New Trek Prequel Coming?

Writer Erik Jendresen (Band of Brothers) told Dreamwatch magazine that he's turned in a draft for a proposed new Star Trek prequel movie to Paramount, according to a report on the TrekWeb (http://trekweb.com/articles/2005/08/26/430f1c48c18bd.shtml) site.

"I'm excited about this project, and I think the chances of it getting made are good," Jendresen told the magazine. "It all depends on what the studio thinks, and Paramount has been through significant changes lately. But the people who are making the decisions are pretty responsible folk with a fine body of work behind them. So we'll see. Right now, I'm optimistic."

Jendresen said the film is tentatively titled Star Trek: The Beginning, produced by Rick Berman, Kerry McCluggage and Jordan Kerner. Berman has said the film won't use any existing Trek characters and will be a prequel to the original series

Jendresen elaborates: "This would take place just a couple of years after the end of the events in Enterprirse, but well before the original series, and it would look at the inciting incident that started everything. The story is big and epic, and it isn't as antiseptic as the television stories had to be."

Jendresen added that the movie won't be centered on a ship. "We're looking at a very small group of men and women, particularly focusing on one character," he said. "There are a couple of ships, including a principal ship, but this is not a traditional captain-and-crew-of-a-starship story in the least."

Saw this on another board last week. Looks like Star Trek just can't move forward any more.

As soon as Berman & Braga get their hands on this, it'll turn into a time travel adventure, as Data and Spot seek to make an important decision in their lives by visiting a past event, during a lull in the episode "Data's Day." :rolleyes:

I'll cut 'em a break and reserve judgment but I will say the working title blows.

Since Berman & Braga are involved, I will pass. I will stick with the fan films.

New Trek Prequel Coming?

....Jendresen said the film is tentatively titled Star Trek: The Beginning, produced by Rick Berman, Kerry McCluggage and Jordan Kerner. Berman has said the film won't use any existing Trek characters and will be a prequel to the original series ...

Jendresen added that the movie won't be centered on a ship. "We're looking at a very small group of men and women, particularly focusing on one character," he said. "There are a couple of ships, including a principal ship, but this is not a traditional captain-and-crew-of-a-starship story in the least."

Reserving judgment aside, consider this: Berman's involved, it features no ship or character from previous Treks. So, what would be the appeal for seeing this movie?

José

Reserving judgment aside, consider this: Berman's involved, it features no ship or character from previous Treks. So, what would be the appeal for seeing this movie? José

Sealing Berman in a lead box for a second, "no ship or character from previous Treks" is one of the foundations of DS9 and as Trek's first (and maybe only) character driven drama it was often excellent, on bad days at least entertaining. Can't say that for the Treks that came after. Adding Berman back into the mix ...well ...forget about it, he doesn't understand drama and he is a visionless workman.

After seeing the episodes of Firefly that Sci-Fi has been re-running, not to mention the new BSG, I'm with those who'd recommended someone like Joss Whedon or Ronald Moore take a shot at it. Star Trek needs an artist, not a carpet layer.

John O.

Well said, John.

I think the Reeves-Stevenseseses wee doing fine with the last season of Enterprise. I don't know how they'd be as show-runners, but I wouldn't mind them as head writers.

Without making cheap personal attacks on Mssrs Berman and Braga, I really think that a changing of the guard would be a good thing for Trek. Manny Coto seemed to have a much better handle on where to take things. I think a new effort with Coto and the Reeves-Stevenseseseseses ;) could be quite promising.

And I agree with John O about the artist thing. Its like building construction. If you want it to be exciting and interesting, you need a good architect in charge. But it also has to be structurally sound so the architect has to have a good engineer working for him and he must be ready to listen to him when need be. Its no good if its pretty but won't stand up.

Huzz

Jendresen elaborates ... "it would look at the inciting incident that started everything."

If he uses redundant, ridiculous phrases such as "inciting incident that started everything," that script is going to need SERIOUS revisions.

Sealing Berman in a lead box for a second

For only a second? Can't we keep him there indefinitely? In my book he can go to the deepest circle of hell for what he did to Trek.

