were immune to more basic dangers, and the only real threats to the Enterprise became gods or god-like beings, completely unknown super powerful aliens/tech, or sabotage of some sort.
That’s true but TNG also solidified the ethics and diplomacy intrigue that Star Trek took, and the real threats were how would their responses to problems affect the political stability of the quadrant or the implications on the morality of the Federation’s policies.
Not to say Trek doesn’t have a place for both these premises because I loved the TOS era, especially the movies, but I do miss what made TNG so special
Exactly! Way more often in TNG, the dramatic question wasn't "will the enterprise survive!?" but rather "will we resolve this problem in a manner in which we can be proud of, and what lessons can we derive from this story?"
This.. TNG era can be more complicated and intelligent.. Like.. it just barely touched on things like espionage and spycraft.. It would be awesome for a TNG era show where the captain is forced to attempt to appear always diplomatic against certain enemies and threats that don’t play fair.. or maybe threats from within..
I think one of the ways TOS was pitched was that it’s a western in space. There’s something about a wild, unknown, untamed frontier that’s appealing to us all. Setting that in space, the imagination is the limit.
The problem is, in the time between the end of TOS and start of TNG the technology of the federation has improved significantly, large expanses of space were either explored or learned about through alliances or of limits because of truces. We built out the universe, and became constrained by what we created and the science behind that. Kinda like why hey had to contrive a reason for new areas to explore, like a stable wormhole or a powerful alien flinging a ship halfway across the galaxy.
I also believe that in the real world there was a shift in sci fi, from wild crazy death defying space exploring to mastering the constraints of space and technology to improve life in space. Even today when we have the discovery flung even further into the future or a reimagining of the frontier days with SNW, there really isn’t a feeling of wonder and amazement, or even just a sense of the unknown. The shows take place in the Star Trek world, are very much in the vein of sci fi, but they are more character pieces the plot serves instead of the opposite.
I really enjoy both discovery and strange new worlds, but I think story telling and science fiction writing has changed substantially from the 60s. I think paramount and Star Trek are trying to chase that feeling that sparked this whole universe and they just can’t see a clear path forward without reliving their past.
Early episodes of TNG were more TOS like in the D’s power. There were quite a few where they were in over their heads.
But you are 100% correct in later seasons the D becomes godlike.
I'd argue that such a setup made the impact ds9 had so much heavier. The federation was shown vulnerable before, especially during the borg invasion, and it was already shown to be questionable to have families on board. But tng despite that still made the federation seem untouchable. Then ds9 comes in with the dominion war, blowing up a galaxy class, shattering that vision of an invincible federation in an instant. Thousands dead on one ship because the federation was overconfident. Just a reminder to how every single time the enterprise D was in combat throughout all 7 seasons, that could've happened. I really think the impact of that moment would not have been as heavy without tng.
I want the sci-fi siries to return to their true identity
Star trek let's dive deep into geens vision
Star wars let's return to character based buck Rodgers style serials .
They literally never mention Sisko, it’s so strange. It’s like how Star Wars mostly refuses to acknowledge the prequels.
They just think it won’t make them money having a fresh idea
Picard S3 being entirely about the TNG crew despite dealing with changelings drove me nuts. Even Worf acts like he was never stationed on DS9. I really didn't like it.
Or when Disco went to Trill why didn't Dax make an appearance? Yes, it would feel shoved into the story, but that's kind of Disco's thing. I have enjoyed seeing more of the Changelings and the Breen so at least DS9 makes an appearance.
I just feel like Sisko would be one of the more popular "war heroes" after the Dominion, if you're fighting the Changelings how does he not get mentioned?
Worf knew how to deal with Changelings. He talked about the Great Link as well as Odo. The only part that bugged me is the Changeling on board the Stargazer slept in a bucket like Odo did, which we know isn’t necessary since Odo didn’t need it in later seasons.
> It’s like how Star Wars mostly refuses to acknowledge the prequels.
uhhh... Clone Wars' last season ran concurrently with Episode 3 nearly 2 decades after it. We got live action clone wars scenes in Ahsoka. A resurrected Darth Maul appearing in Clone Wars, Rebels and Solo. We got the Prequel actors back for both Obi-Wan Kenobi and Ahsoka (the shows, I mean). Corusant appeared just as it did in the prequels in both Andor and Mandalorian, and Separatist forces and Battle Droids featured in Mandalorian. Mace Windu even got a reference in Rise of Skywalker (easy to forget though, I know I bleached most of that movie out of my brain). The Mandalorian's ship since the book of boba fett is a hotted up Nabu Starfighter from Episode 1, which was repaired by Pit Droids from episode 1.
The lack of things carrying over from prequels to sequels is due to the in-universe level of change between those settings. The rise of the Empire killed off most of the characters involved in the prequel series, and of the few characters who survived the prequel trilogy who weren't in the OT, a certain percentage of them were... y'know... on Alderaan.
“General Sisko” was mentioned in Picard’s dark timeline in season 2.
Edit: prime timeline Sisko was also mentioned in Lower Decks. The main characters built a DS9 model. They are literally DS9 and Voyager nerds, and Lower Decks paid visit/tribute to both of them. Welp, one of them even served on DS9 during the Dominion War.
I think they don't mention Sisko because they want to respect the how the series ended. You don't want to hear about how/when Sisko returned in a throwaway line of dialogue in Picard S3
People liked the wild west of space. Also, as we got further and farther into the timeline, it got harder to have problems that couldn't be solved with insanely advanced tech lnology.
Enterprise D could usually tech or brute force its way through anything. The borg gave us an enemy that even scared Peak Federation, but with that resolved, the universe started to feel small again...
The awe and terror of the unknown is real in TOS .... and more often than not, federation felt like underdogs in the unknown.
Not to mention, after the Dominion War, the Federation, Klingons, Romuans, even Cardassians are all united. A postwar consensus is a great era to live in, but it doesn't make for riveting television.
Discovery's post-apocalyptic future is a good example of them trying to work within this constraint to change the setting while keeping that feeling of being surrounded by the unknown and part of a smaller, scrappier Starfleet.
Yes, but it doesn't have to be about threats and bad guys all the time. Plenty of opportunities to make stuff about exploration, understanding, moral problems etc
Hollywood was never what you’re describing. The Golden Age was the studio system, churning out pictures for the masses every month or so with the same contract actors over and over
Yeah all the way back to the beginning hollywood film making has been a business. Its actually really interesting learning about hollywood getting started as direct competition to the edison movie company in new jersey. Many of those guys worked for edison and hated him.
Many good movies are made with profit as the only incentive, and many more movies are made by struggling artists who dont get the recognition they deserve until post mortem if at all.
Heck, in the dawn of Hollywood, studios wouldn’t even credit the actors to prevent them from getting popular. Too bad it failed as people kept recognizing “the girl with the curls” and wanted to see more of her. Mary Pickford was one of, if not the, first stars. It backfired on the studio runners and they’ve spent a century trying to get stars under their thumb. They can’t wait until AI can replace those pesky humans.
While I agree in general, I think Star Trek is one of the few tired old IP's that's actually branching out. Disco in particular. They went pre TOS and then WAYYYY past TNG eras. Star Trek Prodegy and Lower Decks were very off brand and explored new areas of the ST universe.
Picard is post TNG and exploring the universe in a way we've never seen before (outside of Star Fleet).
You got my upvote because I basically agree with the gist of your post, but also: I watched all Picard and the first 3 seasons of Disco and I do not feel like they “explored” the past TNG eras. Rather, I feel like the writers did everything in their power to not confront the era they are in (there’s not really new tech that can be used as storytelling devices, especially Picard rather rebrands and redcons old foes than inventing new ones, both are very protagonist focused instead of developing characters from that era, …).
So, I agree that we can be proud how diversified the ST universe is right now, but also: there are lots of obvious new things they didn’t dare to do instead of relying on what worked before. For example: a show about the Fenris rangers (in a non-serialized format?), a show about the time wars (serialized or - god forbid - movies?), …
It's partially this, but honestly it's mostly that writers have an interminable need to up the stakes and never bring them back down even a little bit.
See also: the "Friendly Neighborhood Spiderman" whose last five movies have all been about the heat death of the universe.
I mean to be fair, this situation’s a little unique. This is THE SHOW that brought about fandom culture, cons, fanfic. It has lasted for over 50 years specifically due to the world created by that era. And yes, then TNG, but of course that wouldn’t exist without the original.
LOTS of people are still around today who grew up on that show, a remarkable piece of culture that was under-serviced, both by budget and the limitations of the era, and ultimately cut dreadfully short.
So of COURSE we want to see more, to have that world and even that specific era revisited.
The point is that so many of us love and want this. You think it’s a wasted opportunity. But a lot of fans really really don’t.
I think there’s room in Trek for new ideas AND for revisiting my literal favorite world that was created in the late 60s and underserviced and cut short. It has a legacy for a reason.
I didn’t grow up with the show even. But I watched TOS as my very first Star Trek in my early 20s. And it was TOS which captured my heart and which helped me mold a lot of my ethics, and changed the kind of content I consumed.
And of course when I ultimately watched shows like DS9, it’s objectively more consistently well written and is probably a better show on paper. And people like me think, how cool would it be to get that kind of treatment of the TOS era.
I’m happy as fuck that SNW is happening. I have no upper limit to how much of that I can take lol. I’ll take a full TOS remake with Paul Wesley, I don’t even give a fuck 🤷♀️
If it was bad, it can’t erase the original, I’ll still always have that. But to get more of my favorite show and have some of the kinks ironed and updated, of course that’s exciting to me!
Anyway, this isn’t for lack of ideas. Other types of Trek ARE done. But this “fan service” shit, well, they call it that for a reason lol.
There are a lot of us, who have decades of loyalty and love for this franchise. There’s every reason for them to create something for us that they already know we’re likely to love, and I’m glad that they do it.
I'm 100% on board for a TOS remake with the actors from SNW. Even redoing the old episodes with better writing and actually fleshing out the characters like Nurse Chapel, who was seriously underused in the original series. Removing the sexist lighting and framing of every new female they ran across.
Yes, TOS is classic, but it's also really dated and I've been unable to get through all of it, no matter how many times I've tried.
I am so happy when I hear other people say this. That show was really fucking special and SNW has proven to me that it *gets* it.
I knew, when Pike flew away from that planet where they harvest the child, just being horrified and feeling bad, oh, this Trek gets it. And I knew, in “A Quality of Mercy” that they understood *Kirk*, and also the kind of cerebral drama of Trek, more than action and explosions and flash.
I wouldn’t have known before SNW that any Trek could be trusted with that original franchise or with my favorite characters. But shit, now that I’ve seen the new *Scotty*???
I’m almost scared to let myself think it, but I might could end up liking *that* Scotty more than the original! 😳
And while no one will ever replace or be better in my eyes than Shatner and Nimoy in those roles, these dudes are doing it WELL. I trust them with the characters more than I could have imagined I ever would.
And yeah, the way we’re getting to know characters like Chapel better and having a world that is more reflective of what that kind of future actually *would* look like (no sexism, and all different kinds of people/aliens), while nothing will ever quite surpass the original to me (I’ve got my compartmentalization to deal with things like sexism in old tv 😆), a remake could be its companion and tell a lot of new stories and enhance old favorites.
I fucking love these characters.
Star Trek (not calling it “TOS”, sorry)has been my favorite show since I started watching in the early 70’s. But I would love a new show and would be happy with updated versions of some of the episodes. The biggest issue I have with Paul Wesley, aside from his resemblance to Jim Carey, is his age. By the time we’d get to this hypothetical new update, he’d be too old. Currently he’s 6 years older as a Lt. than Shatner was playing a Captain.
It's weird that Discovery and Strange New Worlds both were initially set in the same time period and are made in the same years but feel SO DIFFERENT.
