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Wanted: Ent-Era Trek Reboot Main Theme Ideas


Vondy

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I'm working on an Enterprise-era reboot fic w. a new crew for the NX-01 and an altered Trek timeline. Let's face it, in canon, Kahn was exiled in... 1996. In fact, I'm only saying its set in 88 AFC [after first contact] w.out saying what year first contact happened in. I'm also updating some themes while trying to stay true to what made Trek fun. In some ways, Roddenberry's 1960's zeitgeist-standpoint on ethics and utopia leaves me utterly cold. For me, Trek's writers and actors made it work despite the creator.I want to focus on a classically (not radically) liberal optimism about of man's future and technology. And on Space Action! and Boldly Going! So, anyways, I'm looking for suggestions for a Main Theme. One rule, No Rod Stewart. Actually, no Hotel or Stairway, either.... So, let's hear your ideas!

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Well, IMHO the main theme of Enterprise, which I found rather compelling (when well-executed) was, "Mankind growing up." Our pre-contact civilization had royally screwed itself, which "daddy" (the Vulcans) had to step in and help us clean up. Humans collectively resented that, and like rebellious children chafed under Vulcan's continued paternalistic attempts to guide us. Enterprise opened with the human race effectively in adolescence, eager to strike out on our own, convinced we had the answers and ready to show the Vulcans we didn't need them... only to discover the wider universe is a lot more complicated than we thought, responsibility for our own decisions is a heavy burden, and daddy wasn't always wrong.

 

Yet at the same time, our youthful energy, enthusiasm, and fresh ideas had a salutary effect on the galactic community. Humanity shook up ossified perceptions and prejudices among the older civilizations. We provided an unbiased voice to help reconcile long-standing mistrust and hatred. As mankind matured and grew in prominence and reputation, we became the driving force behind assembling what would ultimately become the Federation. (A story-arc I would have loved to see play out if not for the series's premature cancellation.)

 

A game could start at any point along that arc, depending on what issues your group wanted to roleplay.

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Modest proposal: the timeline actually happened that way.

 

The big issue here is "the Eugenics War," which killed millions of people in the late 1990s, and led to the exile in space of a group of genetically modified superpeople in a ship called the Botany Bay.To be honest, I don't remember that. Maybe I was too wrapped up in the Lewinski scandal?

 

More likely, there was a cover up.Clearly this was a big coverup, given that they (there's always a "they" in conspiracy theories) managed to reattributed millions of deaths to other causes. Apart from modifying 20 million death certificates to read "heart failure" instead of "blown up real good fighting the Battle of Angola-6,"* it's hard to imagine how that could have happened. Heck, the only outsized, single cause of death that I can think of off hand in the 1990s is AIDS. 

 

So let's go with that. The Eugenics War was a covert war; the deaths referred to are from AIDS. AIDS is a war plague, intended to kill off people for, uhm, eugenics reasons. Presumably the fact that it mostly killed gay men is incidental to its actual targeting, intended to obscure the fact that it is aimed at a small group of people with certain genes who are ultra-susceptible to it. 

 

So who is fighting? Khan's escape implies extra-terrestrial involvement, unless one or the other of our Illuminati-light groups has the werewithal to build a spaceship on the side. Two factions of extraterrestrials, fighting through proxies, are attempting to alter the future development of the human species.

 

Who?

 

Since we don't want to multiply entities unnecessarily, we want to start with known early contact era aliens. Vulcans are the pretty obvious candidates. There's even already a eugenics component here. Vulcans and humans can interbreed, and one known outcome of a genetic project combining human and Vulcan hereditary factors is an actually existing superhuman. 

 

Clearly the Vulcans, even given a secretly-Romulan-influenced Vulcan High Command (a plot element of Enterprise that I actually thought worked quite well), are not going to be down with this as an official policy. On the other hand, Vulcan society is as big and complex as any other, presumably, and another episode of Enterprise introduced us to an ancient Vulcan monastery on an undeveloped planet. (It would have been a perfect place for it to turn out that Sarek's space-soul was hidden away, but the writers blew that one.) Two other Vulcan factions --monks, corporations, renegade university departments,  small RPG publishing houses, you take your pick-- have been manipulating the course of events on Earth in pursuit of their agenda. Eventually, they are defeated by a heroic, ragtag band of human rebels (rebels against what is not determined, but all ragtag bands are rebels) with some Vulcan assistance, perhaps, and the last remaining Human-Vulcan hybridish superhumans escape on a spare spaceship, renamed Botany Bay.