"no ship or character from previous Treks" is one of the foundations of DS9 and as Trek's first (and maybe only) character driven drama it was often excellent, on bad days at least entertaining. Can't say that for the Treks that came after.

True, DS9 was excellent. Even a secondary cast members had their day on that show and everyone was three-dimensional. The thing is, Trek movies featured characters we've seen before. At best, not having a familiar face on a movie is an interesting experiment. At worst, it's ill-advised.

NOTE: This doesn't mean I want some dumb a$$ "time travel" story. If they want to make a Romulan War movie, you'd think they'd use a character from Enterprise (except for Trip cuz he's dead).

After seeing the episodes of Firefly that Sci-Fi has been re-running, not to mention the new BSG, I'm with those who'd recommended someone like Joss Whedon or Ronald Moore take a shot at it. Star Trek needs an artist, not a carpet layer.

Amen. Truer words have not been said.

José

I think they have cut the legs out from under Star Trek. I seriously doubt that any time soon they could make a Trek movie anything but box office poison.
Just the fact that Berman is still involved shows Paramount hasn't learned anything.
I can't give them the benefit of the doubt on this. They have long had the chance to stop stamping the Trek logo on horse sh*t and they didn't.

Completely concur. TPTB still don't understand why recent Trek failed so they'll blow it again.

John O.

Bingo - how can you produce a successful Trek movie if you don't understand what went wrong with the last TV series and feature film?

If it succeeds, it will just be dumb luck.

Huzz

Hey, maybe they'll add a crewmember that can talk to dead people! Personally, I can never get enough of that on TV! And a "cool' "hip" young character like the kid on Seaquest! Maybe he'll be able to travel in time!

You guys are just a bunch of negative nellies, I bet this is going to be the bestest Trek yet!

Of course, if Serenity makes a gajillion bucks, it'll probably be about about a lovable band of misfits on the starfeet equivilent of a tramp steamer.

Oh yeah! Maybe we can have a Talking animal too!!!

Of course, if Serenity makes a gajillion bucks, it'll probably be about about a lovable band of misfits on the starfeet equivilent of a tramp steamer.
I think this may be the heart of the problem. The fact is that the concept of a heavily armed ship, representing a large, multi-system government, traveling around and telling other cultures the proper way to live just doesn't sit comfortably with many people today.

I've been a fan of TREK for 34 years, but I think we may have to finally admit that it is no longer a viable entity. And this may be heresy, but I think the fans are largely to blame.

The way things stand, I don't think we can have a situation like WRATH OF KAHN, where an outsider, who admittedly knew little about the show, comes in and completely redefines what TREK is. Too many fans have very narrow and restrictive ideas about what is acceptable and what should be allowed.

Unfortunately, to many fans, STAR TREK is no longer about drama and story-telling. It is a giant database from which they pull facts and compare them and see how well everything fits together, condemning certain bits of trivia as "non-canon" if they don't fit with other bits of trivia. There are even fans who still think that references to the Eugenics Wars should still place it in the 1990's. When you think 40-year-old fictional history should supercede actual history, there is something fundamentally wrong with your approach.

^ I think the difference between the "TWOK reinvention" and current attempts to rekindle/redefine Trek lies in competency and the intent of the re-inventor. Meyer and Bennett (whether through genius or dumb luck) created and presented a wonderfully repackaged Trek that worked and, while different from Roddenberry's vision, it was not an affront or an insult to what came before (the feel of the show versus "facts"). In other words, it casually slid into old Trek, strengthened what worked (drama, relationships between the Big Three) and surreptitiously discarded what didn't (pastel uniforms) to the point where most fans either didn't notice or cared.

In sharp contrast, the current efforts are more like discarding the whole thing about Trek, both good and bad, and, yeah, replace it with facts and technobabble. The intent here is to disregard and replace TOS instead of enhancing it.

José

Except for the last season of Enterprise, I have not felt any suspense, urgency or any strength in the story telling since First Contact.
Honestly, and with all do respect for all Trek fans, Trek has turned into a joke.
It was rather apropo that the last ep of Enterprise was a holo deck one, since it was an easy cop out so many times in the past decade or so.
They should leave it alone until they either learn to respect the idea and the fans.

Perhaps they can get some work for Jar Jar Binks and have him as the new Vulcan science officer.

