Barbelith Underground > Film, TV & Theatre

There was an episode of Next Gen in which warp drive in an area of space had resulted in a place where subspace had kind of eroded and after that the crew of the Enterprise had to stay under Warp 8 for risk of further damaging space. I found that really interesting at the time. I'll come back to that in a moment.

Basically the various Star Trek shows since Next Generation had been hinting at the apparent decadence and over-ripeness of the Federation and how complacent it had become, and ripe for corruption. Again - all of which I thought was an interesting parallel to Americas sense of self-perception at the time, of a noble experiment drifting away from its aspirations. So it seemed to me part of the thing you had to do in this environment was to try and redeem the Federation and make it a positive aspirational thing again by making a break from that in some way. Also it had become clear that a larger block of the technology that they'd developed they were using to compensate for a lack in clarity on stories, and one other thing that I found very annoying - that frankly their vision of the future became increasingly less alien or strange and has started to look a bit dated. That last thing seemed to me to be kind of unfixable, frankly, except to try and start pushing it in weirder directions.

What I'd hoped was going to happen did - in fact - not. My desire was that the final episodes of Voyager would show a ship that had been travelling for decades arrive back in an Alpha Quadrant that it barely recognised and in which they were pretty much the sole representatives of a functioning and aspirationally noble Federation. My thought was that the problems in space-time caused by Warp travel had escalated dramatically, creating a chain reaction that made warp drive pretty much totally impractical, and that for the last twenty years or so, most of the planets in the federation had been pretty much isolated from one another and had started going in radically different directions. Some technologies had been lost, families had been split apart, different races had been rammed together on certain planets, planets that were not self-sufficient had been forced to completely re-orient their production etc. etc. In this environment, younger races who hadn't been engaged in the federation for as long would be in a better state to cope with things than the older established planets. In the depths of space, some ships had been trapped in subspace by the collapse, others had been marooned in the middle of nowhere.

Into this environment comes Voyager, pretty much the only known ship in the Federation able to travel between worlds because of its reclaimed technology from around the whatever sector, but in a slower fashion. This makes the ship incredibly valuable to anyone whose system it arrives in. The premise of the new show is that a Federation needs to be rebuilt, with Voyager being the hub of that activity either with a generational crew, or with the existing crew displaced twenty years, or - my particular favourite - with a new crew of aspirational multi-racial idealists from earth figuring out that the crashed ship might have the ability to fly between planets and deciding to steal it and try to use it to remake the universe.

And of course, no one knows what has happened to all the worlds on the edge of what was Klingon territory or Romulan territory or whatever, and each of those world's may be isolated or not for all any of our crew knows.

it sounds a bit too much like Andromeda, I guess, in retrospect, but I liked the way that you could gradually reintroduce characters or races after twenty years and illustrate significant changes. For example, I always assumed that the grub-like Ferengi, continually obsessed with acquisition were kind of pupating higher order beings of some kind, frantically accumulating for their chrysalis stage. I had this theory that they'd end up being the wormhole aliens of DS9. Twenty years of exposure to different spacial radiation or being trapped in subspace or whatever might force this transition in some way. Suddenly, a radically different culture appears to operate with. I'm thinking also docile Klingons subdued by chemicals in the water on one world, an emerging group of long-distance telepaths being used to communicate between worlds, new distant territories turning towards religion and spirituality, high science worlds finding new ways of travelling, totally holographic cultures achieving equal recognition, etc. etc. etc. Could be a laugh...

Redeeming Star Trek