 

None the wiser, a larger human society proceeds on its merry way to a mid-21st Century nuclear apocalypse, right at the threshold of warp drive, as it happens. No wonder, given the tragic prehistory of human-Vulcan contact, that a grief-stricken Vulcan society intervenes on Earth as soon as the development of warp drive authorises it per the Vulcan version of the Prime Directive. 

 

None of this, of course, prevents human society from "living rough" for a couple of generations. Stripped of many of the more refined comforts of advanced 21st century technology, human society sees something of a retrograde movement on the social justice front. Racism is not really revived, although there is some manifestation of xenophobia in the context of widespread, sub-nuclear national wars, but gender equality takes backwards steps, mostly invisible to contemporaries, who think that they are quite advanced on this front. As a historian of popular prejudice will be aware, from Victorian times down to the present, smug men have been congratulating themselves on how "advanced" their views on the "Woman Question" are compared with previous eras. "Now, could you please freshen my coffee, Yeoman Rand? That's a good girl."

 

Meanwhile, living rough implies that the birthrate begins to climb back towards pre-modern levels, so that by Contact+88, Earth is just coming out of a renewed "population explosion." Earth's population is actually lower than it was in 2014, but Mars and the Moon have been heavily populated. 

 

And so we are moving back towards the society seen in +88 and even +150. Skewing young compared with our current population, rough, relatively unreflective on many social issues, aggressively liberal and confrontational on values issues, chafing at Vulcan "restraint," and with the secret of the genetic potential of a widespread human-Vulcan hybridisation hanging over the future of the two species, and, perhaps, the galaxy.

 

My two cents.

 

 

*Bonus Ron Goulart-inspired near-future post-apocalyptic reference!

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Point of clarification: Main Theme Music.

 

Hence,

 

One rule, No Rod Stewart. Actually, no Hotel or Stairway, either.... So, let's hear your ideas!

 

Your thoughtful comments are appreciated, and I will respond to them when I have some time, but don't address what I meant to ask.

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The Botany Bay incident was the TOS Episode "Space Seed" they quickly went over the Eugenic Wars and that Khan was the guy that ended up running everything, before normal humanity rose up against him and his augmented kin. Khan disappeared and because the war was so nasty there were few records left.

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Music wise, why not go with the Filmation version of the TOS theme. It's classic and people understand it.

 

There's always Zefram Cochrane's theme for the Launch of the Phoenix (Steppenwolf's Magic Carpet Ride)

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Okay then. You can see that I've spent more time than I should thinking about how to "fix" Enterprise and fanwank the Eugenics War. (I also note that I'm completely unoriginal. D'oh!)

 

So start with that foundation. Timeline:

 

2049: World War III starts.

2054--2079 "Atomic horror."

2063: First Contact

2151: Launch of NX-01 Enterprise. 

2265: First episode of TOS.

 

For a person living in 2151, the beginning of WWIII is as distant as the beginning of World War I. Many people, notably Captain Archer, knew people who were alive in 2049. The grandparents, or even parents, of most older people had personal experiences of it. World War III was a brutal conflict, lasting four years and terminated by a nuclear exchange. It killed 600 million people, presumably including casualties due to conventional fighting, disease, famine, and the usual. This relatively low(!) figure, plus the lack of a complete ecological collapse, suggests that the final nuclear exchange was a gentle exchange of love taps compared with the common Twentieth Century vision of the final apocalypse, consonant with the use of "minimum deterrent" arsenals. 

 

he end of the era of "atomic horror" is 76 years in the past, just a little longer ago than the end of WWII is for us today. Anyone over 80 has at least some memory of it. Anyone over 60, so including most senior policy makers, have parents who lived through it. Only very young children do not have grandparents who remember it.

 

 People who experienced the atomic horror were probably traumatised by it. It was horrible (it's in the name!) and would have been far less confident of it ending than they were of the end of the Great Depression, too. It also seems to have been far more severe. First Contact establishes the revival of a Western-style milieu (admittedly in Montana, but still) as of 2063, while the reconstructed court scene in Encounter at Far Point is very much of the Road Warrior aesthetic. It is in this general period that "Colonel Green" conducts a genocidal war against ...somebody. Enterprise established that the Greenites were purging genetic mutants, presumably due to radiation, and that their activities continued into the post-horror age. Enterprise also establishes that Earth militaries are still active in the immediate past of the launch of NX-01. Global security is not an accepted fact of life in 2151 --although the concern that has kept the United Kingdom in the nuclear submarine business and the United States(?) in Special Forces might be little more than nostalgia at this point. 