Huzz

think the difference between the "TWOK reinvention" and current attempts to rekindle/redefine Trek lies in competency and the intent of the re-inventor. Meyer and Bennett (whether through genius or dumb luck) created and presented a wonderfully repackaged Trek that worked and, while different from Roddenberry's vision, it was not an affront or an insult to what came before (the feel of the show versus "facts"). In other words, it casually slid into old Trek, strengthened what worked (drama, relationships between the Big Three) and surreptitiously discarded what didn't (pastel uniforms) to the point where most fans either didn't notice or cared.

In sharp contrast, the current efforts are more like discarding the whole thing about Trek, both good and bad, and, yeah, replace it with facts and technobabble. The intent here is to disregard and replace TOS instead of enhancing it.

Exactly. Completely respectful to what came before and did not violate or change what made Trek Trek. At the same time they turned out what will probably remain the greatest Trek film of all time

Ironically, from the tramp-steamer comment, last week there was a showing in LA of TWOK and Adam "Jayne" Baldwin from Firefly was there edumacating his kids on its greatness :)

Perhaps they can get some work for Jar Jar Binks and have him as the new Vulcan science officer.

Huzz
Somehow that would seem most fitting...indeed!!

There are even fans who still think that references to the Eugenics Wars should still place it in the 1990's. When you think 40-year-old fictional history should supercede actual history, there is something fundamentally wrong with your approach.

I'll respectfully disagree on that point, to the extent that I think of Trek as an alternate fictional reality to our ow. Therefor, there WAS a Eugenics War in THEIR 1990s. :)

^^ Right,John! ST is a TV series, but it should follow what Gene Roddenberry, and other writers on the show laid down. What made TOS special was it's sense of wonder. To meet new aliens, and to explore new places. The newer ST is about war.

War is not a bad topic to discuss. DS9 handled it fairly well, IMO. The trade off is that it's not necessarily Trek. Trek, as envisioned by Roddenberry, was about conflict between the Feds and other races, that the universe was full of danger, and that somehow we can go to the brink of war but... we somehow overcome that impulse, to discover that we humans can be so much more beyond conflict.

Focusing on war for its own sake diminishes that sense of discovery. How it's been executed in Trek is that the drama is either dark (and DS9 got dark several times, especially "By the Pale Moonlight") or cartoonish (how many episodes of ENT started with the Xindi twirling their mustaches and threatening to destroy Earth?). You lose something of Trek at that point.

José

I'll respectfully disagree on that point, to the extent that I think of Trek as an alternate fictional reality to our ow. Therefor, there WAS a Eugenics War in THEIR 1990s. :)
Yeah, I've heard that argument and I don't buy it. Other than the fact that in STAR TREK's universe STAR TREK, the TV show, doesn't exist, it needs to be our future. If they've been going on a separate time line since the 1970s, what's the point?

I know this was brought up in that VOYAGER episode where they went back to the '90s. Some fans wondered why there was no mention of the war. The answer of course is that they would have had to spend a good chunk of the episode establishing that they were in an alternate timeline than ours, but this wasn't because of the time travel, it's just the way things are in the Star Trek universe and there is this war going on and blah blah blah.

This is why I've always maintained that filmmakers should not give the fans what they want. If they had done this, it would have pleased a few viewers and frustrated, confused, and bored the vast majority.

STAR TREK takes place in the future. Period.

I was unaware that time travel was and has been an actual physical reality at least since the 1960's, and that the television and film industries were allowed to use this technology in order to produce future-historically accurate video entertainment for the masses. Perhaps the Doctor Who series is based on actual fact, after all.

Thanks for this startling information. I will be contacting the producers of the Star Trek series in an effort to get them to allow me to also use their time travel technology in order to go back in time and visit my dear dead Mother, and others who have been loved by me, but have died in the past. I miss them terribly.

I was foolishly holding the belief that the only programs which were supposed to be actually occurring in our own reality with real actual consequences, or actually had occurred in our own reality, were game shows, talk shows, the news programs, documentaries, and the 'reality' shows which have taken up so much bandwidth on our televisions over the last several years.

