Hypothetical Star Trek, because Lonespark insists I have something less distressing as the latest post

On the up side it was about half an hour after that last post that I saw my therapist, on the downside while my mood might be more positive most everything said about non-mood related stuff is still true.

But to get that off your mind off you should give me a billion dollars  I'm going to fill in all the gaps in Edith and Ben right here right now  we're going to have more in depth discussion of Squirrel Simulator  I'm going to collect things I said in the comments of Fred Clark's post about what should be in the new Star Trek series.

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Chris Pine as Captian Kirk was a horrible Kirk and a horrible Enterprise captain. Chris Pine as Jack Frost (Rise of the Guardians) would have been great. Whoever is directing needs to know the difference and be able to pick the right one. (If you can't sell "Second star to the right, and straight on till morning" do not apply.)

There needs to be gender representation, and I don't just mean male and female. Given the shit they can do with Star Trek medical technology we should have characters who, as a result of choice rather than their species' unique handwavium, can be male in the morning and female in the afternoon. There should be characters who are completely androgynous and that's never commented on because it's ok. And that's just the humans.

On the subject of medical technology, I don't remember whether Geordi being given sight (not ordinary human sight, but sight via the visor) was a choice that he made or one that was made for him at a young age. The thing is, even with the amazing med tech some people would decide to remain as they are. (For a diverse variety of reasons.)

I'm now imagining a character in a manually propelled wheelchair and this happening:

"Why don't you use a hoverchair?"

"Why don't you use one? You don't have to walk you know."

Aliens need to be more than just token characters.

Star Trek was built on the idea that we as a people could get to a better utopian place but that place would still be full of people. Problems weren't systemic but instead stemmed from individuals.  Individuals with enough power or at the precisely the wrong intersection of influence could cause horrible, horrible things, but together we could be better than any of us flawed human beings are individually and thus society could move passed the moral afflictions inherent in ourselves.

And such.  And stuff.  And warp drive and humanoid aliens and planets that have united into a single culture.

But back to the idea that even though people remain people it's possible for those people to live in a much better world with a much better society than we now have.

Section 31 was introduced basically to undermine that, say the system was rotten to the core, has been since the beginning, and argues that without that rot the apparent good on surface would be impossible, so, basically, "Torture the kid!  Have you seen how cool Omales is?"

Section 31 went against everything that made Star Trek Star Trek*, that shit needs to be taken down hard. I don't care if they have to introduce dimension hopping Julian Bashir to do it, it needs to be taken down. Actually, Alexander Siddig is awesome, so maybe they should introduce dimension hopping Julian Bashir.

When Data met Spock there was an interesting exchange.  Spock, trying to embrace pure logic even though his half human nature made it more difficult for him than most Vulcan, was trying to be what Data started out as while abandoning what Data strove for.  Data, naturally, was trying to abandon what Spock strove for, while striving to be what Spock abandoned.  Having completely different goals, views, and philosophies did not lead to judgement, condemnation, or animosity.  There needs to be more of that. "We completely disagree, that's nice, let's keep working together.

When they timetravel, which they will (they always do), there needs to be an understanding that the people in the new timeline have every bit as much of a right to exist as the people in the original timeline and thus "fixing the timeline" is only half of what they'd be doing with the other half being "in a way that doesn't erase the new timeline" and they'd have to face that every time.

Maybe sometimes it would be as simple as duplicating a planet, maybe sometimes it would mean creating an entirely new universe, but the one consistent thing about Star Trek time travel --seriously the only thing that's consistent across the various versions-- is that changing the past doesn't branch off a new timeline, it overwrites the existing one.

There was a good recognition of this, finally, in Stargate: Continuum when people in the new timeline looked on the characters from the original timeline with horror for even floating the idea of resetting things and thus destroying the entire world these people knew.  (The moral conundrum was solved when the entire planet was wiped out in the new timeline, though one imagines that people on other planets might have had objections to being erased when the timeline was reset.)

Given how much Star Trek dabbles in time travel it's well passed time that they start dealing with the fact that, "I want my world back," does not excuse "So I'm going to erase this entire world and all the people in it from existence."

Accountability and continuity.  When the captain does something that's morally reprehensible, the captain is demoted and, hopefully, thrown in the brig.  (So maybe don't have the captain be the one to do morally reprehensible things, just a thought)

Continuity in that the reset button isn't pushed every episode.

Because you know what would have been an awesome Star Trek show?  Voyager with no reset button (except for that one time when there was a time weapon that was a damned temporal reset button and the entire coalition against it made sure that they'd be able to be reset in hopes that maybe, just maybe, they'd create a better world through their sacrifice when they ... reset the reset button itself.)

Consider the episode "Deadlock". Spacial anomaly of the week creates two versions of Voyager and her crew but because antimatter is technobable each ship is operating at half power since they're drawing on the same, original, supply. Attempts are made to merge the ships, they fail. Eventually one ship blows up but not before sending the only two unique people (their copies died) to the other ship. Thus everything is exactly as it was.

Now imagine that they'd evacuated some or all of the blown up ship.

For simplicity say they saved everyone.  Only one adult doesn't have to deal with suddenly having someone who has an equal claim to their life, their friends, their memories, their identity, and their stuff.  The other unique was a new born baby, there are two people with claim to be her mother.