 

The Greenite/nuclear submarine thing leads me to propose that the era of reconstruction that began in 2079 was anything but instantaneous. For the people who lived through it, the privations of the post-atomic era, which would have included famine and disease unimaginable to us today, never mind people living in 2049, would have marked them deeply. I have suggested that the era of the "horror" was long enough for people to revert to a pre-modern demographic pattern (seven live births per woman, etc). The result of this would have been the typical "age bulge" expansion of the population after 2079 due to the rapidly rising average age of death. But I think that the lag in the transition from "pre-modern" to "modern" birth rates would have been longer. In many ways, the era immediately after 2079 would have been one of exhilarating prosperity and rapid expansion in the standard of living. More like the 1950s than the 1880s, and I am proposing a Baby Boom. Given the "gradual" onset of the new era, I am going to pull it out of my ass that this "boom" was delayed long enough that the NX-01 era has a Sixties-on-steroids vibe. 

 

So: theme music:

 

Instrumental options

 

Since it's not like I'm going to compose something for you, I shall now proceed to lift stuff direct from Youtube

 

 

Traditional:

 

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=westenra+shenandoah

Or

 

Folk Rock

 

(the revival of folk rock in the 2140s was clearly all about the dance beat)

 

Schmaltz Rock

 

 

Oh what the heck

 

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Point of clarification: Main Theme Music.

 

Hence,

 

 

Your thoughtful comments are appreciated, and I will respond to them when I have some time, but don't address what I meant to ask.

 

I thought you were just being wittily sarcastic. Sorry. :o

 

Musically speaking, while many Trekkers have expressed disapproval of it, I really thought Enterprise's opening theme, "Faith of the Heart," eloquently articulated exactly what the series aspired to be about. Personally, I found the parade of pseudo-classical themes from all the previous series had grown tiresome.

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I thought you were just being wittily sarcastic. Sorry. :o

 

Musically speaking, while many Trekkers have expressed disapproval of it, I really thought Enterprise's opening theme, "Faith of the Heart," eloquently articulated exactly what the series aspired to be about. Personally, I found the parade of pseudo-classical themes from all the previous series had grown tiresome.

 

I was being witty, sarcastic, and serious all at once!

 

I agree Faith of the Heart struck the show's key emotional note. And, for the record, I don't hate it. I just want something else -- it could be a more contemporary or instrumental beat. It could even have vocals. I admit that I too got tired of the procession of orchestral style intros the original series had -- despite their being iconic. Last night I was listening to a ton of music from Two Steps From Hell. Its distinct from the orchestral style of most Trek shows. Here's one I liked:

 

 

But, I'm not committed and don't want to operate in a creative echo-chamber -- someone else may have a better idea!

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I would love to play in a NX-1 Enterprise campaign. Being an engineer on an experimental ship with tons of untested tech. Gearhead heaven!

 

Its also explorer, pioneer, trailblazer and by-the-seat-of-your-pants heaven! Until the NX-02 is commissioned you are Starfleet beyond the Sol system. And, if you pay closer attention to transit and communication times there are no discussions with admirals. Messages could take days or weeks -- it has a very Age of Sail verve in that way.

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Will be parsing...

 

Well, IMHO the main theme of Enterprise, which I found rather compelling (when well-executed) was, "Mankind growing up."

Agreed 100%.

 

Our pre-contact civilization had royally screwed itself, which "daddy" (the Vulcans) had to step in and help us clean up.

Agreed w. reservations.

 

Its not clear how much they "stepped in" or how much credit they really get for humanity's rapid social progress. We aren't told. However, early on, the Vulcan's are show being worry-worts over how fast humanity made progress and actually seemed intimidated by it. I would credit for aiding in academic and scientific progress with a caveat (see below) -- and certainly a fascination with their culture and thought would have an influence on our own -- but how much of that progress was simply the psychological impact of realizing "we're not alone?" For all its aliens, a key element of Trek is optimism about the human spirit.

 

Humans collectively resented that,

Not without cause. Archer's complaint, while petulantly made, was 100% valid. His father did die before seeing his W5 drive in action because of Vulcan interference. And, the parent analogy can be carried too far. They were a more accurately a foreign power we were interacting with. One could, instead, make the analogy of a smaller nation dealing with a great power that wants to maintain the established world order.

 

and like rebellious children chafed under Vulcan's continued paternalistic attempts to guide us.