The other types of programs I have seen, I had thought were imaginary stories written and then portrayed by people called actors who were merely pretending that what was occurring was actual reality (or an exact, past/present/future historically accurate representation) rather than a scripted act produced for entertainment value and profit by those participating in the production.

While it is true that these programs are produced in our physical reality, they normally are recognized as not truly being the actual real event being portrayed. In the case of portrayals of historical events, even these are not noted for always being absolutely accurate.

Being 'real' is what happens when I get up in the morning, take care of business around the house, go places with my wife, lose my job, go to the store and buy things, and so on.

When a television program or movie is supposed to be occurring in the present in our real world environment, I do not assume that it is somebody's webcam showing the actual event, or somebody scrambling to instantaneously produce an exact accurate representation of what is occurring.

Many years ago, I did not think that I watched a 'real' Auric Goldfinger's attempt to mess with the gold in Fort Knox. I also did not think that the deaths of people or animals in TV and movies were always real.

Now that I know that all this is real or at the very least historically (whether past, present or future) accurate representations of reality, I don't know if I feel much better or much worse.

I am very concerned about our future, since it involves worldwide destruction and countless Terminator robots. Or did it involve black obelisks? Or those nasty Aliens. Or maybe It, the Terror From Space. Or maybe we are all really just walking bags of Soylent Green.

I apologize for this diatribe (and sorry for any unfavorable remarks to me this may generate). But sometimes I just feel the need to have my say, too.

Nobody, but nobody, better ever use the phrase "put the bong down" about one of my post for a loooooooong time!

Dude, you're so highed up and your screen name is like totally a private dick. Whoooaaa... snacks? snakcs anyone? waht were wee talkign abbout?

JohhO

Nobody, but nobody, better ever use the phrase "put the bong down" about one of my post for a loooooooong time!

Dude, put the bong down and don't get so hung up on stuff.

:)

José

Yes, I realize fiction does not exactly represent the real world. But most fiction is a version of our reality, deviating from ours depending on the genre and the needs of the story. For instance, in a Western you wouldn't have a Confederate soldier coming home in triumph after the South's winning of the Civil War. In a romantic comedy, you wouldn't have the characters mentioning the policies of President Al Gore. One of the rules of Science Fiction is that it takes place in our world unless it is specifically an alternate history story. STAR TREK TOS made some predictions about the near future and got them wrong (as has every work of science fiction ever written). You can either accept that the "facts" no longer apply and need to be adjusted for modern audiences, or you can turn it into an isolated world with its own history only tangentially related to us.

I'm frankly surprised that I haven't gotten more criticism from my original post. Perhaps I wasn't clear enough. The biggest problem right now with STAR TREK is the fans. To many people, TREK fans are a bunch of misfits obsessing over the trivia of their own insular world. And there are many fans who are more than willing to prove them right.

If you give the fans exactly what they want, you'll get stories that can only be of interest to a smaller and smaller subculture. If the producers aren't willing to ignore the expectations of the fans, they'll never produce anything worth being a fan of.

Jose,
I don't really think DS9 completely violated the original principles of Trek with the Dominion War - that whole storyline was, at least to me, about "what happens when all of these people who always try (and usually succeed) in defusing conflicts are backed into a corner they can't get out of?" The results weren't always pretty - "In the Pale Moonlight" is the perfect example.

I'm frankly surprised that I haven't gotten more criticism from my original post. Perhaps I wasn't clear enough. The biggest problem right now with STAR TREK is the fans. To many people, TREK fans are a bunch of misfits obsessing over the trivia of their own insular world. And there are many fans who are more than willing to prove them right.

If you give the fans exactly what they want, you'll get stories that can only be of interest to a smaller and smaller subculture. If the producers aren't willing to ignore the expectations of the fans, they'll never produce anything worth being a fan of.

Welp, I'm gonna disagree in principle again. As kept saying whenever Enterprise had an event that contradicted or ignored an established bit of Trek screen history - any good writer should be capable of writing within an established history.

If you write a historical novel with your characters set in WWII, you don't equip them with F-16s, or cast Norweigians as Japanese soldiers. You don't place Tokyo a 0ne-hour boat trip from New York. You don't encounter Iraqi suicide bombers while stationed on Saipan. You don't use depleted uranium rounds in your tanks and have laser sights.