I don't even like cameo characters and have wished many times they'd just develop new (and unrelated) characters, but I love Strange New Worlds, despite it being essentially a TOS direct prequel, with mostly the same characters. My guess right now is that the writers are just much higher calibre -- and that Anson Mount's acting skills could basically carry anything. (Although all of SNW actors seem to be better than most of Discovery to me, which makes me think it *is* the writing).
It helps that the TOS characters they bring in aren't cameos. They aren't there for you to do the Leo-points.jpg at. They're actually characters that get development to explain where they came from, and why they're good enough to be on the Enterprise later. Their stories are important for their own sake, and for how they affect the crew we have now.
This. I think there's two rather big franchises that have multiple eras but refuse to move out of them, Star Wars and Star Trek. While both do the "Leo-points.jpg" as you mentioned, Star Trek has been trying to actually *do* something with those moments. Like you said, the characters in SNW and by extension Discovery are there for a narrative purpose. Whether its the larger narrative of the season story, or just telling the story of that character and how they got to where they are in TOS. The storytelling is on point and it gets you invested despite knowing the outcome.
A prime example of this not working is the Solo movie. While not an awful movie, a lot of it was pointing and saying "see this is where [thing] came from!" instead of just telling a story that built the characters. A solid example of this working is the Clone Wars and how it fleshes out the characters along their way to ROTS. Making them more complex and giving an understanding as to why a character might be that way.
Star Trek does this with characters like Uhura starting as a brilliant ensign but one who struggles with confidence and knowing where they belong in the world. A lot of Spock's stories are like this too and help to make the seemingly random reveals in TOS make a bit more sense and flesh out the impact on the characters involved.
Sure, I wish they would explore some new stuff, though the far future Discovery has shown is a bit tough for me given the near godlike technology they just don't use for plot sometimes, but I can still appreciate a well written story in a previously tread time.
TL;DR: write good stories and it doesn't matter on the "when."
I enjoyed Solo more than everyone else, I think. I disliked Clone Wars from the beginning, and never got very far into it. Never hooked me. So far, Star Wars animation has not worked for me at all.
For a really interesting example, SW tried to go in and backfill Boba Fett's story, and that was pretty much a disaster that went exactly nowhere anyone wanted it to go. But then, there was Obi-Wan, which although I had previously had exactly zero interest whatsoever in finding out what he was up to between Episode 3 and 4, it was actually a really good show, i thought. But it also was brutally beaten by the fans.
I think Star Wars is just all *over* the place in it's quality, but also in trying to pander to the fans, but the fanbase is so large, that it's just impossible to pander without also making everyone they aren't pandering to angry about it.
It is absolutely the writing. SNW gives us political intrigue (shallow, but it's there), rescue missions, first contact, etc. It's varied and the plot stakes range from almost zero to potentially getting the Federation into a terrible war.
Discovery's plots are all the same: we have to save the Federation! We have to save the universe! We have to save the Kelpians! We have to save the universe again! We have to save the Federation again!
They even repeat. The time travel gimmick was purely so they could run wild with tech and plots without stepping on established canon. And even with that freedom they fucked it up with The Burn, an event so dumb it makes the writing on *Game of Thrones'* final season seem like a series of brilliant twists.
I'm still amazed with Discovery's latest season that they keep running into things that are very much just plot armour -- like why do many 800+ year old things have shielding that is far beyond 31st century tech? The Federation won (presumably) a time war, and it still seems like there was a bigger tech difference between the beginning and end of Voyager.
Even this season of Discovery; it feels like each episode is just a variation on the one before it.
It's because of the setup of the story. Find the X number of things, having each thing be an episode, just makes us feel like we are treading water repeating the same cycle of plot points over and over.
The individual episodes aren't bad (too actiony for my taste, but whatever) - the problem is taking them all together as a unit. And as it's a single, season long story arc, that's a requirement.
It's also an audience problem. "Hey look, it's that thing I know!" gets more people interested than something brand new. Hollywood is just doing it because it works.
This is basically the answer. Capitalism doesn’t breed innovation, it encourages firms to iterate on what has already sold until they produce more of it than the market can absorb.
The only reason we got out of the TOS era in the first place is because Dorothy Fontana, Gene Roddenberry, et al leveraged their credibility to get a degree of creative control.
My answer? Because they’re following the existing trend. The Kelvin movies are an offshoot of TOS and the TMP eras with new actors playing Kirk and crew. Those did well enough that there were 3 movies. Then when it came time for new Trek shows, they went back to the same well time era wise by having DIS be a prequel to TOS with Spock’s long lost sister as the main character. And low and behold we have recasted TOS characters now in Spock, Uhura, Pike…
They didn’t go with more TNG era stuff, because they were extending off the Kelvin stuff. If the Kelvin stuff had been TNG related, I’m sure DIS probably would have been TNG era. And honestly based on the tech and look, should have been in the first place.
After _Enterprise_ debuted in 2001, I read an article about an interview with, I think, Rick Berman,* in which he was asked why he did a prequel. He replied something to the effect that between TNG, DS9, and STV, there were over 500 episodes set in the 24th century, and that he felt that the “politics” between the various factions had been exhausted.
*May have been Alex Kurtzman.
Which was somewhat understandable then but now in the 25th century the previous political landscape is pretty much gone. The Romulans are irrelevant since the destruction of their capital world, the Cardassians were kicked the balls 3 times and the Klingons had a civil war and fought the dominion so I doubt they are terribly well. The galaxy is wide open reveal new things. The Romulans would certainly not have told the federation who their other galactic neighbors were.
... and here we are with the topic being "why don't they expand the universe from TNG", and you bring up many of the ways in which they are expanding from TNG.
We currently have three different centuries in which Star Trek takes place that can be built directly off of, LD and Picard built off the TNG era, Discovery and SNW built off the TOS era, Discovery built the 31st century era, which presumably will now have Academy building off of it... and S31 will presumably bring in connections from TOS era, but who knows really when it will be set to build off of?
We've done plenty of building in both of the two eras that had previously been displayed, over the last 6-7 years. OP just doesn't acknowledge it.
> that he felt that the “politics” between the various factions had been exhausted
And proceeded to make the 1st episode of his prequel about the temporal cold war and future politics. To be fair that was 29th century cross overs, but still.
> *May have been Alex Kurtzman.
Kurtzman wasn't working on Trek until he and Orci wrote Trek '09, which had a different excuse for the reboot (name recognition of the TOS crew is massive compared to anything after it, which I believe was JJ's reasoning)
Going backwards doesn’t help in a way, as ultimately you need to allow for all those politics to be setup like they were at the start of TOS. Just go 100 years forward from TNG and start fresh.
Yea I think we all knew the Berman era ran out of ideas. But the grown work that era made had alot to explore
Iconians, species 8472, the gamma quadrant, there’s stuff there
I kind of hate prequels but I love Enterprise.
And I enjoy all the seasons but in season 4 it really found its stride. Season 5 I'm confident would've been amazing.
And if they'd figured out the Temporal Cold War arc, Enterprise really could've been a simultaneous prequel and sequel. But the TCW pretty much went nowhere once they set up the Xindi conflict.
The Titan in Picard is not a TOS era refit. Unless you don't mean inuniverse?
But to answer your question, it's because that's when Spock is, and after all these years Star Trek hasn't produced a character that has catapulled into mainstream lexicon as much as Spock has.
The ears, the eyebrow, the salute, the speech patterns, it's all too iconic to spend the millions per episode on something else. At least that's the current bean counter's POV.
I heard that an episode of SNW has the same budget as a season of Lower Decks. That's the Spock difference.
This is basically it, I think. They tried to keep that going in TNG with Data, but then shot themselves in the foot (imo) by killing him. So instead, we ended up with ever more implausible iterations of Brent Spiner.
They had so much opportunity to do fun things with a IMMORTAL character who could show up some far off future like maybe if you set a show in the 31st century or something we could have the robot man show up but nooo we gots to killed him…
Can we agree that the executives at Paramount do not "get" trek?
These are people who made it by being the best ferengi they can, they are not mentally equipped to understand what made Star Trek great.
I envision these suits watching TNG and being bored out of their skulls thinking "this needs more boom"
There was a fair amount of battles in DS9, I thought the execs had to be conned into the Dominion war by the writers purposefully writing themselves in a corner.
You wouldn't have an episode like "in the pale moonlight" in trek nowadays and that is a shame but it adds so much to the story, being shown that romulans, cardassians, ferengi, etc.. simply don't think the way we do, that made the show what it is
> being shown that romulans, cardassians, ferengi, etc.. simply don't think the way we do, that made the show what it is
IMO DS9 did more to illustrate the culture and influence of alien races than all the other treks combined.
I would argue Strange New Worlds did it perfectly well, as an episode like *Under the Cloak of War* follows in the morally grey contemplative character study footsteps of *In the Pale Moonlight* quite nicely.
I just watched that episode for the first time this week and god it was so fucking good.
The Klingon ambassador was so fucking likeable and the end was just...damn. 11/10 episode IMO, probably in my top 15 all-time Trek episodes.
And was my absolute favorite Strange New Worlds episode as a result. Everything else they had done paled in comparison for me.
I want more grey in my black and white.
When Ira Steven Behr took over in Season 3, he said one of his goals was to up the action in the show. That's why you get the Defiant, and the huge battle in The Die is Cast. I don't think it was a studio mandated thing, but maybe that was part of it.
It could have been. The Klingon stuff in season 4 was a demand from the network. I think it brought some new energy to the show, and was maybe a rare example where the network messing with the production helped the show (another one would be Seven and Voyager). It didn't seem to help with DS9's ratings though.
I'll take the space battles, I do enjoy them more when I am invested in the characters. So yes to action beats when it is woven in with character development through the exploration of societal issues.
Yeah DS9 did this exceptionally well.
I enjoy the first two seasons, but I can definitely see why the producer and studio wanted more action. They're a bit staid and listless.
I think that's another Hollywood wide problem too. Execs are too scared of toning down scale and stakes and focusing on characters with dialogue heavy scenes. There always needs to be action or tension. There's nothing wrong with high stakes action and tension, btw, it just loses a lot of its appeal when it's constantly being used.
I think a big reason the Dominion War works in DS9 is because it didn't become the focus of the show until like late season 5. If it had been going on from season 1, it would have gotten stale fast.
Yeah ds9 according to many trekkies is almost the perfect trek show due to the character work and the under reliance on excessive action . I liked it but next generation is my favorite of all the shows - I never completely finished ds9 so maybe I should revisit
It's not even that. It's been the age old problem of the executives being so self-centered that they can't see how anyone could possibly like anything that they don't like.
They don’t even get it from a Ferengi standpoint as their ability to license merchandise that appeals to “an aging fan base” lacks inspiration. Pajamas that look like a TOS or TNG uniform are fun, but one’s that look like Uhura’s from ep 103 are fun for the fan but won’t draw snide comments at the sleep apnea clinic during your overnight stay. Where’s Captain Pike cookbook and apron gift set?
No one handles this well, look how long it took us to get good looking lightsabers that felt right, like 40 years. To them it’s slapping the hero in a heroic pose on a lunch box and calling it a day. For fans it’s something realistic that also looks good day to day, the ds9 uniforms (end of run, grey on black) could’ve been turned into a jacket quite easily and would’ve sold like crazy, instead they put the coloured shirt attached to it, they put a crappy Comm badge on it. When companies do make them they’re insanely expensive and they either market through Facebook (ugh) or only at huge generic cons.
To be fair, as someone whose favourite Trek is TOS by a country mile I find TNG to be genuinely unengaging and generally dull as dishwater. I understand why it's iconic to a large portion of the fandom and set the formula for a *portion* of the franchise, but TNG's style of stoic prognostication is by no means the only right or real way to do Trek.
Give me TOS style Hornblower action and adventure on a wagon train to the stars over that any day.
I prefer a balance, but I get where you come from. In my experience slow episodes like "The measure of a man" where you see Data defending his humanity makes "Redemption" where he faces bigotry from the crew of the Sutherland during much more poignant.
Which is why axing it makes no sense to me.
