Poll of the Week: A new Direction

[Laria Herren]

Every series of Star Trek has taken the same basic premise and put its own unique spin on it. The show follows a crew of Starfleet officers as they carry out Starfleet’s mission of exploration, scientific discovery, and defense of the United Federation of Planets. There is a captain, a first officer, a senior staff made up of the senior officers of each department, and oftentimes a ship named Enterprise. Each new entry into the Star Trek franchise usually tries to do something new from the same starting point. Deep Space Nine placed its crew on a space station out on the frontier as opposed to the Federation flagship. Voyager cut the ship off from all support and left it to fend for itself. Enterprise gave us a look at the earliest days of Starfleet.

Despite these changes there is still a great deal of similarity in the basic structure between shows. Every series is unique and tells its own stories, but they all branch off from the same general starting point. However, there’s nothing to say that every Star Trek series has to follow the usual Starfleet crew on their adventures. There are several alternative perspectives that a new series could explore, both inside and outside the United Federation of Planets. If a new Star Trek series decided to depart from the familiar setting of a Starfleet ship or starbase what would you be most excited to see?

[Randal Shayne]

Personally, I've always wanted to see something on Temporal Investigations, but that might be a disaster, as most of my ideas turn out to be.

 

[+ Trellis Vondaryan]

Back when Discovery was still being whispered about I wrote a blog post about the different iterations I would like and some potential problems with any/all of them. Still a lot of fun to think about, though.

[Kalia Qinn]

I would love a Star Trek crossed with West Wing show (So while not Starfleet, it would be focusing on the Federation Council and government).  I think a Ground Facility would be interesting but they'd need to find a way to give them agency when everyone can come and go as they want.

While not a ground facility I think maybe setting it at UP might be neat. 

~Patrick

[Gogigobo Fairhug]

I think I'd like to see something based at Starfleet Academy.

[Jordan aka FltAdmlWolf]

It's a close race for me between something like Starfleet Intelligence and the civilian angle. I think the only problem with the latter is that you'd need to go with a different format than normal shows – one thing that would work that was thrown around as a rumor before Discovery was potentially doing limited-run seasons and switching the characters/actors each season? In that way, I think they could do really tightly written, dramatic plots on a number of worlds (Trill, Vulcan, Bajor, Betazed, Andorian, perhaps with a "sub-plot" each season on a non-Federation world like Cardassia, Romulus, etc.) without going too far down the rabbit hole in a way that would require you to pit your civilians against each other that seems "un-Federation-like"? Because one of the things I fear about a full series done in the normal TV style is that you really have to dig quite a bit to find enough story to fill a whole season, and then multiple seasons, which leads you away from the original "vision" of what the Federation is like. So doing really short seasons (8-10 episodes) with different worlds each season means you can tell stories that don't bend the premise of the "evolved Federation citizen" past the point of breaking. 

You could probably do a similar format even with the specialized Starfleet departments – 8-10 episodes each of Starfleet Medical (in the Grays Anatomy style!), Starfleet Intelligence (The Americans showed us thrilling spylore), Starfleet Security (there are so many crime procedurals to base this off of...), Starfleet Engineering (maybe something like Scorpion?), Starfleet flight school (Top Gun!), etc. 

With so many amazing stories to tell, it's hard to believe they went the Discovery route... 😒