WI: Instead of ENTERPRISE, Star Trek Anthology Series

So recently I've heard something, and it may only be a rumor, that before Enterprise came out, there was a proposal that instead of that kind of series, there'd be a Star Trek anthology series. So instead of one group of characters, it'd bounce around like "Twilight Zone": one week, a story set on a mining colony, one week, a story set with the Klingons, one week, a story set in the TOS period aboard a starship, etc. Apparently Paramount shot it down because they thought people needed recurring characters.

So what if this happened instead of Enterprise?
 
That sounds... expensive. It might get cancelled earlier, in fact, due to not bringing in enough revenue to justify the budget.

Although it would be amusing to have as lead actors in this anthology series all the people who appeared in many multiple roles. Star Trek: The Anthology, starring Jeffrey Combs, Suzie Plakson, Vaughn Armstrong, JG Hertzler, Randy Oglesby...
 
I will say, cost wise, Star Trek has a LOT of props and costumes and other things left over from basically all the series and films. It was even more back then since they went ahead and sold off a lot of them in an auction a few years ago. That would off set the costs a lot.
 
I actually think this might work better as a series of TV movies. Say if each one was twice the length of an episode, and there were ten or twelve of them per year...

...I just realised something. If this is coming out at the same time that Enterprise did in OTL then maybe the execs will get them to put the friggin' Temporal Cold War in this too. Especially since this would be jumping back and forth across the timeline -- that might be what ties it together.
 
I actually think this might work better as a series of TV movies. Say if each one was twice the length of an episode, and there were ten or twelve of them per year...

...I just realised something. If this is coming out at the same time that Enterprise did in OTL then maybe the execs will get them to put the friggin' Temporal Cold War in this too. Especially since this would be jumping back and forth across the timeline -- that might be what ties it together.

mmm...I think the OP meant doing it instead of ENT, not at the same time.
 
mmm...I think the OP meant doing it instead of ENT, not at the same time.

I think Cole means the Execs who, in OTL, were in charge of Enterprise would likely instead be in charge of the anthology series. And they might use the Temporal Cold War to tie the different anthology stories together.
 
Why couldnn't they have gone for a sort of halfway house, where people who were main characters in 1 episode were minor characters in another?

Give fans a chance to say "Hey it's that bloke who was in a few episodes back". Cue continuity creep
 
ugh bad idea, it would have probably meant that frakes had more chances to put himself in roles (he massively ruined the last episode of ENT), or worse shatner in another delusional fit would have tried to get some role (maybe as shatner the hut LOL, jabbas cousin).

I personally think that ENT deserved a few more seasons because it was one of the best of the different series (average start, but steadily getting better and better)
 
Actually an anthology format would be exactly what a logical approach to Enterprise's basic premise would require!

I did somewhat enjoy watching Enterprise on DVD after the series was cancelled. I think it was indeed getting better toward the end, for the most part.

But--the whole idea of focusing on one ship that manages to be present at all the action of its era was absurd. The whole point of early Trek is, the ships are slow, communications are nil--every ship is on its own adventure, and every one takes years to go out, return, and tell its story.

It was perfectly clear in TOS and more so in TNG and after, the early ships were like sailing ships in the early age of exploration. They'd set out. Some would come back. Until they came back no one on Earth knew what they heck they'd been doing out there. A great many TOS episodes were based on the premise that some early exploration ship, usually a century before, had come to grief in one way or another, and Enterprise NCC-1701 was the first to find it or any clue what had happened to them.

Using the Okuda timeline books published in the mid-90s I got my own picture of what it was like in those early founding days. The Daedelus class of ship, mentioned in aired canon, and illustrated in the Paramount published books (which was in fact based on Roddenberry's early draft design of Enterprise for TOS) would have been the ships, with a maximum speed (based on extrapolation, plus Paramount publication information) of around Warp 3 or so--no matter how one defines "warp speeds," they'd have been much slower. A "five year mission," going by Sternbach's plot of warp speeds and ignoring "warp corridors" and "Cochrane factors" and so forth would have taken them on loops about 60 light years in diameter; given the great density of habitable worlds and indeed humanoid species living on them in the Trek verse, that's plenty of opportunity to meet space babes! But it would take each ship months to go from one star on their agenda to the next.

