I know a strictly military-focused show goes against Roddenberry’s vision, but what are the chances that we could see some sort of war-focused Trek in the future? The scenes in “Under the Cloak of War” (SNW 2x08… yes I’m a few weeks behind) fascinated me. What would a MAS*H-style show look like in Trek? Could the show tell the story of the war exclusively from the medical perspective? Until now, we’ve only gotten glimpses of war shown through the eyes of our main characters (O’Brien, Nog, Chakotay, Burnham, M’Benga, Chapel, etc) and we’ve gotten fleet-level looks of battles, but very little on-the-ground coverage of war.
I’d prefer the setting to be some war set some time after PIC–something we as an audience know nothing about. What are your thoughts, Lemmy?
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I don’t think a medical-focused Trek show would have to take place during war time. Medical Ethics in general is ripe for the sort of show Trek lends itself to.
One of Roddenberry’s first series was called The Lieutenant which aired on NBC for a season – until it was canceled due to a falling out between the Marines and the network over a race-based episode that nobody wanted but Roddenberry forced through (too preachy they worried). Episodes of this are available on YouTube and you will see some of the Trek stars that appeared in Where No Man has Gone Before.
I have an idea for a series I’d like to write that fits this somewhat. In the Kelvin timeline before Romulus is destroyed but after Voyager, the Romulans decide to stripmine their doomed solar system, build a fleet, and go on a conquest to subdue Federation territory starting with Earth. The war would be an over-arching theme but the episodes would still be mostly self contined challenge of the week type stories based one ship & crew but with glimpes of what other crews are going through, but also flashbacks to how the invasion got started showing how we got to “now” without dragging it out.
Do you mean a war in space with spaceships? some war on an alien planet? Or a war on earth?
I mean we follow a mobile hospital, similar to MAS*H. Different planets as the front moves. We’ve had a lot of the war on starships, and I’m sure that there would necessarily be some of that, too, but we have not seen a lot of the war “on the ground” in Star Trek. Correct me if I’m wrong, but this episode of SNW and “Seige of AR-558” (DS9 7x08) are really the only episodes of Trek that I can remember that have depictions of full-scale battles on planets (or maybe I need to do a series rewatch somewhere)
The difficult thing about planet-side battles in Star Trek is the phasers. When one is hit with a phaser on high power, there is nothing left worth saving by a medic. Weapons in Trek are too efficient to make surface war particularly entertaining.
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The last thing I want to see from Star Trek is something like MASH, a show which whitewashes the genocidal Korean War. The last thing Star Trek needs is more imperialism.