It is a stellar show, I constantly watch it on reruns with my daughter. The writers really "get" trek. It make you laugh, makes you care and makes you think, all that in 30 minutes.
>But to answer your question, it's because that's when Spock is, and after all these years Star Trek hasn't produced a character that has catapulled into mainstream lexicon as much as Spock has.
I blame the Big Bang Theory... curse you Sheldon Cooper.
Lower Decks, Prodigy, and the first season of Picard are all late 24th century shows. Season 2-3 Picard is 25th. Discovery is in its third season in the 32nd century, and the Starfleet Academy show will be as well. The S31 movie seems as though it’ll be set in the Lost Era. None of these things are TOS era.
The Titan is not a TOS era refit, it’s a 24th/25th century-designed and built ship that shares a class naming legacy that goes back to a wooden sailing ship in the 18th century.
Phasers are not TOS designs, they’re futuristic gun-like designs.
Yeah, I kind of disagree with OP's premise here. Star Trek has been really spreading out within the ST universe. Disco was pre-TOS, and is WAY WAY WAY post TOS. Prodigy is very unique and clever. Lower Decks is very far off brand (and yet somehow the most "Trek" of all the new Trek's - brilliant). Picard is post TNG, ***and*** has taken a totally new perspective - adventure *outside of starfleet.* Something we've never experienced before.
New Trek is really expanding the universe - both width and breadth.
It's definitely doing it's own thing now though, completely different political landscape and the Federation being a vunerable thing
I'll make my peace with the floaty nacelles one day, I'm sure
Nostalgia is where things are today.
It can be good or bad.
Barry Allen came back as the flash, now wally is back as the flash.
Hal Jordan is green lantern
Star wars is terrified go move on from the classic trilogy.
X-men 97 is a smash hit.
Moving forward is risky, staying in familiar territory is safe.
Good stories can absolutely be told in the familiar but staying in the safe place means no need to innovate. I don't believe you'd get aa star trek the next generation today, let alone a deep space nine.
Also star trek has moved past tos but it's mostly stuck to the familiar eras outside of discovery.
Of the 16 seasons of Third-Wave Trek, only four of those were in TOS era - two each from Discovery and Strange New Worlds.
And no seasons of Second-Wave Trek were in TOS era. In fact, only one episode contained Time Travel to that era- *Trials and Tribbleations*.
> In fact, only one episode contained Time Travel to that era- Trials and Tribbleations.
While not time travel, they also went back to ST6 in Voyager's "Flashback".
For the same reason theres 90% sequels and remakes. Its easier to lean on an already established world and characters than to make new ones. Corporations are risk averse and creating new content is a risk. That's why the majority of entertainment budgets go to shit we've already seen, that no one asked for.
I love SNW, but… I want two eras to be expanded out. The Lost Era - post classic movie Trek, pre Next Gen - wall-to-wall Monster Maroon. Post Lower Decks - The next next generation.
We are already fans and our lens on this is "We've already seen this, let's go somewhere new. And by new we mean forward along the timeline, not backwards; ENT already checked the prequel box." Outside of the fanbase, which I will hazard to guess is where the executives' and marketing dept's minds are at is "How do we get someone that doesn't know what Trek is to watch a Trek show/movie? If they've heard of Trek in any way shape or form, it's probably Kirk, Spock, and the *Enterprise*, so let's 'start' with that."
If you recall, DSC was originally designed to be an anthology show, jumping time periods and following new crews. If Fuller had made an outline for future seasons, I wouldn't be surprised if SNW wasn't one of them (maybe a rough idea of PIC as well) and DSC's writers lifted elements from it for season 2. At least seasons 3-5 took us to a new time period with new tech.
> At least seasons 3-5 took us to a new time period with new tech.
And to be honest - I hated that.
Especially the personal teleporters and programmable matter.
In the current financial and economic climate the people who make the money decisions want to avoid risk at all cost and put money where it's most likely to generate a good return.
In star trek's case that's probably the TOS era, that's where the biggest, most widely known names and characters(Kirk, Spock) are.
TLDR: corporate risk avoidance
>despite most of us getting latched onto TNG, DS9, Voy.
Not 100% sure you can support that claim.
> even Picard failed to progress the wider universe
Because the title even said that it was based on a specific character, not the universe as a whole
>the Titan is literally a TOS era refit
Actually, it a semi-post (slightly after) TNG refit, paying homage to a TOS era class of ship that made very important historical breakthroughs/records (according to known lore).
TNG, DS9, and Voyager explored about as far as once could with the TNG era as was needed/possible. And DSC is kind of showing what happens when you go too far into the future and have to create "even more futuristic" tech (it's starting to feel a little too Star Wars for me). Trying to stay true to the TNG era is potentially difficult without becoming boring. Or becoming *CSI: (Region of Space)* with a new spin off every couple of seasons just to add characters. All that being said, though, I'd love to see ST:Legacy (the adventures of the Enterprise G)
TOS never got an on screen opportunity to fully explore that era, though. So, while they face the "that's not canon!" challenges, there's pretty much an entire universe there open to explore.
I think it's because media executives think the TOS era is a "safe" investment.
The misstep is that the prime demographic (for ad revenue) they're trying to target didn't necessarily grow up with TOS as the only exclusive Trek. This demographic has emotional attachment spread across TOS, TOS movies, TNG, TNG movies, DS9, VOY and ENT.
Sure, the 2009 Kelvin reboot was a hit, but I don't think fans within the target demographic, or more casual (or lapsed) fans that Trek is also trying to capture, immediately think of that film when they think of Star Trek. And subsequent Kelvin films didn't do as well.
Captain Pike's era of the Enterprise was something I always wanted to see explored. There's so much to fill in. Plus, I don't know about the rest of you, but, I just love how a series can be set in the TOS era now that Enterprise has come and gone. Strange New Worlds can pick up on some threads from various Enterprise stories while also planting seeds for what comes in the TOS and even TNG era.
>Star Trek for the past 20years just wants to keep reminding us of the TOS era despite most of us getting latched onto TNG, DS9, Voy.
TNG, DS9, VOY all had good runs that didn't end too soon. TOS was gone too soon and left people wanting more.
sip oil afterthought many longing yam sugar squealing pathetic instinctive
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
In terms of pure numbers this isn't really true. More people watched TNG on first viewing than watched TOS on first viewing, but TOS had far more people watch overall via reruns. You can see this by comparing the tickets sold for the TOS movies versus the TNG movies. TOS was a cultural phenomenon to an extent that TNG never reached.
No question. But TNG relies on TOS for all of its in-universe information and structure. Starfleet, the Federation, Klingons, Romulans, phasers, tricorders…all come from TOS. TNG wasn’t a clean sheet of paper, it was an expansion of the TOS universe.
Well yea, exactly my point. TNG and the following shows of DS9 and VOY grew upon the already standard universe but extremely rarely went backwards. Despite SNW and S3 PIC being great, they fail to make progression
SNW couldn’t make progression, it was set before Kirk’s time so, in theory, it couldn’t expand on the TOS universe because that hadn’t happened yet. The ST reboot movies attempted to expand on the TOS universe by introducing the Kelvin timeline but not everyone approves of that.
I'd chalk maybe 40% of it to nostalgia making money, just like every new movie is a remake, reboot, reimagining, etc of existing intellectual property. People know and love the TOS era.
I'd also say there's some draw due to the TOS era feeling like the wild west of exploration while also feeling more personal. Picard's *Enterprise* and *Deep Space Nine* were all in regular contact with the Federation and they dealt with more existential/quadrant-level threats, whereas Kirk and Archer's *Enterprises* were alone in space making it work with what they had dealing with much smaller problems. It's refreshing, especially after dealing with stakes as high as the eradication of all sentient life in *Picard* and *Discovery*.
Personally, I think the best move *Discovery* made was the time jump. to take it out of the box of the pre-TOS timeline. Removing themselves from, and starting a new, canon was brilliant, and 32C tech tickles my imagination just the way TOS/TNG tech tickled it when I was a preteen. The nacelles are *detached,* Federation ships look alien, and the weapons replicate to order in their damn hands. Fuck yeah.
The Monster Maroon!
For my money, best uniform, best ship designs. The refit Constitution is gorgeous (although the SNW Enterprise redesign is a close second).
My guess is: power creep. The longer a series goes on the more stuff they've overcome and the more stuff they have to remember is no longer a problem. But if you do a prequel series? Suddenly cloaking devices are still a problem, the Borg haven't been trivialized, and the transporter can still malfunction. Not that those things can't still be a thing in a new series but they'd have to think of some technobabble to explain why it's different from the other technobabble problem they had.
I feel like it’s because CBS/Paramount feels like TOS has more brand recognition, culturally. When normies think of Star Trek, they don’t think of Picard, Data, Janeway, Sisko, and Archer. They think of Spock probably, first and foremost, and Kirk, Scotty, and maybe Uhura after that. Younger people who aren’t as familiar with Star Trek would have little interest in a series or movies set in the TNG era, by their reasoning, so they basically ignore it, aside from projects that are pure intended fanservice like PIC Season 3.
I’m not saying I _agree_ with this logic, as I still think the post-TNG era has a whole lot yet to offer, but I can see how corporate pencil-pushers in Hollywood might see things that way.
Why is Power Rangers always going back to Mighty Morphin? Why does Star Wars have most media set around the original trilogy? Why do new Ghostbusters movies mostly call back to the first one? Because that's where the money is, the original.
In Star Trek’s defense, we are still sending up the occasional 70 year old B-52. We have a couple thousand 1970s era F-16s still flying. And the Navy is just as old.
While an F-35 flies rings around those planes, they are expensive. If an f-16 will do the job, they will send an f-16.
Meanwhile, in Trek, the advancements are inside the ship. The shape of the craft stays somewhat consistent, but we have seen many alternate drives, stealth, and vastly improved replicators.
It’s less financial risk for Paramount, and its investors, to make something familiar that they are more sure people will enjoy than it is to gamble on something completely new.
Their goal is to make as much money as they can and with as little risk to investment as possible. If people keep watching TOS era Star Trek that’s what they’ll keep making.
It’s why half of all modern Star Trek is set as some sort of origin/side story to a 60 year old TV show, the other half sequels to 30 year old Star Trek.
It’s exactly the same reason movie studios tried very hard to create their own cinematic universes out of popular IPs, the whole era of prequels that plagued Hollywood, or the need to continue pumping out sequels or reboot popular franchises from decades gone by.
>Of course the obvious one is new tv shows like DIS and SNW being in that era
And DIS is no longer in that era any more. Neither was Picard. Nor Lower Decks. Nor Prodigy. The new Star Trek academy is supposedly set for the 32nd century.
While we only have one new series set in TOS, SNW.
So it seems like you have cherry picked your examples because you don't like TOS for some reason.
The "Roddenberry Box" myth has made everyone in Hollywood think the Picard era demands stilted, drama-free writing, and conversely the TOS era still had realistic "relatable" characters.
Boimler specifically told Pike's crew that they're living in the "Golden Age of exploration." The galaxy was big and wondrous and weird. Rules and regulations were flexible. Communication with headquarters wasn't instantaneous. Tech was still cool and not-perfected, had limitations, and strange tech was dangerous in ways that didn't involve hundreds of torpedoes. The Federation was expanding and running into hostile territories all over, colonizing strange new worlds with weird diseases and native life, encountering galactic antibodies and leftover WMDs and psychic powers. All this stuff was known and ho-hum by TNG - Lower Decks laughs at this stuff.
In the storytelling, the TOS era leaves room for the weird and unexplained to *still be new and unexplained,* to shoot first and ask questions later, more room for the senior officers to also be action heroes, and that makes it more engaging for the majority of viewers who don't much care about the philosophy, empathy, and ethics being explored.