I don't regard the Vulcans as being  altruists rockin' Moses on the Mount and Buddy Jesus for humanity's sake. In fact, presenting them that way would make them boring, naive, and unrealistic. They were using information control and diplomatic leverage to further goals they were setting for us. As an American who has seen his nation's foreign policy from within and without. The US always says its there to help -- and really wants to believe that about itself -- but the truth is that we gladhand in public and twist arms in private. Washington has a tendency to give avuncular advise "for their own good" that is really about further our own national interests. Now, sometimes we are right, and sometimes we are helping, and we should pursue our own interests. But... American (and Western) aid dollars come with strings attached -- I see Vulcan help in much the same vein.

 

Enterprise opened with the human race effectively in adolescence, eager to strike out on our own, convinced we had the answers and ready to show the Vulcans we didn't need them...only to discover the wider universe is a lot more complicated than we thought,

More or less true. There does come a point where, when a boy becomes a man, he tells his father "I'm a man now. I'm going to call my own shots, and make and learn from my own mistakes." And, the universe turns out to just be international politics in space. Its not really *that* more complicated than our own history of many cultures interacting, competing, trading, warring, and navigating one another on a planet that seemed increasingly smaller as years and technology marched on. It wasn't really outside of our experience -- it was just interplanetary.

 

responsibility for our own decisions is a heavy burden,and daddy wasn't always wrong.

We didn't know this from our own lives and history? And, daddy wasn't *always* right and there is plenty of room to lambaste Vulcan philosophy and ethics. Or rather, Roddenberry's philosophy and ethics and view of what an "all grown up humanity" rocking a utopia would ultimately look like. He wasn't always wrong, either, but man was he politically narrow and dogmatic! Now, I know it sounds like I'm being really hard on the Vulcans, but the truth is I do think they were right about several things, did perceive themselves as being helpful, and did aid mankind in bettering itself. I just don't think they were selfless angels from on high representing "enlightenment."

 

Yet at the same time, our youthful energy, enthusiasm, and fresh ideas had a salutary effect on the galactic community. Humanity shook up ossified perceptions and prejudices among the older civilizations. We provided an unbiased voice to help reconcile long-standing mistrust and hatred. As mankind matured and grew in prominence and reputation, we became the driving force behind assembling what would ultimately become the Federation.

Agreed 100%! In the end it was human hopes and dreams -- and wisdom -- that forged the Federation and brought so many disparate alien species together in a common cause.

 

(A story-arc I would have loved to see play out if not for the series's premature cancellation.)

Also agreed. Enterprise was cancelled just as it hit its stride and started going somewhere. To that end, its too bad it wasn't a cable show. Almost every episode of Enterpise had more viewers than cable titan Mad Men...

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Enterprise suffered from day 1 from interferance from the network. All of that Temporal Cold War BS was the network making them add that storyline to what would have been a fine show without it. Also, The Zindi was also annoying. There were so many reason to not bother with the show. It was annoying that the show was so Meh to bad.

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There was just so much potential in that show. Let's look at the first season:

 

The pilot features a Klingon warrior being set loose on Earth. He is promptly shot by a Kansas farmer. (No doubt acting out the post-apocalyptic stresses inflicted on his parents!) This turns out to be a scheme to start trouble between Earth and the Klingon Empire. Apart from the intended, unnecessary "temporal cold war" arc, this works pretty well. Earth has to rush NX-01 into service so it can go find the culprits and apologise to the Klingons. I would have developed the scenario a little differently from the writers, and I certainly would not have put the Klingon homeworld in easy range, but, you know, details. Visiting the Kingon homeworld is something to save for Season 5 sweeps, if you ask me.

 

Then we have a scary stuff in space encounter. Again the execution wasn't up to the concept, but it didn't fall that far short.

 

Then we have the "Ghost Wind" episode, which is what I want to focus on. Just to explain, the Ghost Wind is a plot device from Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover novels. It is the pollen season of a weird, unearthly plant from the weird, unearthly planet of Darkover. Every now and then in the spring, conditions are just right for a mass pollen release. Humans are affected; but instead of getting plugged sinuses, their latent psychic powers are stimulated. The result is a mass psychedelic craziness that works the same way that hippies used to think an acid party worked. Everyone gets freaky, there's lots of sex, a little paranoid violence, a little mindmelding. 

