Picture cute but only here to lure you in.
Classic utopian Star Trek is showing up in the Stereotype Nebula and boning down with the denizens of the planet where everyone is an 1820s dandy.
Holodeck Space Ireland, anyone?
God, Voyager is my least favorite of the old treks. I liked it until Season 7, but that season flanderized everything and made so many horrible design choices that I was glad it was over. Also, imo it peaked in Season 5 and felt slightly too long
Ugggggh I wrote up a whole thing that didn’t post somehow… anyway:
The crew arrives on a planet where one of four genders is assigned to a person after an arbitrary life event happens (eg first steps, eyes opening, birth, etc). This gender is also tied with class in their society.
The alien genders are different colored/shaped alien ears or something that viewers can quickly identify visually.
A group of eco-terrorists sets off a dirty bomb that randomly gender bends anyone in the radius to one of those other genders. The away team gets hit by this and also gender swaps.
A klingon crew member is nonbinary and not affected at all, someone drops a line about not knowing they were enby and gets a blunt “gender has no baring on a warrior’s honor” line.
Vulcan crewmember becomes a woman, has immense gender euphoria, and then realizes they’ve been suppressing their gender identity their whole life along with their emotions.
The eco-terrorists use this gender swap event to undermine the gender-essentialist social order and kick off a people’s revolution. The space terf rulers who were force transitioned have a 75/25 split between learning empathy and trying to kill everyone (they are immediately phazered).
Speech from the captain character about how star fleet and humanity abolished prescriptive notions of gender before we even took to the stars.
The crew members affected try to find a “cure”, but realize there isn’t one. This is only mildly inconvenient since gender transitioning treatments have been widely available since the early 21st century.
Ugggggh I wrote up a whole thing that didn’t post somehow… anyway:
This has happened to me several times and I wanted to reply in solidarity with you. Any multi-paragraph comment I now paste into a notepad document first.
Like recently? I never noticed this before the last couple of weeks.
I've noticed that hexbear seems to forget that you're logged in if you sit on one page for too long (like if you're typing out a story outline on your phone)...
Edit: :reddit-logo: and other sites do the same thing when I use them, not sure if it's due to default user settings or if it has more to do with the engineering of the site.
I'm bad at placing dates but yeah, over the last month or so I'd say. Happens more often if my VPN connection gets shitty.
The crew arrives on a planet where one of four genders is assigned to a person after an arbitrary life event happens (eg first steps, eyes opening, birth, etc). This gender is also tied with class in their society.
Star Trek ENT S2E22 - Though the ending of that episode is controversial. Fun fact: That episode inspired my Discord Profile Picture
Vulcans didn't just happen to be in the Solar system when the first warp drive was activated, they had a permanent presence to study human development. This resulted in a cultual feedback loop, where studying the development of a younger civilization lead to new insights in Vulcan logic and spiritualism. The Romulan split happened because a group of Vulcans were fed up with what they viewed as "navel gazing nerd-shit" and, ironically, started a colony that ended up looking more like infant Humanity than Vulcan ever did.
Really like to imagine a lost scene in tos of a Romulan being like "I'm over this navel gazing nerd-shit!"
In the Rihannsu novels that we going to be canonised if enterprise had got another season, the Vulcans didnt have ftl due to being in more or less a state of constant nuclear war.
When Surak unified Vulcan after an Orion Pirates invasion, his student broke with him over the destruction of Vulcan culture he was proposing and instead decided to control Vulcan behaviour with rituals and a rigid social structure.
They then piled into slower than light starships and spent a century losing most of their ships before landing and recommencing slightly less nuclear war.
They got ftl after a United Earth ship got too close.
The Vulcans settled down and developed ftl the normal way.
Ok, this isn't necessarily utopian, but I would like to see a plot or character that is basically just Zoidberg from Futurama but serious. What I mean by that is, I want an alien character that is clearly intelligent, well-meaning, but also genuinely alien, even kinda scary and gross. I want to see a serious realization of what it would be like to have people live alongside or do diplomacy with these sorts of alien lifeforms.
Like, what if John Carpenter's version of the Thing was just your coworker, or you had to stay on an alien planet full of that shit as part of a diplomatic meeting.
Well, he's hilarious too.
Enterprise is quite underrated, sadly due to the Bush era/Rick Berman bullshit in some of the storytelling, but Season 4 is some good shit. A shame it was canceled, but that ending is
spoiler
hilariously bad
Okay, this, except the captain/protag eventually makes out with Zoidberg.
They kinda had this with the fish diplomats/assassins in early TNG.
Picard is being all diplomatic but still clearly off-put by their fishy ways. Worf is enamoured by them and calls them "a handsome race" in one of my favourite gags in the series.