Either they have no subspace radio at all (TOS implied that was a rather recent invention) or it's unreliable and restricted; they often have only the alternatives of dispatching a speed-of-light radio message as backup to their hopes of showing up in person to give their reports.

No Transporters. No Phasers. Or either in very primitive form! I was amazed when Broken Bow, the first Enterprise ep, decided to nod toward the idea this was after all 100 years before TOS by scrapping the bloody tractor beam; the one most reliable technology on any Trek episode is the dang artificial gravity!:p And more seriously, warp technology itself relies on gravity manipulation; tractor beams should be elementary tech for any warp-capable civilization, no matter how lame their warp units are. So AARGH!

I didn't think it was crazy to have some kind of transporter, but I thought it should be way clumsier. Say, the entire bottom of the primary hull (if this were a Daedelus, the primary hull is a sphere) is a big dish antenna that has to be aimed at the transport target; the process takes longer, and is not stealthy at all--Roddenberry's original idea was that Transporters used visible beams of light and indeed what became the standard "ship firing phasers" special effect was meant to be the transporter beam in action. Also, shorter range. So basically you can't just beam down on a whim; the ship has to be maneuvered into place, a place it can only be in briefly due to orbital mechanics, so it's an operation, and a very visible one.

So--an anthology series. One ep joins one ship having an interesting encounter somewhere, another is back on Earth watching some development or other, another joins a colony that is trying to solve some weird problem all on their own, with help from Earth years away if ever; and so on.

It would probably be the worst of all the worlds discussed thus far; they would rarely be able to reuse props from previous franchise episodes; they'd have no recurring cast to speak of; the Temporal War would be a very inappropriate way of tying it all together.

It would fail as TV.

But it would make some sense!

Obviously that doesn't count for anything.:rolleyes:
 
The concept for Enterprise was actually a good one. Showing the founding of the Federation and the beginning of man's going out to explore space.

It was just poorly executed.

There's nothing to say an anthology series wouldn't have been handled just as badly and been canceled after just one or two seasons.
 
It does seem to me though that the basic concept of Enterprise's beginning (the first Warp 5 starship ever, captained by the son of the inventor) might end up being the premiere episode (or TV movie, as the case may be). Probably not the Klaang story from "Broken Bow", though.
 
Why couldnn't they have gone for a sort of halfway house, where people who were main characters in 1 episode were minor characters in another?

Give fans a chance to say "Hey it's that bloke who was in a few episodes back". Cue continuity creep
How about if in a 26-episode season there's about three crews with four or five episodes centred around them, three more with two or three episodes centred around them (either two-parters or three separate episodes) and a few other completely standalone episodes (these ones would be the alien-centric ones)? Sounds like a good balance.
 
The concept for Enterprise was actually a good one. Showing the founding of the Federation and the beginning of man's going out to explore space.

It was just poorly executed.

There's nothing to say an anthology series wouldn't have been handled just as badly and been canceled after just one or two seasons.

Well, it is unreasonable to marry the concept of early Federation history with the vehicle of focusing on one crew on the model followed by all previous Trek franchise series. Doing so automatically makes that history a preposterous product of that one ship and crew's near-singlehanded efforts.

Worse, to inject a decent amount of adventure, they had a Warp 5 ship. There should have been no such thing available to Earth in that era. Of course even a Warp 5 ship would not realistically allow them to show up at some new and exciting adventure every damn week, or even (allowing for episodes skipping some weeks spaced out over just 2/3 or so of a year, and some slippage of years) every month.