 

Now, in the context of the episode, the Enterprise has run into what is described as a "Minshara-class" planet. A review linked to the Wikipedia article reveals that I'm not the only fan who squeed when the classic "M-Class planet" was revealed to be Vulcan-derived terminology. (Another squee moment comes later in the episode, when they transport a casualty aboard ship, and a semi-malfunctioning transporter nearly kills him, confirming that the transporter is going to continue to be an unreliable and potentially lethal technology that won't be available as an obnoxious deus ex machina.) 

 

Captain Archer decides that since this is the first inhabitable planet that they've run into, they're going to go down and look around.

 

And by that he means, "have a picnic."

 

"Planets aren't picnics," says Vulcan Science Officer T'Pol, "Please show a little sense, you sophomoric goof!" Only she's a diplomat, so she phrases it as something like, "Highly illogical, Captain." 

 

So off they go. The metaplot  is the cliched one that, of course, that the planet is, in fact, dangerous. Because of the Ghost Wind. Only no sex, please, because we are Broadcast standards-friendly.

 

But never mind the metaplot, because look at the raw material we have to work with here.

 

i) Humans are awfully distrustful of Vulcan motives, and of their Vulcan High Command-imposed Vulcan shipmate. Now there's a drug in the air to make them paranoid! And this, to be fair, is well and truly developed.

ii) T'Pol is a pretty, pretty alien woman-type person. In a dark, post-apocalyptic future, there is only romantic tension! Unfortunately, the writers have decided to have an act-off between Trineer and Bakula to decide who is worthy of the toothsome T'Pol, and, given that, decide not to do anything with the sex stuff that is right there in the source material they are ripping off homaging. Oh, sure, they're way too high minded for that kind of stuff. We'll have to wait for just episodes and episodes for a tank-topped T'Pol to slather the ointment on Trineer's buff body in the uhm, err, "decontamination chamber."

iii) Vulcans are psychic, right? They can mind-meld. Humans are potentially psychic, too, in this imaginarium. Although it might be that the only established way of developing this is by running them into the edge of the Galaxy. It will eventually be decided that the Vulcan mind-meld is the Official Metaphor For Teh Gayness in this series, so that T'Pol's development of mind-melding capability is a source of considerable emotional distress for her. The Vulcan High Command, in fact, officially oppresses the mind melders. This stuff was worked out as early as Episode 17, and even if it had not been written yet, which I doubt, it would not have cost the writers one iota to have T'Pol develop an unwitting, subconscious mind-meldy thing with one of the humans. 

 

To be precise, with Trineer, because I have my "Trip-T'Pol Official Shipper" badge right here. What a great way that would have been to develop Trip's paranoia and T'Pol's prejudice against the primitive, uninhibited Earthlings. Again, this is right in the source material! In fact, I can't believe that the writers didn't intend to do exactly this, given where their material is coming from. I suspect that a rewrite blanderised this stuff out. 

 

iv) Beyond that, Captain Archer's "Let's have a picnic" thing seems a little undermotivated. But here's the thing: this season has one excellent and a couple of passable space-horror episodes. The last third of the season turns into a mini-arc with Enterprise on its way to the pleasure planet of Rissa for desperately needed shore leave. Inserting this episode before the beginning of that arc would have turned somewhat inexplicable behaviour into evidence that the stress is getting to Archer. As, in real life, it would. All in all, an excellent way of moving a good overarching plot (humans and Vulcans becoming more self aware, moving towards the fall of the High Command) forward. 

 

All of that is there, in the source material, or in the first season as eventually shown. Why not put it in the episode?

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Okay then. You can see that I've spent more time than I should thinking about how to "fix" Enterprise and fanwank the Eugenics War. (I also note that I'm completely unoriginal. D'oh!)

 

So start with that foundation. Timeline:

 

2049: World War III starts.

2054--2079 "Atomic horror."

2063: First Contact

2151: Launch of NX-01 Enterprise. 

2265: First episode of TOS.

 

For a person living in 2151, the beginning of WWIII is as distant as the beginning of World War I. Many people, notably Captain Archer, knew people who were alive in 2049. The grandparents, or even parents, of most older people had personal experiences of it. World War III was a brutal conflict, lasting four years and terminated by a nuclear exchange. It killed 600 million people, presumably including casualties due to conventional fighting, disease, famine, and the usual. This relatively low(!) figure, plus the lack of a complete ecological collapse, suggests that the final nuclear exchange was a gentle exchange of love taps compared with the common Twentieth Century vision of the final apocalypse, consonant with the use of "minimum deterrent" arsenals. 