If Spock - Mr. Precision - said the Romulan War was fought with primitive nuclear weapons and no visual contact, and was obviously surprised that they had develped a cloaking device, then when you write a show that takes place before the Romulan War, you don't give us photon torpedos and you don't give the Romulans the ability to cloak, period. IF you're a producer who respects the material, and respects the fan base that made the show popular. Otherwise the viewers may get pissed and the show may get cancelled ... like what happened! ;)

"no ship or character from previous Treks" is one of the foundations of DS9
I'm surprised no one mentioned this:
Chief of Operations, Miles Edward O'brien transferred from
the U.S.S. ENTERPRISE to DEEP SPACE NINE.
He crossed over from STAR TREK The Next Generation.

If the producers aren't willing to ignore the expectations of the fans, they'll never produce anything worth being a fan of.
Isn't that what Berman did?
He gave us "grittier" stories, characters at odds with each other, and nearly naked women, in an attempt to titilate potential viewers.
He thought he was appealing to a broader audience, and only alienated the 20 million dedicated fans in America.
(I don't know how many the world harbors. I never hear about them.)

John P has nailed the problem right on the head!

I'm generalizing here, but it seems that everyone latley wants to take established characters or franchises and give them there own spin instead of coming up with new characters or situations.

I call it the "very special episode" syndrome. It goes like this...a writer says "I want to write a Superman movie...but I want to wriite the story where he dreams he's a regular guy. or I want to use the Star Trek name , but in MY version.. Starfleet is a evil, corrupt organization. or a new Flipper movie, but THIS time Flipper is a Chimpanzee. etc...

If you want to use the name (and the built in cache of notoriety..) you should have to adhere to certain standards. If you don't like the idea that, say, Starfleet is a noble organization dedicated to the betterment of mankind thru peaceful exploration, then go write Starship Troopers or Aliens or something else. But spare me from your vision of what YOU think Star Trek SHOULD be

And then again we have those Trek fans who honestly believe that Trek IS our future. There were some Trek fans who claimed B5 was Bullsh*t because everyone knew we'd be using transporters and B5 didn't.
Yes Virginia there are scary Trek fans.

Read Greg Cox's Khan novels. Just do it. he does a masterful job of blending actual history with trek lore.

My point is, if you are good enough you can write compelling stories within the "restrictions"

It's the lazy writer who bends established facts to suit their "vision"

My point is, if you are good enough you can write compelling stories within the "restrictions"

It's the lazy writer who bends established facts to suit their "vision"

You now deserve a "Hear! Hear!" That was my problem with the Temporal Cold War crap ENT dished out for nearly three years. It was a designed to give B&B and their stupid writers as much leeway to bend what had been established before and served as a huge "reset" button when it was all said and done. Do I expect every little Trek fact to be adhered to? No, just the big ones (humans hadn't encountered Klingons 100 years before Kirk, Romulans didn't have cloaking devices, etc) and at the very least at least respect what TOS did, both the show itself and to the future "mythos" it created.

Spe - Good point!

José

Is this a good point to say, "boobies"? :roll:

John O.

I don't really think DS9 completely violated the original principles of Trek with the Dominion War - that whole storyline was, at least to me, about "what happens when all of these people who always try (and usually succeed) in defusing conflicts are backed into a corner they can't get out of?" The results weren't always pretty - "In the Pale Moonlight" is the perfect example

Exactly, the federation is still founded and based on Roddenberry's ideals, but sometimes war is unavoidable. The NextGen characters could afford to be squeaky because they were on the sparkly Federation flagship. Not a grimy dirty trade hub.

"no ship or character from previous Treks" is one of the foundations of DS9

Oh hardly!

previously mentioned O'Brien family
Q
Vash
Necheyev
WORF
Gowron
the 3 Klingons from TOS
the whole trials and tribblations ep
the mirror universe
Duras sisters
Thomas Riker

probably more I'm missing off the top of my head. DS9 was probably the most respectful, and definately the series that used the most pieces of previous Trek lore.

call it the "very special episode" syndrome. It goes like this...a writer says "I want to write a Superman movie...but I want to wriite the story where he dreams he's a regular guy. or I want to use the Star Trek name , but in MY version.. Starfleet is a evil, corrupt organization. or a new Flipper movie, but THIS time Flipper is a Chimpanzee. etc...