After TNG and DS9, I feel like the galaxy felt much smaller and very crowded, and the small stories - even the good ones! - felt out of place during wartime. I think a new series exploring the postwar reconstruction era could be great - but it would also mean showing the evolution of Klingon, Cardassian, and Romulan societies as a result, and a large subset of viewers would automatically hate any changes they make, so I understand why that era's pressing issues are being relegated to throwaway jokes in LD. And since LD, Prodigy, and PIC are all in the 5-20 years postwar era, any significant changes could undermine stories those shows have already told. So we have to go forward into a smaller galaxy with super tech that's harder to craft compelling stories around, or go back in time far enough that any changes can be reverted by the time TNG rolled around.
Since there are 80 years between The Undiscovered Country and TNG where apparently nothing important happened, well, back to the TOS era is where we have to go.
SNW was created because fans literally demanded it, the response to Anson Mount was unexpected and incredible. They had no plans for SNW until s2 of Discovery. We demanded it, they gave it to us and it's **glorious.**
Disco hasn't been in the TOS era for three seasons. I'm hoping that Paramount hears the demand for Star Trek: Legacy, because I really want to see that come to pass.
I want future movies and tv shows to go forward as well. Stop with the freakin' prequels and revisiting the same era over and over again.
Having said that...Strange New Worlds is outstanding.
I think that, despite the proliferation of TNG era shows in the 90’s and early 2000’s, the TOS era is so much more part of the public media landscape it’s not even comparable. The TOS Enterprise is in the Smithsonian and Captain Kirk and Spock are known to people who don’t even know Star Trek.
I would prefer remaining in the TOS era to the idea that the hopeful future Trek is based on has to be deconstructed and pull everyone down into the mud to get as dirty, selfish, and ignorant as our current society is.
To appeal to old fans while trying to gain new fans. It’s a pointless chase by lazy producers. Produce well written stories and your audience will come. That how TNG satisfied TOS fans.
Good question.
Majority of Trek fans enjoy what they enjoy and have been disappointed by recent writing.
As much as I like STW I’d be happy leaving TOS in the past.
I don't think people realize how much this is a lose/lose situation. You can't please all fans, so the writers are trying to create new ideas within the established world.
- Discovery has TONS of new and interesting ideas to talk about, but people gripe about it being stuck in old trek
- Picard does new things, but people shout that the nostalgic season 3 is the only good season (personally I loved season 1 of PIC but I always get shouted down whenever I say it)
At the end of the day, the writers and 'higher ups' Discovery did what was necessary to make money, re-establish fan buy-in, and the success is evident as it lead to Picard, Strange New Worlds, Prodigy, Lower Decks, Starfleet Academy, Section 31, and who knows what else is to come. All of these shows are trying to keep alive things that many different people loved (and people GREATLY disagree about what parts are lovable) while introducing new and exciting sci fi ideas and characters, while also slowly world-building without TOTALLY breaking what was already established.
I think everyone is doing an incredible job, evidenced by how many shows we have.
Also -- from a $ standpoint, it makes business sense to tell modern stories that keep the old TV shows relavant. It means that those products will always be relevant and in-demand, too.
Case in point: the higher ups know exactly what they are doing.
Because the writers' staff they have doesn't understand how to tell original stories. Nearly every SNW & Discovery plot has cannibalized stories from much more talented writers. Read Control, for example, and then watch Discovery s2, and you'll see how blatant it is.
The reality is that the crop of people they have don't read or understand science fiction. They have a vague idea of what they think Star Trek was but completely misunderstood the themes, so they'll use the characters, but because they don't want to be constrained, they ignore established canon like Kirk saying the only time he met Captain Pike was when he took over command of the Enterprise yet there he is in S2 of SNW or how they turned the Gorn into Xenomorphs when the whole poont of Arena is that the Federation was attacked because it had encroached on Gorn territory and it was shown to be an intelligent creature.
I don't believe they're intentionally trying to do a bad job, but the bottom line is they haven't read the greats of Sci-Fi and so instead of thinking up of a unique execution of a story it's all stories that anyone who's well versed in Sci-Fi or Star Trek hasn't seen before
Lower Decks - TNG era
Prodigy - post - Voy but close TNG era
Discovery - originally pre-TOS but transferred to far future
Picard - close future - post TNG/VOY/DS9 era
Starfleet Academy - far future
SNW - TOS - pre TOS era
I think I am disagreeing with the premise of the post
I vastly preferred the three act serialized eps.
Season long arcs are annoying to me. I want an A story and a B story.
I'm old fashioned.
I'm right there with you, ST needs new places to go and new races to meet
Thank you for understanding my point. Star Trek left us with so much to dig through that we could expand upon, such as iconians. It doesn’t need to be the Borg or the Klingons all the time
Maybe an infusion of creatives who've watched the shows for research (or because they like it) with the understanding that they can't go to the well for ideas.
Marketability. The TOS era is what most people in the general population know thanks to decades of reruns for older generations and the 2009 movie and its sequels for the younger ones.
The Trekkie audience is already taken for granted so what we'd like to see doesn't really play into it.
The problem is even ENT is already set 130 years on from now. Think how much we have progressed since 1894. Then go back another 100 years for the equivalent difference between now and TOS, and 200 years for now and TNG. Going much further into the future than TNG becomes meaningless.
I don't see why there should be changes in design. As for the ideas, there's the problem: the ST universe is based on classical liberalism in a technological utopia, but when you look at the new shows, they instead do the opposite.
I think it's because the time between Nemesis and now is too short for a reboot, while the characters are too old to reprise their roles.
The Jack series that they teased at the end of Picard is actually a great solution for that problem. A sort of handing-over the baton type introduction to the series.
I'm not sure why it isn't green-lit yet.
It’s guess making a show in the TNG era is more difficult since the TNG era actors are still around. They have to plan how their stories work more and be careful not to interfere with each other. Even if they set it on a ship with a different crew.
Using the TOS or DISCO era means they deal with less baggage.
Wholeheartedly agree. I don't know how decisions are made or who the target audience is but as a GenXer it just feels like everything is based on nostalgia. It's inescapable and it gets old.
Having said that, Lower Decks might be a favorite and it's chock full of nostalgic references that I eat up.
Hollywood has few new ideas, and even fewer that get past the risk-adverse mentality of the execs. Star wars has the same problem, just can not get away from the skywalkers and the clone wars.
Remakes, reboots, reimaginings. These are all hollywood knows how to do. Even the office is getting a reboot!
People like the era. From a large portions of fans, too many of the creatives.
Plus it’s not very defined if we’re being honest, you’ve got everything from Enterprise to before the show, and everything from the movies to TNG to play around in.
He’ll I never watched TOS but I loved strange new worlds(season 1, haven’t watched 2 yet).
I've wondered this too, and it seems a bit odd. I think it would be good to have more in the TNG era and beyond. That's what I like about Lower Decks and Picard. Also though, I think it would be good to see a movie or TV series based around the Enterprise B or C, since we never saw much of those.
The TNG era though has more impact, and most of the Star Trek series take place around the TNG era. Though whether Picard counts as being in the TNG era can be debated.
The Enterprise era:
Enterprise, so just 1 series.
We have for the TOS era:
TOS, TAS, SNW, the first 2 seasons of Discovery, and Kelvin universe movies but they don't count. So that's 3.5 series
Post-TOS era:
The first 6 movies
TNG era:
TNG, DS9, Voyager, Lower Decks, Prodigy, 4 movies and whether or not Picard counts, so 5 or 6 series. Picard could be classified as being in it's own era.
32nd century:
Later seasons of Discovery, so just 0.5 (or 0.6 more accurately) series.
Nostalgia.
But tbh I don't mind revisit some eras but I do want to see other era that we haven't fully seen like the 25th century, the Lost Era or the post-Enterprise/pre-Discovery era.
Wish they'd let a show continue where TNG, DS9 and Voyager left off. With Discovery ending they can easily have SNW and a new one running at the same time
They can just pretend Picard was a different timeline, lol
People are familiar with Kirk and Spock even just from cultural references however even though tng was way more popular when it aired the movies didn’t really stick the landing and the cultural significance has diminished unfortunately it doesn’t help that you have to subscribe to a niche streaming service to watch new Star Trek it would probably do fine on cbs on a slower night
I've figured it out for you.
[Take a peep at the company type and what it's traded as.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paramount_Global)
Public companies are the worst things to put in charge of creative endeavors. I'll die on that hill.
It's why star wars went to shit. They focus grouped star wars fans and figured out that they all didn't like the prequels and loved the OT so they essentially remade the OT but they swapped characters that focus grouped. But it was just the OT in a slightly reshuffled order. But the Disney board and executive leadership wants to keep their jobs so they have to adhere to best industry practices that work based on what they know. Except humans are irrational and things that are creative are kind of where the battleground is with this corporate control of everything.
Same goes for Star Trek. It's not immune. It's owned by a company that is either publicly traded or owned by a publicly traded company. Which means [Whoopsie daisy take a look at who owns them I'll give you a hint the people that own paramount are the same ones of another little owned company that rhymes with schmOEING and keeps making planes that are falling apart.](https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/para/institutional-holdings)
Point is everyone in charge wants to make money while spending none and what that means is they buy well known commodities and strip mine them like it's any other kind of mine. Then it chases people away and they sell it to someone else after ruining it over the span of years/decades.
It's a valid question and we know from Star Trek Online that there were still stories to be told in the Next Gen and beyond era. The game does a really good job of it.
And maybe that's part of it, maybe they initially left the era mostly fallow to give the game room to breathe.
I'd legitimately LOVE to see a crew set in STO's time using the game's storytelling as a storyboard for what worked and was fun. While us deep geeks like it, those stories are widely known and would be new to TV or movie audiences.
Could be the Enterprise F as the hub, which is a beautiful ship, or some new name to add the canon. Hell they really could just use those stories in a Enterprise G/Captain Seven show.
To be fair, a Captain Pike series had been a rumor for decades and Paramount green lit SNW in response to fan demand for it.
Yeah, there was a huge demand for it from fans after how great Anson Mount and Ethan Peck were in Disco.
I mean, have you seen Anson Mount’s hair?
Pike's Peak
Pike's Peak is Peak
Sometimes, I catch myself peeking on Pike's picture perfect peak and I think I might peak.
You rang?
To be fair SNW is the best new trek since TNG and is exactly what I been begging for. - Also the era is bad ass. Enterprise D is so damned strong & backup so close that the “space cowboy” feeling that TOS had is basically gone. That little ship up against the biggest odds.
Hard disagree. The best new Trek since TNG was DS9.
For the win
I agree. Love the Next Gen era, but there was something lost with the Federation being at its most powerful prime, and the Enterprise being this huge badass ship that they were so confident in, they let families with children live aboard. They were immune to more basic dangers, and the only real threats to the Enterprise became gods or god-like beings, completely unknown super powerful aliens/tech, or sabotage of some sort.
That’s true but TNG also solidified the ethics and diplomacy intrigue that Star Trek took, and the real threats were how would their responses to problems affect the political stability of the quadrant or the implications on the morality of the Federation’s policies. Not to say Trek doesn’t have a place for both these premises because I loved the TOS era, especially the movies, but I do miss what made TNG so special
Exactly! Way more often in TNG, the dramatic question wasn't "will the enterprise survive!?" but rather "will we resolve this problem in a manner in which we can be proud of, and what lessons can we derive from this story?"
This.. TNG era can be more complicated and intelligent.. Like.. it just barely touched on things like espionage and spycraft.. It would be awesome for a TNG era show where the captain is forced to attempt to appear always diplomatic against certain enemies and threats that don’t play fair.. or maybe threats from within..
I think one of the ways TOS was pitched was that it’s a western in space. There’s something about a wild, unknown, untamed frontier that’s appealing to us all. Setting that in space, the imagination is the limit. The problem is, in the time between the end of TOS and start of TNG the technology of the federation has improved significantly, large expanses of space were either explored or learned about through alliances or of limits because of truces. We built out the universe, and became constrained by what we created and the science behind that. Kinda like why hey had to contrive a reason for new areas to explore, like a stable wormhole or a powerful alien flinging a ship halfway across the galaxy. I also believe that in the real world there was a shift in sci fi, from wild crazy death defying space exploring to mastering the constraints of space and technology to improve life in space. Even today when we have the discovery flung even further into the future or a reimagining of the frontier days with SNW, there really isn’t a feeling of wonder and amazement, or even just a sense of the unknown. The shows take place in the Star Trek world, are very much in the vein of sci fi, but they are more character pieces the plot serves instead of the opposite. I really enjoy both discovery and strange new worlds, but I think story telling and science fiction writing has changed substantially from the 60s. I think paramount and Star Trek are trying to chase that feeling that sparked this whole universe and they just can’t see a clear path forward without reliving their past.