 

he end of the era of "atomic horror" is 76 years in the past, just a little longer ago than the end of WWII is for us today. Anyone over 80 has at least some memory of it. Anyone over 60, so including most senior policy makers, have parents who lived through it. Only very young children do not have grandparents who remember it.

 

 People who experienced the atomic horror were probably traumatised by it. It was horrible (it's in the name!) and would have been far less confident of it ending than they were of the end of the Great Depression, too. It also seems to have been far more severe. First Contact establishes the revival of a Western-style milieu (admittedly in Montana, but still) as of 2063, while the reconstructed court scene in Encounter at Far Point is very much of the Road Warrior aesthetic. It is in this general period that "Colonel Green" conducts a genocidal war against ...somebody. Enterprise established that the Greenites were purging genetic mutants, presumably due to radiation, and that their activities continued into the post-horror age. Enterprise also establishes that Earth militaries are still active in the immediate past of the launch of NX-01. Global security is not an accepted fact of life in 2151 --although the concern that has kept the United Kingdom in the nuclear submarine business and the United States(?) in Special Forces might be little more than nostalgia at this point. 

 

The Greenite/nuclear submarine thing leads me to propose that the era of reconstruction that began in 2079 was anything but instantaneous. For the people who lived through it, the privations of the post-atomic era, which would have included famine and disease unimaginable to us today, never mind people living in 2049, would have marked them deeply. I have suggested that the era of the "horror" was long enough for people to revert to a pre-modern demographic pattern (seven live births per woman, etc). The result of this would have been the typical "age bulge" expansion of the population after 2079 due to the rapidly rising average age of death. But I think that the lag in the transition from "pre-modern" to "modern" birth rates would have been longer. In many ways, the era immediately after 2079 would have been one of exhilarating prosperity and rapid expansion in the standard of living. More like the 1950s than the 1880s, and I am proposing a Baby Boom. Given the "gradual" onset of the new era, I am going to pull it out of my ass that this "boom" was delayed long enough that the NX-01 era has a Sixties-on-steroids vibe.

 

Wow. You have put a lot of thought into that and color me impressed. I may well use some of that!

 

However, your closing line is one of my key issues with Trek's back-story and sociopolitical dogmas. Trek it isn't a "Sixties-on-steroids vibe" -- Trek is the sixties on steroids en toto. I'm not a baby-boomer who made hay in the 1960's. And Roddenberry was only 9 years younger than my grandfather.This isn't to say I don't remember the cold war or atomic horror or WWIII fears -- but the Berlin Wall fell in my senior year of high school. I watched that world order evaporate to be replaced by a different one. I have lived a life of rapid social transitions, too.

 

I remember, even though it was the 1970's a south that remained unofficially segregated. One of my first memories is the klan burning a cross in our front yard and threatening to kill my father and I when I was four years old because we were "race traitors" who sold our house to a black family. I remember the cold war. I cried when the wall came down. I remember a time before personal computers and email and the internet -- let alone this social media business. Those problems haven't gone away. But there has been immense progress and they express themselves in very different ways -- its a very different world. 

 

I'm not living in the world I grew up in, let alone the world Roddenberry grew up in. While a lot of Trek's ideals and hopes and dreams are timeless and resonate -- there is a good deal that doesn't. I'm a classically liberal idealist, not an angry sixties radical. His vision of human enlightenment and utopia leaves me cold and has some ironically authoritarian undertones. Let alone the lack of nuance or diversity of opinion and thought. And, some of it just isn't our zeitgeist -- like the atomic horror.

 

Our end of the world scenario and fears aren't singularly focused on the bomb. What about decades of global warming leading to the "resource and eugenics wars" before the collapse of ocean systems and a sudden decade long slide into an ice age? The eruption of a supervolcano or asteroid impact could create the equivalent of nuclear winter -- with resource wars in its wake, as well What about powerful surveillance states run by plutocratic elites enslaving the masses while genetically engineering their own offspring to be superior rising to power? What if man is picking himself back up from his own folly while living in mega-acrologies amid frozen tundra and in orbital and lunar colonies above? Worse, what if man only survived because of the orbitals?!

 

That doesn't mean I necessarily intend to make sweeping changes to the backstory -- and I like your ideas -- but I do want to boil Trek down to those ideals and hopes and dreams without it being "sixties redux.

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Enterprise suffered from day 1 from interferance from the network. All of that Temporal Cold War BS was the network making them add that storyline to what would have been a fine show without it. Also, The Zindi was also annoying. There were so many reason to not bother with the show. It was annoying that the show was so Meh to bad.