To be sure, one way to interpret the voyage direct to Q'onos itself is to suggest that T'Pol's Vulcan star charts actually showed the various high-speed warp corridors various fans have suggested must explain the wacky astrography of the whole set of series in general. If they were going to do that--that, rather than "Warp 5!!!" could have been the technological premise--you know--"we've already sent out a bunch of Daedelus ships, but we've designed this very odd and anachronistic NX ship to take advantage of these alleged 'warp corridors' we've heard tell of--now in this emergency, the Vulcans have consented to loan us actual star charts so we're all set to go popping erratically around this part of the Galaxy on strange and unpredictable paths!" This might even have explained why Enterprise would always be in the right place and right time to make history--it would be an experimental ship, but also a troubleshooter, a high-speed courier, a whole lot of interesting stuff.

Just making it first in class of regular new Warp 5 ships gives much less excuse for that kind of thing; Archer and crew should have been focused on the technical business of shaking down the ship, near to home, and the glory of the actual exploration fallen to the third, fourth, fifth and so on ships of the regular fleet. But when the whole point is to go skipping down warp corridors, actually going to the faraway places is after all the only way to shake it down.

It was inexcusable to make the Enterprise crew the center of every important turning point in the formation of the Federation. If one wanted to seriously explore that--one needed an entirely different series format.

I actually did enjoy the Enterprise series, especially the first and last seasons--the more they extricated themselves from the "Xindi arc" the better I liked it. I'd say it was a very poor idea, executed far better than anyone could reasonably have expected. There was no way to do it right; at least they did it with some fun and some drama and some good characters.

How about if in a 26-episode season there's about three crews with four or five episodes centred around them, three more with two or three episodes centred around them (either two-parters or three separate episodes) and a few other completely standalone episodes (these ones would be the alien-centric ones)? Sounds like a good balance.

Yeah, I think that would be quite a lot more reasonable!

Unfortunately it would still be a lot more costly, there still wouldn't be a single cast to identify with. They might have possibly anticipated whatever that cop/legal series my mom watches is, NCIS o SVU or whatever, that alternates between different "departments" as it were of the process, and built some suspense in audiences about when Crew A finds out what's going on at Colony B and whether they will be able to do anything about it in time. But we are still talking about five or six different casts, and at that falling between stools, attaining neither the realism a purist might want nor the familiar dramatic formula the audience expects. It isn't much more realistic to have all history made by 5 or six different groups of people scattered across known space than to have it all done by one remarkably ubiquitous spaceship after all.
 
How about if in a 26-episode season there's about three crews with four or five episodes centred around them, three more with two or three episodes centred around them (either two-parters or three separate episodes) and a few other completely standalone episodes (these ones would be the alien-centric ones)? Sounds like a good balance.
But that means employing a much larger cast, and each person is going to have to find extra work since they aren't going to get paid as much. The only way you could really make it work would be for each crew to play extras in the other crew's series.
 

NothingNow

Banned
But that means employing a much larger cast, and each person is going to have to find extra work since they aren't going to get paid as much. The only way you could really make it work would be for each crew to play extras in the other crew's series.

I think It'd be more like a bunch of Miniseries/serial than individual series strung out over X seasons.

It'd be cheaper and easier still if you shot it in Vancouver, and timed so you weren't fighting the other major series for cast and crew members.
 
Canon...

One of the problems the "prequel" idea had was the continuity established in TOS, TNG and other shows. Sometimes they got themselves in a terrible muddle - was the Treaty of Algeron the one which concluded the Earth-Romulan War of 2161 or was it fashioned after the "Tomad Incident" of 2311?

Sad Trekkies like me pick up on things like that - the Xindi story gave ENT the chance to break into its own area so I can understand why they did it.

To be fair, the logical next step would have been an ENT movie possibly around the first Romulan War but the problem is we all know how it ends (or is supposed to). The new ST movies have broken the canon with the destruction of Vulcan so they can go wherever they like.

The problem was after Voyager (ship lost), DS9 (static location) and TNG (ship-based), where could they have gone without repeating themselves?
 
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