WI: Star Trek TNG Not Canceled?

Again, in my book, these don't count as true cancellations, because everyone in the know realizes it's the last season before the season begins production. This wasn't the case for TOS, TAS, and Enterprise.
I don't see the need to get into semantics here. An order came from the top down saying "We're going to stop making the show this season. You can't do anything about it. We're ending the show." That's a cancellation. Whether it was forewarned or not doesn't much matter.
 
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I think one of the things that everyone's overlooked with the DS9-TNG crossover/story line mixing was the tension between Picard and Sisko. Go back and re-watch the first episode of DS9, Sisko really blames Picard for the death of his wife, Jennifer. Their relationship was pretty icy at the beginning, and only sort of warmed up after Sisko decided to stay on the station by the end of the episode.

Both Sisko and Picard were really in touch with their personal and national histories. Picard was knowledgeable about French history because of his family heritage, while Sisko was well read about the civil rights movement (See the episode in Season 7 where the holographic lounge singer's bar turned into a mob joint. Sisko complained to Dr. Bashir that no person of color would have been let into a casino like the Mirage in the early 1960s and it was unrealistic.)

I think there could be some really interesting tension to mix DS9 and TNG, especially with the command crew. Picard could get to really face what happened @ Wolf 359 from Sisko's perspective and although Picard's healing was pretty much complete by season 6, I think they could have mixed the two series together and used the Picard-Sisko tension to create a really interesting mix of the two story lines.

One of the mixed DS9-TNG plots could be a survivor of the massacre at Wolf 359 trying to take a shot at Picard, maybe he even gets close and kills some ambassador. The phaser gets tied back somehow to a weapons dealer who passed through DS9, Worf and Data end up interrogating Quark for information on the weapons dealer while Constable Odo tries to hold Worf back. Tie the assassination to some larger underground Bajoran/Maquis movement to destabilize the Federation-Bajoran relationship or instigate a Federation-Cardassian War.

I think even though TNG may have had a different feel, there could have been a real synergy between the two casts to build off.

This sounds like it would have been totally awesome.

To be perfectly frank, I liked Enterprise, even with the messes that were the Temporal Cold War and the fight with the Xindi. I loved all the stuff with the Vulcans and Andorians, and the fact that Klingons were villians again was cool. I thought Archer was a bit too much of a proto-kirk (to boldy screw aliens no human has screwed before) but I overall liked his general attitude towards doing things.

And hey, the Borg episode was AWESOME!! :mad: The Ferengi one could have been done better, but I defintively like the Borg one.
 
Aspects of DS9 predate B5, it's difficult to say how much of one influenced the other. Anyhow, I used to think B5 was just better but I recently watched them again on Netflix and saw a lot more flaws in B5 in all aspects and less in DS9 than I remembered.

Nuance!
JMS went to Paramount first with his idea for a show that eventually became Babylon 5, but Paramount was not interested. But it seems that they liked the idea of a show aboard a space station thus DS9 was born.
 
I have something new to add. In TNG's last season, they made a HUGE, HUUUUUGE, HUUUUUUUUUGE dramatic mistake. In one episode, they made it known that warp travel damaged subspace where it covered. Which is wonderful to parallel global warming through car pollution, but moronic because A) Its the future. Warp drive is not fossil fuel powered. This is supposed to be the period where we've gotten beyond that. B) Warp drive is what drives Star Trek. It's how you get from place to place. This is like saying its dangerous to move/walk from one place to another because your footsteps destroy the environment and your travel at all destroys the environment.
So after this episode, and for the remainder of TNG, Starfleet slapped a warp 5 cap on travel, and going any faster required asking Starfleet for permission.

So TNG will need to deal with that. Star Trek dealt with it in the OTL by saying they'd figured out how to make sure engines didn't pollute, so it was swept under the rug as an issue. So by Voyager, they didn't need to worry about it. TNG would need to also address that. If it's not gotten rid of, it is a gigantic drag.
 

MacCaulay

Banned
I have something new to add. In TNG's last season, they made a HUGE, HUUUUUGE, HUUUUUUUUUGE dramatic mistake. In one episode, they made it known that warp travel damaged subspace where it covered. Which is wonderful to parallel global warming through car pollution, but moronic because A) Its the future. Warp drive is not fossil fuel powered. This is supposed to be the period where we've gotten beyond that. B) Warp drive is what drives Star Trek. It's how you get from place to place. This is like saying its dangerous to move/walk from one place to another because your footsteps destroy the environment and your travel at all destroys the environment.
So after this episode, and for the remainder of TNG, Starfleet slapped a warp 5 cap on travel, and going any faster required asking Starfleet for permission.