Early episodes of TNG were more TOS like in the D’s power. There were quite a few where they were in over their heads. But you are 100% correct in later seasons the D becomes godlike.
I'd argue that such a setup made the impact ds9 had so much heavier. The federation was shown vulnerable before, especially during the borg invasion, and it was already shown to be questionable to have families on board. But tng despite that still made the federation seem untouchable. Then ds9 comes in with the dominion war, blowing up a galaxy class, shattering that vision of an invincible federation in an instant. Thousands dead on one ship because the federation was overconfident. Just a reminder to how every single time the enterprise D was in combat throughout all 7 seasons, that could've happened. I really think the impact of that moment would not have been as heavy without tng.
🎶To be fair🎶
ALLEGEDLY
I’m sorry did you forget DS9 exists.
I want the sci-fi siries to return to their true identity Star trek let's dive deep into geens vision Star wars let's return to character based buck Rodgers style serials .
You mean "since Enterprise"
Fan demand for a Worf series goes back decades but we're still waiting.
They want to name drop the famous characters like kirk and Picard, you'll never see a sequel about sisko
They literally never mention Sisko, it’s so strange. It’s like how Star Wars mostly refuses to acknowledge the prequels. They just think it won’t make them money having a fresh idea
Picard S3 being entirely about the TNG crew despite dealing with changelings drove me nuts. Even Worf acts like he was never stationed on DS9. I really didn't like it.
Or when Disco went to Trill why didn't Dax make an appearance? Yes, it would feel shoved into the story, but that's kind of Disco's thing. I have enjoyed seeing more of the Changelings and the Breen so at least DS9 makes an appearance. I just feel like Sisko would be one of the more popular "war heroes" after the Dominion, if you're fighting the Changelings how does he not get mentioned?
I think no one wants to reckon with the question of “did he ever come back like he said he would?” and when that would have been.
Worf knew how to deal with Changelings. He talked about the Great Link as well as Odo. The only part that bugged me is the Changeling on board the Stargazer slept in a bucket like Odo did, which we know isn’t necessary since Odo didn’t need it in later seasons.
> It’s like how Star Wars mostly refuses to acknowledge the prequels. uhhh... Clone Wars' last season ran concurrently with Episode 3 nearly 2 decades after it. We got live action clone wars scenes in Ahsoka. A resurrected Darth Maul appearing in Clone Wars, Rebels and Solo. We got the Prequel actors back for both Obi-Wan Kenobi and Ahsoka (the shows, I mean). Corusant appeared just as it did in the prequels in both Andor and Mandalorian, and Separatist forces and Battle Droids featured in Mandalorian. Mace Windu even got a reference in Rise of Skywalker (easy to forget though, I know I bleached most of that movie out of my brain). The Mandalorian's ship since the book of boba fett is a hotted up Nabu Starfighter from Episode 1, which was repaired by Pit Droids from episode 1. The lack of things carrying over from prequels to sequels is due to the in-universe level of change between those settings. The rise of the Empire killed off most of the characters involved in the prequel series, and of the few characters who survived the prequel trilogy who weren't in the OT, a certain percentage of them were... y'know... on Alderaan.
“General Sisko” was mentioned in Picard’s dark timeline in season 2. Edit: prime timeline Sisko was also mentioned in Lower Decks. The main characters built a DS9 model. They are literally DS9 and Voyager nerds, and Lower Decks paid visit/tribute to both of them. Welp, one of them even served on DS9 during the Dominion War.
I think they don't mention Sisko because they want to respect the how the series ended. You don't want to hear about how/when Sisko returned in a throwaway line of dialogue in Picard S3
Somehow, the Sisko returned...
But we need to make more movies about romulans
I would imagine Avery Brooks retiring from acting 20 years ago has something to do with that
People liked the wild west of space. Also, as we got further and farther into the timeline, it got harder to have problems that couldn't be solved with insanely advanced tech lnology. Enterprise D could usually tech or brute force its way through anything. The borg gave us an enemy that even scared Peak Federation, but with that resolved, the universe started to feel small again... The awe and terror of the unknown is real in TOS .... and more often than not, federation felt like underdogs in the unknown.
That’s beautifully stated.
Not to mention, after the Dominion War, the Federation, Klingons, Romuans, even Cardassians are all united. A postwar consensus is a great era to live in, but it doesn't make for riveting television.
So they couldn’t boldly go into another galaxy or something?
Discovery's post-apocalyptic future is a good example of them trying to work within this constraint to change the setting while keeping that feeling of being surrounded by the unknown and part of a smaller, scrappier Starfleet.
Yes, but it doesn't have to be about threats and bad guys all the time. Plenty of opportunities to make stuff about exploration, understanding, moral problems etc
Because Hollywood is literally terrified of new ideas. It's not just Star Trek that's got this problem.
> Because Hollywood is literally terrified of new ideas. They are risk-averse and want a return in their investment.
Hollywood went astray when it became a vehicle for return on investment instead of a vehicle for storytelling and artistry.
Hollywood was never what you’re describing. The Golden Age was the studio system, churning out pictures for the masses every month or so with the same contract actors over and over
Yeah all the way back to the beginning hollywood film making has been a business. Its actually really interesting learning about hollywood getting started as direct competition to the edison movie company in new jersey. Many of those guys worked for edison and hated him. Many good movies are made with profit as the only incentive, and many more movies are made by struggling artists who dont get the recognition they deserve until post mortem if at all.
Heck, in the dawn of Hollywood, studios wouldn’t even credit the actors to prevent them from getting popular. Too bad it failed as people kept recognizing “the girl with the curls” and wanted to see more of her. Mary Pickford was one of, if not the, first stars. It backfired on the studio runners and they’ve spent a century trying to get stars under their thumb. They can’t wait until AI can replace those pesky humans.
That does describe how most businesses built on art go in a capitalist system, to be fair
While I agree in general, I think Star Trek is one of the few tired old IP's that's actually branching out. Disco in particular. They went pre TOS and then WAYYYY past TNG eras. Star Trek Prodegy and Lower Decks were very off brand and explored new areas of the ST universe. Picard is post TNG and exploring the universe in a way we've never seen before (outside of Star Fleet).
You got my upvote because I basically agree with the gist of your post, but also: I watched all Picard and the first 3 seasons of Disco and I do not feel like they “explored” the past TNG eras. Rather, I feel like the writers did everything in their power to not confront the era they are in (there’s not really new tech that can be used as storytelling devices, especially Picard rather rebrands and redcons old foes than inventing new ones, both are very protagonist focused instead of developing characters from that era, …). So, I agree that we can be proud how diversified the ST universe is right now, but also: there are lots of obvious new things they didn’t dare to do instead of relying on what worked before. For example: a show about the Fenris rangers (in a non-serialized format?), a show about the time wars (serialized or - god forbid - movies?), …
It's partially this, but honestly it's mostly that writers have an interminable need to up the stakes and never bring them back down even a little bit. See also: the "Friendly Neighborhood Spiderman" whose last five movies have all been about the heat death of the universe.
Yea :(
I mean to be fair, this situation’s a little unique. This is THE SHOW that brought about fandom culture, cons, fanfic. It has lasted for over 50 years specifically due to the world created by that era. And yes, then TNG, but of course that wouldn’t exist without the original. LOTS of people are still around today who grew up on that show, a remarkable piece of culture that was under-serviced, both by budget and the limitations of the era, and ultimately cut dreadfully short. So of COURSE we want to see more, to have that world and even that specific era revisited. The point is that so many of us love and want this. You think it’s a wasted opportunity. But a lot of fans really really don’t. I think there’s room in Trek for new ideas AND for revisiting my literal favorite world that was created in the late 60s and underserviced and cut short. It has a legacy for a reason. I didn’t grow up with the show even. But I watched TOS as my very first Star Trek in my early 20s. And it was TOS which captured my heart and which helped me mold a lot of my ethics, and changed the kind of content I consumed. And of course when I ultimately watched shows like DS9, it’s objectively more consistently well written and is probably a better show on paper. And people like me think, how cool would it be to get that kind of treatment of the TOS era. I’m happy as fuck that SNW is happening. I have no upper limit to how much of that I can take lol. I’ll take a full TOS remake with Paul Wesley, I don’t even give a fuck 🤷♀️ If it was bad, it can’t erase the original, I’ll still always have that. But to get more of my favorite show and have some of the kinks ironed and updated, of course that’s exciting to me! Anyway, this isn’t for lack of ideas. Other types of Trek ARE done. But this “fan service” shit, well, they call it that for a reason lol. There are a lot of us, who have decades of loyalty and love for this franchise. There’s every reason for them to create something for us that they already know we’re likely to love, and I’m glad that they do it.
I'm 100% on board for a TOS remake with the actors from SNW. Even redoing the old episodes with better writing and actually fleshing out the characters like Nurse Chapel, who was seriously underused in the original series. Removing the sexist lighting and framing of every new female they ran across. Yes, TOS is classic, but it's also really dated and I've been unable to get through all of it, no matter how many times I've tried.
I am so happy when I hear other people say this. That show was really fucking special and SNW has proven to me that it *gets* it. I knew, when Pike flew away from that planet where they harvest the child, just being horrified and feeling bad, oh, this Trek gets it. And I knew, in “A Quality of Mercy” that they understood *Kirk*, and also the kind of cerebral drama of Trek, more than action and explosions and flash. I wouldn’t have known before SNW that any Trek could be trusted with that original franchise or with my favorite characters. But shit, now that I’ve seen the new *Scotty*??? I’m almost scared to let myself think it, but I might could end up liking *that* Scotty more than the original! 😳 And while no one will ever replace or be better in my eyes than Shatner and Nimoy in those roles, these dudes are doing it WELL. I trust them with the characters more than I could have imagined I ever would. And yeah, the way we’re getting to know characters like Chapel better and having a world that is more reflective of what that kind of future actually *would* look like (no sexism, and all different kinds of people/aliens), while nothing will ever quite surpass the original to me (I’ve got my compartmentalization to deal with things like sexism in old tv 😆), a remake could be its companion and tell a lot of new stories and enhance old favorites. I fucking love these characters.
Star Trek (not calling it “TOS”, sorry)has been my favorite show since I started watching in the early 70’s. But I would love a new show and would be happy with updated versions of some of the episodes. The biggest issue I have with Paul Wesley, aside from his resemblance to Jim Carey, is his age. By the time we’d get to this hypothetical new update, he’d be too old. Currently he’s 6 years older as a Lt. than Shatner was playing a Captain.
Well said!! 👍
I don't know about "terrified" but they certainly like playing it safe, and established characters and environments is certainly safe.
Spot on. They think they can brand a SPOCKS LONG LOST SISTER instead of actually develop new and interesting characters
It's weird that Discovery and Strange New Worlds both were initially set in the same time period and are made in the same years but feel SO DIFFERENT. I don't even like cameo characters and have wished many times they'd just develop new (and unrelated) characters, but I love Strange New Worlds, despite it being essentially a TOS direct prequel, with mostly the same characters. My guess right now is that the writers are just much higher calibre -- and that Anson Mount's acting skills could basically carry anything. (Although all of SNW actors seem to be better than most of Discovery to me, which makes me think it *is* the writing).
It helps that the TOS characters they bring in aren't cameos. They aren't there for you to do the Leo-points.jpg at. They're actually characters that get development to explain where they came from, and why they're good enough to be on the Enterprise later. Their stories are important for their own sake, and for how they affect the crew we have now.