 

Don't get me started on the Temporal Cold War, and there were other more-than-quibbles I had with it -- but there were several good episodes in the first three seasons. I also liked several of the main characters -- and enjoyed Archer's more relaxed style after so many "intensity on steroids" captains. They had established protocols and history and fully developed policies and ideologies and ex-cathedra righteousness. He was literally making it up as he went and admitted he was making mistakes. I wish there had been a season five. The show was actually digging itself out and going somewhere...

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Some songs you may want to consider:

 

Transcendence by Lindsey Stirling

 

Stars Align by Lindsey Stirling

 

More to come.

 

She has a compelling sound. I like the fusion of beat-box electronic drums with the violin. Its very well done.

 

I'm not sure if I'd pick them for a main theme, but they are going on my playlist.

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Modest proposal: the timeline actually happened that way.

 

The big issue here is "the Eugenics War," which killed millions of people in the late 1990s, and led to the exile in space of a group of genetically modified superpeople in a ship called the Botany Bay.To be honest, I don't remember that. Maybe I was too wrapped up in the Lewinski scandal?

 

More likely, there was a cover up.Clearly this was a big coverup, given that they (there's always a "they" in conspiracy theories) managed to reattributed millions of deaths to other causes. Apart from modifying 20 million death certificates to read "heart failure" instead of "blown up real good fighting the Battle of Angola-6,"* it's hard to imagine how that could have happened. Heck, the only outsized, single cause of death that I can think of off hand in the 1990s is AIDS. 

 

So let's go with that. The Eugenics War was a covert war; the deaths referred to are from AIDS. AIDS is a war plague, intended to kill off people for, uhm, eugenics reasons. Presumably the fact that it mostly killed gay men is incidental to its actual targeting, intended to obscure the fact that it is aimed at a small group of people with certain genes who are ultra-susceptible to it. 

 

So who is fighting? Khan's escape implies extra-terrestrial involvement, unless one or the other of our Illuminati-light groups has the werewithal to build a spaceship on the side. Two factions of extraterrestrials, fighting through proxies, are attempting to alter the future development of the human species.

 

Who?

 

Since we don't want to multiply entities unnecessarily, we want to start with known early contact era aliens. Vulcans are the pretty obvious candidates. There's even already a eugenics component here. Vulcans and humans can interbreed, and one known outcome of a genetic project combining human and Vulcan hereditary factors is an actually existing superhuman. 

 

Clearly the Vulcans, even given a secretly-Romulan-influenced Vulcan High Command (a plot element of Enterprise that I actually thought worked quite well), are not going to be down with this as an official policy. On the other hand, Vulcan society is as big and complex as any other, presumably, and another episode of Enterprise introduced us to an ancient Vulcan monastery on an undeveloped planet. (It would have been a perfect place for it to turn out that Sarek's space-soul was hidden away, but the writers blew that one.) Two other Vulcan factions --monks, corporations, renegade university departments,  small RPG publishing houses, you take your pick-- have been manipulating the course of events on Earth in pursuit of their agenda. Eventually, they are defeated by a heroic, ragtag band of human rebels (rebels against what is not determined, but all ragtag bands are rebels) with some Vulcan assistance, perhaps, and the last remaining Human-Vulcan hybridish superhumans escape on a spare spaceship, renamed Botany Bay.

As clever as this is -- and genuine applause to you -- no. Just no.

 

None the wiser, a larger human society proceeds on its merry way to a mid-21st Century nuclear apocalypse, right at the threshold of warp drive, as it happens. No wonder, given the tragic prehistory of human-Vulcan contact, that a grief-stricken Vulcan society intervenes on Earth as soon as the development of warp drive authorises it per the Vulcan version of the Prime Directive.

Don't get me started on the Prime Directive! Talk about a dogmatic, one-size-fits-all, and warp-centric license for moral indifference. Warp technology is the only measure for social and cultural sophistication and development? All contact with pre-warp cultures is a *contamination* or a *corrupting* influence on them without exception? All contact is unwarranted no matter what? Whether they are tech level 1 or tech level 9 makes no difference?

 

This wasn't reflected in TOS, incidentally. There is an episode where Kirk gives an order and Spock asks, "so the Prime Directive is in full force, Captain?" Scotty and Bones then elucidate what the Prime Directive being in full force means. Wait, you mean there are times when it isn't in full force? Its dependent on the Captain's judgement? So, its really the Prime Principle? Or, the Prime Suggestion?