So TNG will need to deal with that. Star Trek dealt with it in the OTL by saying they'd figured out how to make sure engines didn't pollute, so it was swept under the rug as an issue. So by Voyager, they didn't need to worry about it. TNG would need to also address that. If it's not gotten rid of, it is a gigantic drag.


I gotta be honest...I'd like to see that handled as an actual issue. I think that's the kind of thing Moore would have a heyday with.
 
I gotta be honest...I'd like to see that handled as an actual issue. I think that's the kind of thing Moore would have a heyday with.

TNG dealt with the warp 5 limit as an active issue from when that episode aired till when it ended. They had to go only at warp 5, and to go faster they would call up the admiralty to get approval.

But it was a gigantic pain and dramatic idiocy. Star Trek needs warp travel. Without it, you have hamstrung absolutely everything.

So TNG would have had to resolve it, and would likely have done son in the narrative, since TNG dealt with arcs and kept a consistent canon and didn't just ignore things once it made it an issue.
 
The biggest problem with Star Trek after TNG was Rick Berman.

This.

If I recall, DS9 was largely independent of Berman and Braga, right? And I liked DS9, though YMMV. Voyager and Enterprise were run by the same creative team that did TNG, which led to them being pale imitations of TNG. As soon as Enterprise brought in fresh blood, it got good.
 
This.

If I recall, DS9 was largely independent of Berman and Braga, right? And I liked DS9, though YMMV. Voyager and Enterprise were run by the same creative team that did TNG, which led to them being pale imitations of TNG. As soon as Enterprise brought in fresh blood, it got good.
I don't know. I heard that a very large part of post-Roddenberry Star Trek was basicly Berman's idea, including the good seasons of TNG (and thus DS9). Berman had good ideas and the same is true about Braga. The problem probably is that they gave both too much unchecked influence. Replacing them after a couple of years would have been a good idea too. Many Coto's Enterprise was good. Maybe still not as good TNG or DS9, but it had potential. If they would have used his ideas in Enterprise from the start, Enterprise could have been a great series.

Actualy I think one of the big problems for Voyager and Enterprise, was the network. It was the network that wanted to get rid of star trek as they wanted to focus on a different focusgroup who had no/less interest in series like startrek. Certainly it meant the end of Enterprise. I heard that the only reason Enterprise got a 4th season was for syndication and Enterprise was basicly cancelled during season 3.
 
TNG dealt with the warp 5 limit as an active issue from when that episode aired till when it ended. They had to go only at warp 5, and to go faster they would call up the admiralty to get approval.

But it was a gigantic pain and dramatic idiocy. Star Trek needs warp travel. Without it, you have hamstrung absolutely everything.

So TNG would have had to resolve it, and would likely have done son in the narrative, since TNG dealt with arcs and kept a consistent canon and didn't just ignore things once it made it an issue.

Contrarily, I think this would have been a good thing to have from even earlier on. Limits are what make dramatic situations in stories possible. Probably a quarter of the plots of TOS were enhanced at least a little with the tension of the fact that the ship could only travel so fast without breaking up. (Although, in a pinch Scotty could change the laws of physics and make it go faster) With a more "artificial" limit, it's not just the ship breaking up, but the whole staff risking legal issues.

Riker constantly wants to keep following the limits, but Picard is willing to nudge the limits whenever he deems it necessary (which turns out to be quite often). Meanwhile, Geordi would be constantly looking for ways to fix the warp pollution problem so they can go faster, but a newly promoted O'Brien as Geordi's second-in-command is constantly forgetting/ignoring the limits because he disagrees with them. And then, of course, there's the issue of chasing down a Romulan Warbird which has just kidnapped the President of Somewhereouttheria IV, and having to wait until the phone call comes back from the admiral in order to get going... and the repercussions when the Romulans get away and Picard aims a monologue at the admiralty for not streamlining the process.

Sure, after a while it could become a "thing" which eventually gets overdone, but not if they do it right...
 
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