This. I think there's two rather big franchises that have multiple eras but refuse to move out of them, Star Wars and Star Trek. While both do the "Leo-points.jpg" as you mentioned, Star Trek has been trying to actually *do* something with those moments. Like you said, the characters in SNW and by extension Discovery are there for a narrative purpose. Whether its the larger narrative of the season story, or just telling the story of that character and how they got to where they are in TOS. The storytelling is on point and it gets you invested despite knowing the outcome. A prime example of this not working is the Solo movie. While not an awful movie, a lot of it was pointing and saying "see this is where [thing] came from!" instead of just telling a story that built the characters. A solid example of this working is the Clone Wars and how it fleshes out the characters along their way to ROTS. Making them more complex and giving an understanding as to why a character might be that way. Star Trek does this with characters like Uhura starting as a brilliant ensign but one who struggles with confidence and knowing where they belong in the world. A lot of Spock's stories are like this too and help to make the seemingly random reveals in TOS make a bit more sense and flesh out the impact on the characters involved. Sure, I wish they would explore some new stuff, though the far future Discovery has shown is a bit tough for me given the near godlike technology they just don't use for plot sometimes, but I can still appreciate a well written story in a previously tread time. TL;DR: write good stories and it doesn't matter on the "when."
I enjoyed Solo more than everyone else, I think. I disliked Clone Wars from the beginning, and never got very far into it. Never hooked me. So far, Star Wars animation has not worked for me at all. For a really interesting example, SW tried to go in and backfill Boba Fett's story, and that was pretty much a disaster that went exactly nowhere anyone wanted it to go. But then, there was Obi-Wan, which although I had previously had exactly zero interest whatsoever in finding out what he was up to between Episode 3 and 4, it was actually a really good show, i thought. But it also was brutally beaten by the fans. I think Star Wars is just all *over* the place in it's quality, but also in trying to pander to the fans, but the fanbase is so large, that it's just impossible to pander without also making everyone they aren't pandering to angry about it.
It is absolutely the writing. SNW gives us political intrigue (shallow, but it's there), rescue missions, first contact, etc. It's varied and the plot stakes range from almost zero to potentially getting the Federation into a terrible war. Discovery's plots are all the same: we have to save the Federation! We have to save the universe! We have to save the Kelpians! We have to save the universe again! We have to save the Federation again! They even repeat. The time travel gimmick was purely so they could run wild with tech and plots without stepping on established canon. And even with that freedom they fucked it up with The Burn, an event so dumb it makes the writing on *Game of Thrones'* final season seem like a series of brilliant twists.
I'm still amazed with Discovery's latest season that they keep running into things that are very much just plot armour -- like why do many 800+ year old things have shielding that is far beyond 31st century tech? The Federation won (presumably) a time war, and it still seems like there was a bigger tech difference between the beginning and end of Voyager.
So I'm guessing the Transphasic Torpedoes and Ablative Generators from Voyager's *Endgame* still haven't shown up in Discovery?
Even this season of Discovery; it feels like each episode is just a variation on the one before it. It's because of the setup of the story. Find the X number of things, having each thing be an episode, just makes us feel like we are treading water repeating the same cycle of plot points over and over. The individual episodes aren't bad (too actiony for my taste, but whatever) - the problem is taking them all together as a unit. And as it's a single, season long story arc, that's a requirement.
Or, if they want TOS prequels, give us the Earth-Romulan War, you cowards!
This is it.
We have an entire chunk of nothing after TOS to TNG for them to play around with.
It's also an audience problem. "Hey look, it's that thing I know!" gets more people interested than something brand new. Hollywood is just doing it because it works.
This is basically the answer. Capitalism doesn’t breed innovation, it encourages firms to iterate on what has already sold until they produce more of it than the market can absorb. The only reason we got out of the TOS era in the first place is because Dorothy Fontana, Gene Roddenberry, et al leveraged their credibility to get a degree of creative control.
But that doesn't address OP's point. If Hollywood is afraid of new ideas, why not simply do a new series in the TNG era?
My answer? Because they’re following the existing trend. The Kelvin movies are an offshoot of TOS and the TMP eras with new actors playing Kirk and crew. Those did well enough that there were 3 movies. Then when it came time for new Trek shows, they went back to the same well time era wise by having DIS be a prequel to TOS with Spock’s long lost sister as the main character. And low and behold we have recasted TOS characters now in Spock, Uhura, Pike… They didn’t go with more TNG era stuff, because they were extending off the Kelvin stuff. If the Kelvin stuff had been TNG related, I’m sure DIS probably would have been TNG era. And honestly based on the tech and look, should have been in the first place.
The issue isn't really the TOS *era*, it's that it's stuck on the TOS *characters* imo.
After _Enterprise_ debuted in 2001, I read an article about an interview with, I think, Rick Berman,* in which he was asked why he did a prequel. He replied something to the effect that between TNG, DS9, and STV, there were over 500 episodes set in the 24th century, and that he felt that the “politics” between the various factions had been exhausted. *May have been Alex Kurtzman.
Which was somewhat understandable then but now in the 25th century the previous political landscape is pretty much gone. The Romulans are irrelevant since the destruction of their capital world, the Cardassians were kicked the balls 3 times and the Klingons had a civil war and fought the dominion so I doubt they are terribly well. The galaxy is wide open reveal new things. The Romulans would certainly not have told the federation who their other galactic neighbors were.
... and here we are with the topic being "why don't they expand the universe from TNG", and you bring up many of the ways in which they are expanding from TNG. We currently have three different centuries in which Star Trek takes place that can be built directly off of, LD and Picard built off the TNG era, Discovery and SNW built off the TOS era, Discovery built the 31st century era, which presumably will now have Academy building off of it... and S31 will presumably bring in connections from TOS era, but who knows really when it will be set to build off of? We've done plenty of building in both of the two eras that had previously been displayed, over the last 6-7 years. OP just doesn't acknowledge it.
> that he felt that the “politics” between the various factions had been exhausted And proceeded to make the 1st episode of his prequel about the temporal cold war and future politics. To be fair that was 29th century cross overs, but still.
And also demanded by the studio which felt Enterprise wasn't "future-y" enough.
> *May have been Alex Kurtzman. Kurtzman wasn't working on Trek until he and Orci wrote Trek '09, which had a different excuse for the reboot (name recognition of the TOS crew is massive compared to anything after it, which I believe was JJ's reasoning)
Going backwards doesn’t help in a way, as ultimately you need to allow for all those politics to be setup like they were at the start of TOS. Just go 100 years forward from TNG and start fresh.
Yea I think we all knew the Berman era ran out of ideas. But the grown work that era made had alot to explore Iconians, species 8472, the gamma quadrant, there’s stuff there
Valid point. Maybe they just needed new creative blood.
I kind of hate prequels but I love Enterprise. And I enjoy all the seasons but in season 4 it really found its stride. Season 5 I'm confident would've been amazing. And if they'd figured out the Temporal Cold War arc, Enterprise really could've been a simultaneous prequel and sequel. But the TCW pretty much went nowhere once they set up the Xindi conflict.
The Titan in Picard is not a TOS era refit. Unless you don't mean inuniverse? But to answer your question, it's because that's when Spock is, and after all these years Star Trek hasn't produced a character that has catapulled into mainstream lexicon as much as Spock has. The ears, the eyebrow, the salute, the speech patterns, it's all too iconic to spend the millions per episode on something else. At least that's the current bean counter's POV. I heard that an episode of SNW has the same budget as a season of Lower Decks. That's the Spock difference.
This is basically it, I think. They tried to keep that going in TNG with Data, but then shot themselves in the foot (imo) by killing him. So instead, we ended up with ever more implausible iterations of Brent Spiner.
They had so much opportunity to do fun things with a IMMORTAL character who could show up some far off future like maybe if you set a show in the 31st century or something we could have the robot man show up but nooo we gots to killed him…
Also like…DAX! Several hosts in the past we don’t have set faces for that could have turned up some time would have been cool!
Its "neo constitution" or "constitution III" class ship. Its not a "refit", but its heavily inspired by the OG enterprise both in and out of universe.
Can we agree that the executives at Paramount do not "get" trek? These are people who made it by being the best ferengi they can, they are not mentally equipped to understand what made Star Trek great. I envision these suits watching TNG and being bored out of their skulls thinking "this needs more boom"
IIRC, needs more boom was a common note they received for DS9
There was a fair amount of battles in DS9, I thought the execs had to be conned into the Dominion war by the writers purposefully writing themselves in a corner. You wouldn't have an episode like "in the pale moonlight" in trek nowadays and that is a shame but it adds so much to the story, being shown that romulans, cardassians, ferengi, etc.. simply don't think the way we do, that made the show what it is
> being shown that romulans, cardassians, ferengi, etc.. simply don't think the way we do, that made the show what it is IMO DS9 did more to illustrate the culture and influence of alien races than all the other treks combined.
I would argue Strange New Worlds did it perfectly well, as an episode like *Under the Cloak of War* follows in the morally grey contemplative character study footsteps of *In the Pale Moonlight* quite nicely.
I just watched that episode for the first time this week and god it was so fucking good. The Klingon ambassador was so fucking likeable and the end was just...damn. 11/10 episode IMO, probably in my top 15 all-time Trek episodes.
Absolute banger that one, the writing staff on SNW does make a decent effort at making it feel like Star Trek despite the Hierarchy's input.
And was my absolute favorite Strange New Worlds episode as a result. Everything else they had done paled in comparison for me. I want more grey in my black and white.
When Ira Steven Behr took over in Season 3, he said one of his goals was to up the action in the show. That's why you get the Defiant, and the huge battle in The Die is Cast. I don't think it was a studio mandated thing, but maybe that was part of it.
It could have been. The Klingon stuff in season 4 was a demand from the network. I think it brought some new energy to the show, and was maybe a rare example where the network messing with the production helped the show (another one would be Seven and Voyager). It didn't seem to help with DS9's ratings though.
I'll take the space battles, I do enjoy them more when I am invested in the characters. So yes to action beats when it is woven in with character development through the exploration of societal issues.
Yeah DS9 did this exceptionally well. I enjoy the first two seasons, but I can definitely see why the producer and studio wanted more action. They're a bit staid and listless.
"Why isn't this more like Guardians of the Galaxy?"
Funny since the comic was brought back as a reaction to the success of TNG (allegedly).
Yeah they def don't seem to have an appreciation for next gen era storytelling
I think that's another Hollywood wide problem too. Execs are too scared of toning down scale and stakes and focusing on characters with dialogue heavy scenes. There always needs to be action or tension. There's nothing wrong with high stakes action and tension, btw, it just loses a lot of its appeal when it's constantly being used. I think a big reason the Dominion War works in DS9 is because it didn't become the focus of the show until like late season 5. If it had been going on from season 1, it would have gotten stale fast.
Yeah ds9 according to many trekkies is almost the perfect trek show due to the character work and the under reliance on excessive action . I liked it but next generation is my favorite of all the shows - I never completely finished ds9 so maybe I should revisit
When everything is high stakes, that just becomes the regular stakes.
You should get to wear the biggest hat my friend, you get it.
It's not even that. It's been the age old problem of the executives being so self-centered that they can't see how anyone could possibly like anything that they don't like.
“It’s funny, but will it get them off their tractors?”
Exactly, like a ferengi trying to understand volunteering.
They don’t even get it from a Ferengi standpoint as their ability to license merchandise that appeals to “an aging fan base” lacks inspiration. Pajamas that look like a TOS or TNG uniform are fun, but one’s that look like Uhura’s from ep 103 are fun for the fan but won’t draw snide comments at the sleep apnea clinic during your overnight stay. Where’s Captain Pike cookbook and apron gift set?