Yup, Moore's Battlestar Galacticrap being the shining poster child of this concept.

Oh hardly!I said "foundation", not ball and chain. JFC.

John O.

If Spock - Mr. Precision - said the Romulan War was fought with primitive nuclear weapons and no visual contact, and was obviously surprised that they had develped a cloaking device, then when you write a show that takes place before the Romulan War, you don't give us photon torpedos and you don't give the Romulans the ability to cloak, period. IF you're a producer who respects the material, and respects the fan base that made the show popular. Otherwise the viewers may get pissed and the show may get cancelled ... like what happened! ;)

I agree that introducing cloaking technology into ENTERPRISE was a stupid decision, but in regards to the Romulan War, BALANCE OF TERROR also implied that the Romulans didn't have warp drive. This if of course nonsense. If it was fought with primitive nuclear weapons, that means there will be no major weapon advances in the next 150 years. THe idea that they didn't have visual communication was important to the plot of BOT and is fine for a reference to the distant past, but if you're going to set a series in that time period, it would be foolish to only have audio communication. These are "facts" the producers rightly ignored.

Of course, one thing that throws a monkey wrench into the whole thing is the fact that TOS was set in the 22nd century. Which places the Romulan War in the later part of this century. Then the movies came along and Kirk's adventures got bumped up a hundred years, throwing all established history and continuity off. (Strange the TREK nitpickers never seem to mention this rather serious continuity gaff.)

Isn't that what Berman did?
He gave us "grittier" stories, characters at odds with each other, and nearly naked women, in an attempt to titilate potential viewers.
He thought he was appealing to a broader audience, and only alienated the 20 million dedicated fans in America.

A much greater sin than pandering to the fans is pandering to semi-literate, teenage males. Berman's problem was he just didn't know how to tell a story.

And nearly naked women isn't consistant with STAR TREK? Have you even seen the original series? Starfleet's Female uniform was a miniskirt for God's sake!

I call it the "very special episode" syndrome. It goes like this...a writer says "I want to write a Superman movie...but I want to wriite the story where he dreams he's a regular guy. or I want to use the Star Trek name , but in MY version.. Starfleet is a evil, corrupt organization. or a new Flipper movie, but THIS time Flipper is a Chimpanzee. etc...

If you want to use the name (and the built in cache of notoriety..) you should have to adhere to certain standards. If you don't like the idea that, say, Starfleet is a noble organization dedicated to the betterment of mankind thru peaceful exploration, then go write Starship Troopers or Aliens or something else. But spare me from your vision of what YOU think Star Trek SHOULD be

Of course, there have been series portraying the Federation as an evil organization. For instance, FARSCAPE and FIREFLY.

I think this is pretty much my point. Let's use what we love about STAR TREK and create something new. The series itself has so much established history, and so many fans who demand that it be adhered to, that it has calcified. It is no longer a creative, organic entity. To borrow a line from PULP FICTION, it's a wax museum with a pulse.

To get back to the Romulan War example, I'd love to see a series set during the war, but I don't think it would be possible. One of the hard and fast "facts" is that humans didn't know what Romulans looked like until BALANCE OF TERROR. This pretty much eliminates about 80% of possible storylines. The only way I can see this work is to tell the story from the Romulan's point of view, with undercover spies constantly in danger of having their secret revealed. But that wouldn't be STAR TREK, would it?


Do I expect every little Trek fact to be adhered to? No, just the big ones (humans hadn't encountered Klingons 100 years before Kirk, Romulans didn't have cloaking devices, etc) and at the very least at least respect what TOS did, both the show itself and to the future "mythos" it created.

I've heard this about the Klingons before. My understanding is that it is based on a single, throwaway line from one of the TOS episodes. I don't think this rises to the level of hard and fast fact.

On the other hand, I think the idea of the Klingon Homeworld being only 4 days away from Earth is utterly ridiculous. But, hey, it doesn't violate established continuity.