It should be simpler than Battlestar Galactica which had to fill up entire ships worth of people with just seven actors worth of characters, but it would still be a difficult, or at least annoying, thing, but think about what it means going forward.

Are unique people more important than ones with spares?  Voyager wasn't designed to hold a double crew.  At least the Maquis ship was relatively small.  The next several episodes would probably be about getting resources so that they don't all starve or something.

As time went on people would end up attending funerals for people who were, not long ago, the same person as they were (Voyager was never a safe place to live.)

That's just a single episode where there could have been continuity, the Voyager was in the special place of never being able to stop by a starbase to unload their accumulated weird.

A time traveler who's the computer's love interest and has been since version 2.3 of the AI came out centuries ago. ... um, maybe not. It's just a thought.

Bajoran religion got explored to a degree, but human religion not so much. Given that the Enterprise crew's actions led Apollo to commit suicide, I'd like to know how the Hellenists (human or otherwise) felt about that.

I'd like to see human religion grappling with people like Q. Loki is far less divinely overpowered, so in a universe with Q there should be no problem in believing in gods like Loki, but it's not like "If Q then Loki" is sound logic. So the question becomes, "Why do you believe in these particular gods (or that particular god) and why do you consider them (or it) to be gods (or a god)?

Loki was picked not-at-random.  Fred specifically said he wanted Loki.  (Fred also voted for Gina Torres for captain, which I can totally support.)

So, Loki talk:

Starfleet Captain has been assigned to the task of mediation to prevent Ragnarök .

Starfleet Captain knows a little about Norse Myth and initially assumes that Odin is obviously the good guy and then learns that of Loki's six divine children Odin uses one of them as his horse, cast another into the afterlife forever more (sounds a lot like murder), threw another one to earth where he was all alone and lives a life of solitude, raised another one and, in spite of him being perfectly obedient at every turn, betrayed him, tied him up, and left him there to starve (a nearby native took pity on him thus Fenris lives, but still tied up where Odin left him after all these centuries) and as for the last two... turned one into an animal and forced him to disembowel the other so that the entrails of the disemboweled one could be used bind Loki in a spot where he'd be tortured by venom till just before Ragnarök.

So Starfleet Captain now sides with Loki, except then he's reminded that in vengeance Loki killed one of Odin's kids, has committed casual murder, and finally sick of this shit and no longer willing to save the world, fully intends to get a djinn* army and destroy the world because him being sick of this shit means this shit has to go. No, the fact that a lot of people live in this shit will not stop him.

And then . . . what?

I suppose if it's a good ending Hel and Baldr get married and both are allowed to come and go from Helheim as they please, Fenris is freed and given top notch therapy and for the rest I have no idea. The whole situation is a mess.

* No one knows where the boat full of beings of fire came from, likely because the preservation status of Norse myth sucks. As such my going theory is that that Loki negotiated with God, who tends to prefer a monotheistic universe, and offered to take out a competing pantheon that's done morally reprehensible things. (That seems to describe most pantheons, including God's.)

That spurred some conversation, Betwixt-and-Between added this:

I would contribute to this kickstarter.

I like your good ending, but it still seems weird to have a "good ending" for the coming of Ragnarok. I mean, I guess a more realistic (heh) ending would simply be to have Ragnarok delayed, yet again.

Ooohh...oohh! Or! Common enemy!

How about this: Just when things come to a head, and Loki's about to call up Naglfar (which is a SPACESHIP made of the nails of the dead, obviously), and Odin's about to launch Photonic Gungnir....THE BORG SHOW UP.

I don't know who or what the Borg have assimilated to make them an even match with the Norse gods, but the are, and now Starfleet Captain is stuck with THREE terrible sides to pick from. 

Star Trek has had various things with infiltrators, be they bodysnatchers or changelings or whatever.  I want to see some of them going native.

"No, I'm not going to help you overthrow the Romulan Empire.  I like the Romulan Empire.  Now if you'll excuse me I have to go [preform Romulan cultural ritual], don't contact me again."

There was probably other stuff too.

Oh, this is kind of important: Boobs.  There need to be more aliens where the females, if there are things analogous to male and female in that species, don't have them.  A lot more.  There can also be aliens where everyone has them so you're not turning away talented people on the grounds of, "No, sorry, you have boobs."

Star Trek is part of a long tradition where Female==Has boobs and that tradition needs to stop.  I'm not saying that they need to change any of the existing species, but the whole thing is "New life and new civilizations," so they'll be making new ones up.

Generally Star Trek is is based on a a Federation starship or base and I'd assume that would continue, but it's not the only avenue to explore.  Consider a merchant vessel, consider the fact that xenoarchaeology in Star Trek involves sometimes digging up civilizations on the level of the most ancient human stuff we find on earth, sometimes digging up civilizations on the level of the Iconians (technology so advanced it seemed like magic to people with Star Trek level advanced technology of their own) and lots of times investigating sites in between.  Following legitimate archeologists, looters, or both could be interesting.

There were some good episodes that came from Picard being an amateur archaeologist.  At least I think there were.  It's been a while.