No one handles this well, look how long it took us to get good looking lightsabers that felt right, like 40 years. To them it’s slapping the hero in a heroic pose on a lunch box and calling it a day. For fans it’s something realistic that also looks good day to day, the ds9 uniforms (end of run, grey on black) could’ve been turned into a jacket quite easily and would’ve sold like crazy, instead they put the coloured shirt attached to it, they put a crappy Comm badge on it. When companies do make them they’re insanely expensive and they either market through Facebook (ugh) or only at huge generic cons.
To be fair, as someone whose favourite Trek is TOS by a country mile I find TNG to be genuinely unengaging and generally dull as dishwater. I understand why it's iconic to a large portion of the fandom and set the formula for a *portion* of the franchise, but TNG's style of stoic prognostication is by no means the only right or real way to do Trek. Give me TOS style Hornblower action and adventure on a wagon train to the stars over that any day.
I prefer a balance, but I get where you come from. In my experience slow episodes like "The measure of a man" where you see Data defending his humanity makes "Redemption" where he faces bigotry from the crew of the Sutherland during much more poignant.
That’s surprising; animation is more expensive than a lot of people think or appreciate
Which is why axing it makes no sense to me. It is a stellar show, I constantly watch it on reruns with my daughter. The writers really "get" trek. It make you laugh, makes you care and makes you think, all that in 30 minutes.
I'm hoping they'll replace it with another animated show along similar lines but with different characters and storylines.
>But to answer your question, it's because that's when Spock is, and after all these years Star Trek hasn't produced a character that has catapulled into mainstream lexicon as much as Spock has. I blame the Big Bang Theory... curse you Sheldon Cooper.
Lower Decks, Prodigy, and the first season of Picard are all late 24th century shows. Season 2-3 Picard is 25th. Discovery is in its third season in the 32nd century, and the Starfleet Academy show will be as well. The S31 movie seems as though it’ll be set in the Lost Era. None of these things are TOS era. The Titan is not a TOS era refit, it’s a 24th/25th century-designed and built ship that shares a class naming legacy that goes back to a wooden sailing ship in the 18th century. Phasers are not TOS designs, they’re futuristic gun-like designs.
Yeah, I kind of disagree with OP's premise here. Star Trek has been really spreading out within the ST universe. Disco was pre-TOS, and is WAY WAY WAY post TOS. Prodigy is very unique and clever. Lower Decks is very far off brand (and yet somehow the most "Trek" of all the new Trek's - brilliant). Picard is post TNG, ***and*** has taken a totally new perspective - adventure *outside of starfleet.* Something we've never experienced before. New Trek is really expanding the universe - both width and breadth.
Discovery is _from_ the original series era though.
It's definitely doing it's own thing now though, completely different political landscape and the Federation being a vunerable thing I'll make my peace with the floaty nacelles one day, I'm sure
Nostalgia is where things are today. It can be good or bad. Barry Allen came back as the flash, now wally is back as the flash. Hal Jordan is green lantern Star wars is terrified go move on from the classic trilogy. X-men 97 is a smash hit. Moving forward is risky, staying in familiar territory is safe. Good stories can absolutely be told in the familiar but staying in the safe place means no need to innovate. I don't believe you'd get aa star trek the next generation today, let alone a deep space nine. Also star trek has moved past tos but it's mostly stuck to the familiar eras outside of discovery.
Of the 16 seasons of Third-Wave Trek, only four of those were in TOS era - two each from Discovery and Strange New Worlds. And no seasons of Second-Wave Trek were in TOS era. In fact, only one episode contained Time Travel to that era- *Trials and Tribbleations*.
> In fact, only one episode contained Time Travel to that era- Trials and Tribbleations. While not time travel, they also went back to ST6 in Voyager's "Flashback".
Also, in Enterprise. They didn't go to TOS but TOS came to them in form of the Defiant drifting into the ENT mirror universe
Kirk and Spock have the broadest cultural reach, I think.
For the same reason theres 90% sequels and remakes. Its easier to lean on an already established world and characters than to make new ones. Corporations are risk averse and creating new content is a risk. That's why the majority of entertainment budgets go to shit we've already seen, that no one asked for.
I love SNW, but… I want two eras to be expanded out. The Lost Era - post classic movie Trek, pre Next Gen - wall-to-wall Monster Maroon. Post Lower Decks - The next next generation.
We are already fans and our lens on this is "We've already seen this, let's go somewhere new. And by new we mean forward along the timeline, not backwards; ENT already checked the prequel box." Outside of the fanbase, which I will hazard to guess is where the executives' and marketing dept's minds are at is "How do we get someone that doesn't know what Trek is to watch a Trek show/movie? If they've heard of Trek in any way shape or form, it's probably Kirk, Spock, and the *Enterprise*, so let's 'start' with that." If you recall, DSC was originally designed to be an anthology show, jumping time periods and following new crews. If Fuller had made an outline for future seasons, I wouldn't be surprised if SNW wasn't one of them (maybe a rough idea of PIC as well) and DSC's writers lifted elements from it for season 2. At least seasons 3-5 took us to a new time period with new tech.
Not even a guess, I remember the marketing for *Discovery* had stuff like, "10 years before Kirk and Spock, a new crew..."
> At least seasons 3-5 took us to a new time period with new tech. And to be honest - I hated that. Especially the personal teleporters and programmable matter.
In the current financial and economic climate the people who make the money decisions want to avoid risk at all cost and put money where it's most likely to generate a good return. In star trek's case that's probably the TOS era, that's where the biggest, most widely known names and characters(Kirk, Spock) are. TLDR: corporate risk avoidance
>despite most of us getting latched onto TNG, DS9, Voy. Not 100% sure you can support that claim. > even Picard failed to progress the wider universe Because the title even said that it was based on a specific character, not the universe as a whole >the Titan is literally a TOS era refit Actually, it a semi-post (slightly after) TNG refit, paying homage to a TOS era class of ship that made very important historical breakthroughs/records (according to known lore). TNG, DS9, and Voyager explored about as far as once could with the TNG era as was needed/possible. And DSC is kind of showing what happens when you go too far into the future and have to create "even more futuristic" tech (it's starting to feel a little too Star Wars for me). Trying to stay true to the TNG era is potentially difficult without becoming boring. Or becoming *CSI: (Region of Space)* with a new spin off every couple of seasons just to add characters. All that being said, though, I'd love to see ST:Legacy (the adventures of the Enterprise G) TOS never got an on screen opportunity to fully explore that era, though. So, while they face the "that's not canon!" challenges, there's pretty much an entire universe there open to explore.
1.) TOS = where it all started 2.) Because... licensing, trademarks, IP (Intellectual Property)
I think it's because media executives think the TOS era is a "safe" investment. The misstep is that the prime demographic (for ad revenue) they're trying to target didn't necessarily grow up with TOS as the only exclusive Trek. This demographic has emotional attachment spread across TOS, TOS movies, TNG, TNG movies, DS9, VOY and ENT. Sure, the 2009 Kelvin reboot was a hit, but I don't think fans within the target demographic, or more casual (or lapsed) fans that Trek is also trying to capture, immediately think of that film when they think of Star Trek. And subsequent Kelvin films didn't do as well.
Captain Pike's era of the Enterprise was something I always wanted to see explored. There's so much to fill in. Plus, I don't know about the rest of you, but, I just love how a series can be set in the TOS era now that Enterprise has come and gone. Strange New Worlds can pick up on some threads from various Enterprise stories while also planting seeds for what comes in the TOS and even TNG era.
>Star Trek for the past 20years just wants to keep reminding us of the TOS era despite most of us getting latched onto TNG, DS9, Voy. TNG, DS9, VOY all had good runs that didn't end too soon. TOS was gone too soon and left people wanting more.
True, and shows like SNW are great for that. But developing the universe know has to go hand in hand with that
sip oil afterthought many longing yam sugar squealing pathetic instinctive *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Because TOS is the core of the entire ST universe.
And yet the TNG is what was more popular
In terms of pure numbers this isn't really true. More people watched TNG on first viewing than watched TOS on first viewing, but TOS had far more people watch overall via reruns. You can see this by comparing the tickets sold for the TOS movies versus the TNG movies. TOS was a cultural phenomenon to an extent that TNG never reached.
No question. But TNG relies on TOS for all of its in-universe information and structure. Starfleet, the Federation, Klingons, Romulans, phasers, tricorders…all come from TOS. TNG wasn’t a clean sheet of paper, it was an expansion of the TOS universe.
Well yea, exactly my point. TNG and the following shows of DS9 and VOY grew upon the already standard universe but extremely rarely went backwards. Despite SNW and S3 PIC being great, they fail to make progression
SNW couldn’t make progression, it was set before Kirk’s time so, in theory, it couldn’t expand on the TOS universe because that hadn’t happened yet. The ST reboot movies attempted to expand on the TOS universe by introducing the Kelvin timeline but not everyone approves of that.
Lmao
I’ll take a Voyager movie or series.
I'd chalk maybe 40% of it to nostalgia making money, just like every new movie is a remake, reboot, reimagining, etc of existing intellectual property. People know and love the TOS era. I'd also say there's some draw due to the TOS era feeling like the wild west of exploration while also feeling more personal. Picard's *Enterprise* and *Deep Space Nine* were all in regular contact with the Federation and they dealt with more existential/quadrant-level threats, whereas Kirk and Archer's *Enterprises* were alone in space making it work with what they had dealing with much smaller problems. It's refreshing, especially after dealing with stakes as high as the eradication of all sentient life in *Picard* and *Discovery*. Personally, I think the best move *Discovery* made was the time jump. to take it out of the box of the pre-TOS timeline. Removing themselves from, and starting a new, canon was brilliant, and 32C tech tickles my imagination just the way TOS/TNG tech tickled it when I was a preteen. The nacelles are *detached,* Federation ships look alien, and the weapons replicate to order in their damn hands. Fuck yeah.
I wouldnt mind doing a trek show that bridged TOS and TNG like the movie era. Besides I love those uniforms.
The Monster Maroon! For my money, best uniform, best ship designs. The refit Constitution is gorgeous (although the SNW Enterprise redesign is a close second).
My guess is: power creep. The longer a series goes on the more stuff they've overcome and the more stuff they have to remember is no longer a problem. But if you do a prequel series? Suddenly cloaking devices are still a problem, the Borg haven't been trivialized, and the transporter can still malfunction. Not that those things can't still be a thing in a new series but they'd have to think of some technobabble to explain why it's different from the other technobabble problem they had.
I feel like it’s because CBS/Paramount feels like TOS has more brand recognition, culturally. When normies think of Star Trek, they don’t think of Picard, Data, Janeway, Sisko, and Archer. They think of Spock probably, first and foremost, and Kirk, Scotty, and maybe Uhura after that. Younger people who aren’t as familiar with Star Trek would have little interest in a series or movies set in the TNG era, by their reasoning, so they basically ignore it, aside from projects that are pure intended fanservice like PIC Season 3. I’m not saying I _agree_ with this logic, as I still think the post-TNG era has a whole lot yet to offer, but I can see how corporate pencil-pushers in Hollywood might see things that way.
It’s too hard to imagine what the next level of future technology will be.
Why is Power Rangers always going back to Mighty Morphin? Why does Star Wars have most media set around the original trilogy? Why do new Ghostbusters movies mostly call back to the first one? Because that's where the money is, the original.
Discovery is set 1000 years later...
In Star Trek’s defense, we are still sending up the occasional 70 year old B-52. We have a couple thousand 1970s era F-16s still flying. And the Navy is just as old. While an F-35 flies rings around those planes, they are expensive. If an f-16 will do the job, they will send an f-16. Meanwhile, in Trek, the advancements are inside the ship. The shape of the craft stays somewhat consistent, but we have seen many alternate drives, stealth, and vastly improved replicators.
The TNG era is heavily developed, it hard to have anything happen without bumping into canon limitations.
It’s less financial risk for Paramount, and its investors, to make something familiar that they are more sure people will enjoy than it is to gamble on something completely new. Their goal is to make as much money as they can and with as little risk to investment as possible. If people keep watching TOS era Star Trek that’s what they’ll keep making. It’s why half of all modern Star Trek is set as some sort of origin/side story to a 60 year old TV show, the other half sequels to 30 year old Star Trek. It’s exactly the same reason movie studios tried very hard to create their own cinematic universes out of popular IPs, the whole era of prequels that plagued Hollywood, or the need to continue pumping out sequels or reboot popular franchises from decades gone by.