Was precisely what Sisko said that while Earth was perfect, out here on the frontier it wasn't. Sort of the old "it's easy to be an angel when you live in heaven" thought.

But still, the starfleet characters (as best evidenced by Bashir) were honorable, noble (if a little superior ) characters. The more they had to adapt to less than noble honorable surroundings was summed up by O'Brien in one of the early Cardassian episodes where he admitted that He didn't hate the cardassians as much as he hated what they made him become.

Lets throw out 80% of the romulan stories. Hell, after the initial screwup that causes 150 years of hostility, let's throw out the Klingons and Romulans all together.

If you are put in charge of a prequel Star trek series and you can't think up any compelling stories to write about fertile topics like the Orion Slave traders or the Alpha Centauri civilization or the Mars colonies or Vulcans, or Tellerites or andorians or Rigelians ... without resorting to dragging in the Ferengi or the Borg you should...oh, wait a minute...

Whatever happened to the MUE? (Mysterious Unkown Entity). What ever happened to finding just a huge mysterious hunk of space junk? What about the other good million ideas that are still floating around waiting to be told?

The framework of trek doesn't need to be changed, it just needs fresh creative minds

I've heard this about the Klingons before. My understanding is that it is based on a single, throwaway line from one of the TOS episodes. I don't think this rises to the level of hard and fast fact.

It wasn't just a throwaway line. According to McCoy, it drove home to the Federation the need to establish a Prime Directive and the First Contact protocols. The Feds' "disastrous first contact with the Klingons" ensured that there would be 40 years of hostility. That line gave a tremendous amount of background on what the state of affairs were like between the Klingons and the Feds as well as the universe in general during Kirk's time.

José

It wasn't just a throwaway line. According to McCoy, it drove home to the Federation the need to establish a Prime Directive and the First Contact protocols. The Feds' "disastrous first contact with the Klingons" ensured that there would be 40 years of hostility. That line gave a tremendous amount of background on what the state of affairs were like between the Klingons and the Feds as well as the universe in general during Kirk's time.

José
Unfortunately, it's been a while since I've seen a lot of the TOS episodes. (Saving up for the DVD sets.) Which episode was that and what was the context? For me, the distinction between that fact being disposable and hard-and-fast is how integral "40" is to the statement.

When it comes to figures, I allow quite a bit of fudging. For one thing, the producers did a lot of it themselves (see my above comments on the 22nd/23rd century contradiction). Also, from my own attempts at writing, I know that numbers like that are often pretty arbitrary. "40 years" may have been in the script just because it felt right for that particular story.

Or maybe where McCoy comes from, they've adopted the Biblical convention of using 40 to indicate any large, undefined number.

McCoy is a Southerner... :p

wasnt Mcoy a Texan?I think I remember that from somewhere

Nope, he was a Georgia country doctor :).

I agree that year-quotes can have fudge factors. I don't personally keep a calendar in my head, so when I tell someone "that happened about 15 years ago," could in reality have been anywhere from 7 to 20 years ago, and I just remembered wrong.

But when a time value is stated on the show, it gives us a guideline to follow.

^For instance, when Spock stated that Praxis exploded six months before his briefing to the Enterprise crew in a major motion picture, and probably a number of days after that when Kirk is arrested by the Klingons, I don't expect the writers of a Voyager episode to do a flashback episode that tells us it was only 2 days after Praxis that the Excelsior was en route to rescue him.
http://www.inpayne.com/smilies/anim_banghead.gif

^For instance, when Spock stated that Praxis exploded six months before his briefing to the Enterprise crew in a major motion picture, and probably a number of days after that when Kirk is arrested by the Klingons, I don't expect the writers of a Voyager episode to do a flashback episode that tells us it was only 2 days after Praxis that the Excelsior was en route to rescue him.
http://www.inpayne.com/smilies/anim_banghead.gif
You see, it takes time for the shockwave to propogate, even through subspace, so six months had already passed since the explosion when the Excelsior encountered the wave. Then, they were traveling about at subwarp speeds, but at high enough velocities so they had to deal with the time dilation effect. So even though only two days had passed on the ship, several weeks had passed for Kirk and company.

Yeah. That's it.

Now does anyone have a theory as to how Dr. Watson's war wound moved from his arm to his leg?