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 could totally see the Federation getting involved in a war with the best intentions, believing that they need to act to prevent a powerful, implacable faction from gaining the upper hand and tipping the balance of power across many star systems & potentially exterminating/enslaving multiple less advanced civilizations, say along a Federation border.
And the whole thing starts going sideways, and the Feds won’t commit fully to the effort but a dedicated faction of true believers keeps it going on a shoestring.
Kind of sounds like the Maquis. Or maybe the Cardassian War in general.
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.
Yeah, with Trek technology war would be pretty terrible and boring and come down to energy production.
In DS9 the Cardassians build automated weapon platforms and the Federation builds self replicating mines. At that point I find it hard to imagine that war wouldn’t just become a matter of industrial replicators churning out autonomous weapons and defensive systems as fast as possible. Your only need a few control ships in an area with subspace communication to manage massive fleets.
It also seems like Federation tech is pretty near the end game since they’re competitive in all the quadrants (I haven’t finished Voyager though, I can’t remember how they fare against Borg tech), so overwhelming enemies in quantity and energy reserves would be an acceptable strategy.
So maybe we don’t see many phaser wounds, but saying that there’s nothing there ignores all the other ways people can get injured in a battle (explosions, crashes, etc). There may not be analogs to bullet wounds, but I bet there are plenty of other ways.
The problem is that they’re not really trekking anywhere at that point. I remember that being a big criticism of DS9 when it was first airing. DS9 partially made up for it by having a very cosmopolitan setting and the occasional offworld episode, but it wasn’t until a few seasons that they were regularly having adventures off station.
Interestingly, I think DS9 was also the most war-related series, at least of the first four. Voyager had their ongoing Odyssey combat adventures, but not a larger war the way the Dominion War was portrayed. Generally speaking, wars with the Klingons or Romulans just provided context for episodic plots, not drive a multi-season story arc.
I even think there were several MASH-like episodes - stories like Nog playing medic, Jake as a war reporter, Kira being forced to evict that farmer, and some others. They showed the cruelty and absurdity of war, but of course without MASH’s humor. And I think that’s what made MASH, MASH. The bitter, jaded, drafted doctors and medical personnel using humor as a defense. It’s not war that’s non-Trek so much as that kind of human attitude (even if it did surface in later episodes of later series). There’s no Burns and Hot Lips versus Hawkeye and Trapper kind of dynamic in Starfleet.
Come to think of it, Q was a literary trickster character, like Hawkeye. They both had a bemused but sometimes quite angry disregard for authority and did what they could to show it up as absurd. That analogy never occurred to me before. Q is what Hawkeye would be given the power of a god.
There’s no Burns and Hot Lips versus Hawkeye and Trapper kind of dynamic in Starfleet.
Although I see your point, I have to disagree with you here. Look at the Beta shift vs Alpha shift in Lower Decks. There’s clearly room in Starfleet for both the serious and the goofy, even in a comedy show.
Q is what Hawkeye would be given the power of a god.
Well now I want to see that show!
I agree, but I was concentrating on the Roddenberry-verse, since I think we started with the idea that it would be something apart from his conceptualization of the world-building he was doing.
In fact, I think that Lower Decks is a comedy, and one of the organizing features of the humor is poking good-natured fun at Roddenberry’s conceptualization of the universe and the Federation. It’s not outright parody in the sense of Galaxy Quest, but the non-Trekness is deliberately used as a source of humor.
I think that’s the pivot point. The US Army is worthy of endless parody and it doesn’t have to be good natured. We’ve hit a weird part of our timeline where we (as Americans) are idolizing our military as heroic icons. As someone who has been there, I’d rather go back to what we had in the 70s and 80s (not the institutionalized homophobia, but the skepticism of civilians). Starfleet was created at a time of such skepticism, and was set up in deliberate contrast as a near-utopian future. We’re coming to a different place now, where any given soldier is a selfless defender of freedom around the world but Starfleet is getting a more comedic and skeptical treatment.
Anyway, I’d really love to see the idea get a treatment, but it’d be tough to balance the Trekness with the MASHness.
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.
There was a spinoff pitched during TOS called Hopeship featuring M’benga. The pitch for NBC/RCA was that instead of introducing expensive colorful sets, they could stay shipboard and have expensive alien makeup and costumes.
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.
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.
Wow. Yeah, because if you read my post, that is exactly the part of MAS*H that I wanted to copy.
My comment was just hating on MASH, not your concept. I just can’t stand MASH.
The idea of a story of the war from a medical perspective sounds like fun, but I think it would be even more interesting to have war be a part of it (like the Dominion War) but also have some drama and fun like Scrubs.