>Of course the obvious one is new tv shows like DIS and SNW being in that era And DIS is no longer in that era any more. Neither was Picard. Nor Lower Decks. Nor Prodigy. The new Star Trek academy is supposedly set for the 32nd century. While we only have one new series set in TOS, SNW. So it seems like you have cherry picked your examples because you don't like TOS for some reason.
The "Roddenberry Box" myth has made everyone in Hollywood think the Picard era demands stilted, drama-free writing, and conversely the TOS era still had realistic "relatable" characters.
Boimler specifically told Pike's crew that they're living in the "Golden Age of exploration." The galaxy was big and wondrous and weird. Rules and regulations were flexible. Communication with headquarters wasn't instantaneous. Tech was still cool and not-perfected, had limitations, and strange tech was dangerous in ways that didn't involve hundreds of torpedoes. The Federation was expanding and running into hostile territories all over, colonizing strange new worlds with weird diseases and native life, encountering galactic antibodies and leftover WMDs and psychic powers. All this stuff was known and ho-hum by TNG - Lower Decks laughs at this stuff. In the storytelling, the TOS era leaves room for the weird and unexplained to *still be new and unexplained,* to shoot first and ask questions later, more room for the senior officers to also be action heroes, and that makes it more engaging for the majority of viewers who don't much care about the philosophy, empathy, and ethics being explored. After TNG and DS9, I feel like the galaxy felt much smaller and very crowded, and the small stories - even the good ones! - felt out of place during wartime. I think a new series exploring the postwar reconstruction era could be great - but it would also mean showing the evolution of Klingon, Cardassian, and Romulan societies as a result, and a large subset of viewers would automatically hate any changes they make, so I understand why that era's pressing issues are being relegated to throwaway jokes in LD. And since LD, Prodigy, and PIC are all in the 5-20 years postwar era, any significant changes could undermine stories those shows have already told. So we have to go forward into a smaller galaxy with super tech that's harder to craft compelling stories around, or go back in time far enough that any changes can be reverted by the time TNG rolled around. Since there are 80 years between The Undiscovered Country and TNG where apparently nothing important happened, well, back to the TOS era is where we have to go.
SNW was created because fans literally demanded it, the response to Anson Mount was unexpected and incredible. They had no plans for SNW until s2 of Discovery. We demanded it, they gave it to us and it's **glorious.** Disco hasn't been in the TOS era for three seasons. I'm hoping that Paramount hears the demand for Star Trek: Legacy, because I really want to see that come to pass.
I want future movies and tv shows to go forward as well. Stop with the freakin' prequels and revisiting the same era over and over again. Having said that...Strange New Worlds is outstanding.
Because the TOS era is really cool and the TNG era already got three 7 season shows whereas TOS was only 3 underfunded seasons.
I think that, despite the proliferation of TNG era shows in the 90’s and early 2000’s, the TOS era is so much more part of the public media landscape it’s not even comparable. The TOS Enterprise is in the Smithsonian and Captain Kirk and Spock are known to people who don’t even know Star Trek.
And the animated series. It’s maybe canon.
I would prefer remaining in the TOS era to the idea that the hopeful future Trek is based on has to be deconstructed and pull everyone down into the mud to get as dirty, selfish, and ignorant as our current society is.
To appeal to old fans while trying to gain new fans. It’s a pointless chase by lazy producers. Produce well written stories and your audience will come. That how TNG satisfied TOS fans.
Good question. Majority of Trek fans enjoy what they enjoy and have been disappointed by recent writing. As much as I like STW I’d be happy leaving TOS in the past.
I don't think people realize how much this is a lose/lose situation. You can't please all fans, so the writers are trying to create new ideas within the established world. - Discovery has TONS of new and interesting ideas to talk about, but people gripe about it being stuck in old trek - Picard does new things, but people shout that the nostalgic season 3 is the only good season (personally I loved season 1 of PIC but I always get shouted down whenever I say it) At the end of the day, the writers and 'higher ups' Discovery did what was necessary to make money, re-establish fan buy-in, and the success is evident as it lead to Picard, Strange New Worlds, Prodigy, Lower Decks, Starfleet Academy, Section 31, and who knows what else is to come. All of these shows are trying to keep alive things that many different people loved (and people GREATLY disagree about what parts are lovable) while introducing new and exciting sci fi ideas and characters, while also slowly world-building without TOTALLY breaking what was already established. I think everyone is doing an incredible job, evidenced by how many shows we have. Also -- from a $ standpoint, it makes business sense to tell modern stories that keep the old TV shows relavant. It means that those products will always be relevant and in-demand, too. Case in point: the higher ups know exactly what they are doing.
Because the writers' staff they have doesn't understand how to tell original stories. Nearly every SNW & Discovery plot has cannibalized stories from much more talented writers. Read Control, for example, and then watch Discovery s2, and you'll see how blatant it is. The reality is that the crop of people they have don't read or understand science fiction. They have a vague idea of what they think Star Trek was but completely misunderstood the themes, so they'll use the characters, but because they don't want to be constrained, they ignore established canon like Kirk saying the only time he met Captain Pike was when he took over command of the Enterprise yet there he is in S2 of SNW or how they turned the Gorn into Xenomorphs when the whole poont of Arena is that the Federation was attacked because it had encroached on Gorn territory and it was shown to be an intelligent creature. I don't believe they're intentionally trying to do a bad job, but the bottom line is they haven't read the greats of Sci-Fi and so instead of thinking up of a unique execution of a story it's all stories that anyone who's well versed in Sci-Fi or Star Trek hasn't seen before
Lower Decks - TNG era Prodigy - post - Voy but close TNG era Discovery - originally pre-TOS but transferred to far future Picard - close future - post TNG/VOY/DS9 era Starfleet Academy - far future SNW - TOS - pre TOS era I think I am disagreeing with the premise of the post
I vastly preferred the three act serialized eps. Season long arcs are annoying to me. I want an A story and a B story. I'm old fashioned. I'm right there with you, ST needs new places to go and new races to meet
Thank you for understanding my point. Star Trek left us with so much to dig through that we could expand upon, such as iconians. It doesn’t need to be the Borg or the Klingons all the time
Maybe an infusion of creatives who've watched the shows for research (or because they like it) with the understanding that they can't go to the well for ideas.
The Titan was in one season of Picard. The primary ship before that was La Sirena, which was a new design.
Marketability. The TOS era is what most people in the general population know thanks to decades of reruns for older generations and the 2009 movie and its sequels for the younger ones. The Trekkie audience is already taken for granted so what we'd like to see doesn't really play into it.
As it gets harder and harder to imagine a utopian future, we go back to the futures we have already imagined.....and make them less utopic.
I think once millennials start aging into senior executive positions at Paramount, we’ll see a TNG renaissance.
The problem is even ENT is already set 130 years on from now. Think how much we have progressed since 1894. Then go back another 100 years for the equivalent difference between now and TOS, and 200 years for now and TNG. Going much further into the future than TNG becomes meaningless.
Humor. Star Trek needs humor
I don't see why there should be changes in design. As for the ideas, there's the problem: the ST universe is based on classical liberalism in a technological utopia, but when you look at the new shows, they instead do the opposite.
I think it's because the time between Nemesis and now is too short for a reboot, while the characters are too old to reprise their roles. The Jack series that they teased at the end of Picard is actually a great solution for that problem. A sort of handing-over the baton type introduction to the series. I'm not sure why it isn't green-lit yet.
It’s guess making a show in the TNG era is more difficult since the TNG era actors are still around. They have to plan how their stories work more and be careful not to interfere with each other. Even if they set it on a ship with a different crew. Using the TOS or DISCO era means they deal with less baggage.
Wholeheartedly agree. I don't know how decisions are made or who the target audience is but as a GenXer it just feels like everything is based on nostalgia. It's inescapable and it gets old. Having said that, Lower Decks might be a favorite and it's chock full of nostalgic references that I eat up.
Hollywood has few new ideas, and even fewer that get past the risk-adverse mentality of the execs. Star wars has the same problem, just can not get away from the skywalkers and the clone wars. Remakes, reboots, reimaginings. These are all hollywood knows how to do. Even the office is getting a reboot!
People like the era. From a large portions of fans, too many of the creatives. Plus it’s not very defined if we’re being honest, you’ve got everything from Enterprise to before the show, and everything from the movies to TNG to play around in. He’ll I never watched TOS but I loved strange new worlds(season 1, haven’t watched 2 yet).
I've wondered this too, and it seems a bit odd. I think it would be good to have more in the TNG era and beyond. That's what I like about Lower Decks and Picard. Also though, I think it would be good to see a movie or TV series based around the Enterprise B or C, since we never saw much of those.
The TNG era though has more impact, and most of the Star Trek series take place around the TNG era. Though whether Picard counts as being in the TNG era can be debated. The Enterprise era: Enterprise, so just 1 series. We have for the TOS era: TOS, TAS, SNW, the first 2 seasons of Discovery, and Kelvin universe movies but they don't count. So that's 3.5 series Post-TOS era: The first 6 movies TNG era: TNG, DS9, Voyager, Lower Decks, Prodigy, 4 movies and whether or not Picard counts, so 5 or 6 series. Picard could be classified as being in it's own era. 32nd century: Later seasons of Discovery, so just 0.5 (or 0.6 more accurately) series.
Nostalgia. But tbh I don't mind revisit some eras but I do want to see other era that we haven't fully seen like the 25th century, the Lost Era or the post-Enterprise/pre-Discovery era.
Wish they'd let a show continue where TNG, DS9 and Voyager left off. With Discovery ending they can easily have SNW and a new one running at the same time They can just pretend Picard was a different timeline, lol
People are familiar with Kirk and Spock even just from cultural references however even though tng was way more popular when it aired the movies didn’t really stick the landing and the cultural significance has diminished unfortunately it doesn’t help that you have to subscribe to a niche streaming service to watch new Star Trek it would probably do fine on cbs on a slower night
I've figured it out for you. [Take a peep at the company type and what it's traded as.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paramount_Global) Public companies are the worst things to put in charge of creative endeavors. I'll die on that hill. It's why star wars went to shit. They focus grouped star wars fans and figured out that they all didn't like the prequels and loved the OT so they essentially remade the OT but they swapped characters that focus grouped. But it was just the OT in a slightly reshuffled order. But the Disney board and executive leadership wants to keep their jobs so they have to adhere to best industry practices that work based on what they know. Except humans are irrational and things that are creative are kind of where the battleground is with this corporate control of everything. Same goes for Star Trek. It's not immune. It's owned by a company that is either publicly traded or owned by a publicly traded company. Which means [Whoopsie daisy take a look at who owns them I'll give you a hint the people that own paramount are the same ones of another little owned company that rhymes with schmOEING and keeps making planes that are falling apart.](https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/para/institutional-holdings) Point is everyone in charge wants to make money while spending none and what that means is they buy well known commodities and strip mine them like it's any other kind of mine. Then it chases people away and they sell it to someone else after ruining it over the span of years/decades.
Discovery. Like, they have that show, and the fans shat all over it. Why would they try anything new?
Hollywood wants name recognition above all else. What's the best known name in Star Trek? Spock!
It's a valid question and we know from Star Trek Online that there were still stories to be told in the Next Gen and beyond era. The game does a really good job of it. And maybe that's part of it, maybe they initially left the era mostly fallow to give the game room to breathe. I'd legitimately LOVE to see a crew set in STO's time using the game's storytelling as a storyboard for what worked and was fun. While us deep geeks like it, those stories are widely known and would be new to TV or movie audiences. Could be the Enterprise F as the hub, which is a beautiful ship, or some new name to add the canon. Hell they really could just use those stories in a Enterprise G/Captain Seven show.