I was thinking "Things go wrong and it looks like they have to compromise on their values, but they never actually do."
But go for it. I know there's a huge DS9 fandom on this site.
It's a big write up and I gotta go to work pretty soon, but I'll write a wall of text after. I'm using the first episode that the actual writing team broke in What We Left Behind as a jumping off point.
Deep Space 9 has like 100 good episodes in a row (with maybe 3 bad ones inbetween), even when imo things get slightly off the rails in Season 7
spoiler
It became a bit too Star Wars by then, but it was still fantastic
I think Babylon 5 does a better job of synthesizing cool spaceships with alien diplomacy even if the first season is terrible
So a little more than It's Good - it has Quark-esque sassy aliens with character depth, everyone has their own motives, etc. I will say that the captain is a little blander than Sisko or Picard but he actually fights fascists (with violence) in his own government so there is that. It does definitely have the old Trek vibe.
Okay, the first season is bad. I dropped off during the first season not knowing this. I'll power through. I already know I'll like it, but that season one was a punisher
There are some plot points that come up later from S1 but if you've seen it before you might want to just find a watch guide or something for the essentials. I don't think it's ever quite as good as DS9, for the record, but I thought it was good.
The captain finally doing the right thing and reading theory. Real theory. Realizing all the lies they learned throughout their life.
Then promptly warping to Cardassian space and declaring allegiance to the only true leftists in the galaxy.
Not sure what you mean by recapturing though.
The Enterprise and its crew stumble upon an unknown species of creatures that fly around space. While trying to observe this new life form, ships start warping into the area engaging in combat. The Enterprise, unnoticed by the two warring factions, tries to remain out of the battle. The science team reports to the Captain that the warring ships are damaging the habitat of this species of space critter.
Conflict with the prime directive and Starfleet's orders to remain uninvolved in the matters of the warring factions. What does the Captain do to try to protect the space fauna? Will the Captain violate Starfleet Command's order to abandon the creatures to their fate? How will the Captain convince the battling fleets to leave the area?
B plot is Uhura being taught how to fence by Sulu.
If they warp in then the Prime Directive doesn't apply to them im pretty sure, given its about pre-warp societies.
Fair enough, there'd be some other regulation cited to create conflict between solution about keeping the unknown space critters be killed off as collateral damage to a space war that Starfleet hasn't taken a side in yet.
Starfleet has been monitoring the development of a pre-contact global civilization that is still wrestling with capitalist imperialism, still split into infighting nationalistic factions.
World war breaks out near the start of the episode and the fascists actually win, enslave and colonize neighboring countries, committing an ongoing genocide and lebensraum/manifest destiny. The ship is dispatched to send specially trained Starfleet officers down to the planet as infiltrators to directly monitor the situation.
Meanwhile, the situation is intensely debated both by the ship's command staff and the upper echelons of Starfleet, with regards to the prime directive and whether/how to intervene.
I know this is a lot like DS9 but I loved that shit and was so disappointed when Trek went in a completely different and wrong direction that I'm not watching any of the new stuff. Wanted more of the philosophical Picard and so on.
Not sure exactly where to go from there but I don't believe there should be some deus ex machina that allows the main characters to resolve the crisis in one episode, but I think they should intervene over the course of several episodes because that gives an opportunity to explore the moral core of FALGSC and the ethical dilemmas ( deontological vs. utilitarian) and contradictions inherent in the prime directive and whether the Federation itself is imperialistic.
I think it would also make for good drama and satisfy people's apparent demand for grittier iterations of classic sci fi without becoming warped by capitalist realism.
So it's not a mechanistic adherence to legal codes that holds the Federation together and keeps it true to its aims but the spirit and positive potential of human nature and the nature of all sentient beings. So you know, classic Trek stuff.
Edit: classic tng/ds9 stuff I guess
Edit2: Or... "Spirit and positive potential of human nature and the nature of all sentient beings" could easily be a cynically appropriated fascist slogan. See? I think it would be interesting...
I'd love a Star Trek 6 era show based around the Federation Mission to Qo'nos. Dealing with ecological disaster, old hatreds, Klingon colonialism, both sides overcoming their prejudice and calming hardliners...
Riker and the gang encounter a paperclip maximizer; this is a routine thing that just happens sometimes, and not a real threat. The whole ship runs a betting pool on whether Picard can dramatic speech it into reforming its ways. He fails so they stick it in a simulated universe where it can maximize all the paperclips it wants, then toss it in the box with the other paperclip maximizers.
In the B plot, Geordi and Data teach a bunch of kids about engineering by having them build bridges out of all the excess paperclips.