 

But, by TNG it had become the Prime Dogma -- an iron-clad thought-terminating cliche along the lines of "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one." Sounds noble. In practice? Not so much. And yet, despite all of Picard's pontificating about the inviolate sanctity of the PD, when an admiral complains to Picard he has violated the PD 9 times in 6 years he waves him off saying "it was necessary." Its 100% inviolate in all cases unless I -- Picard -- say so!

 

Let alone this little tidbit -- Stafleet isn't alone out there. Other powers and planets don't share the Prime Dogma. Unless the planet you are dealing with is isolated and remote to the centers of star fairing nations. Odds are someone else will make contact and "corrupt," "contaminate," and perhaps colonize and exploit them. You know -- the horror story the PD was warning about. I know, you could intervene once that contact is made -- but is it really prudential and forward thinking to do so? This is doubly true with Andoria and Vulcan in a "great powers" style chess game, let alone a galaxy that also has Klingons, Tellarites, Romulans, et al.

 

To me the ethics of the Prime Directive are rooted in a black and white and inflexible 1960's radical read on the conduct of the colonial powers in their conquered territories and the aftermath -- are we really worried Starfleet captains will start invading planets, taking them over, and then exploiting the natives for the glory of the federation? That it will become Star Trek: Heart of Darkness? I can see telling them -- barring a very narrow set of exigent circumstances due to communication times -- not to interfere without the go-ahead from SF Command or the Federation Council. But, never? Ever? No matter how horrifying the outcome?

 

This goes double when you take into context its deeper message -- humanity cannot and will not ever learn from its mistakes, or grow in wisdom and character and prudence. That runs at odds with the eternal optimism Trek wears on its sleeve. I think the Prime Directive, in general terms, is a good idea. But the specifics of its presentation are contradictory, disturbing, and not a little bit stupid. Its an inflexible dogma -- and those never turn out badly, do they?

 

None of this, of course, prevents human society from "living rough" for a couple of generations. Stripped of many of the more refined comforts of advanced 21st century technology, human society sees something of a retrograde movement on the social justice front. Racism is not really revived, although there is some manifestation of xenophobia in the context of widespread, sub-nuclear national wars, but gender equality takes backwards steps, mostly invisible to contemporaries, who think that they are quite advanced on this front. As a historian of popular prejudice will be aware, from Victorian times down to the present, smug men have been congratulating themselves on how "advanced" their views on the "Woman Question" are compared with previous eras. "Now, could you please freshen my coffee, Yeoman Rand? That's a good girl."

Amusingly put. Accurate of TOS. And, not necessarily unlikely when "living rough." A good deal of our enlightened progress is rooted in the prosperity and stability and ubiquitous technology we enjoy. Remove or diminish that and pre-modern divisions of labor and survival strategies will become more prevalent -- esp. if the population dramatically drops. The entire notion of "women and children first" and "men go out and do the dangerous jobs" was rooted in the fact that men are less reproductively valuable than women while possessing greater brute strength to do the work today's technology has replaced so much of. Today, we still have some dangerous *and* brute-strength jobs -- and those remain overwhelmingly male -- though its a much narrower segment of our moden economy. And the vast majority of women don't really seem to *want* those jobs whether they can do them or not. The irony, of course, is that Trek tech is light-years beyond our own. Literally.

 

Meanwhile, living rough implies that the birthrate begins to climb back towards pre-modern levels, so that by Contact+88, Earth is just coming out of a renewed "population explosion." Earth's population is actually lower than it was in 2014, but Mars and the Moon have been heavily populated. 

 

And so we are moving back towards the society seen in +88 and even +150. Skewing young compared with our current population, rough, relatively unreflective on many social issues, aggressively liberal and confrontational on values issues, chafing at Vulcan "restraint," and with the secret of the genetic potential of a widespread human-Vulcan hybridisation hanging over the future of the two species, and, perhaps, the galaxy.

That makes a lot of sense on a cultural-psychological level.

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I want to focus on a classically (not radically) liberal optimism about of man's future and technology. And on Space Action! and Boldly Going! So, anyways, I'm looking for suggestions for a Main Theme. One rule, No Rod Stewart. Actually, no Hotel or Stairway, either.... So, let's hear your ideas!

 

Boldly Going!

 

OT, I know. :)

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BTW i know it SOUNDED like Rod Stewart, but was actually sung by a Tenor named Russell Watson. It's title is actually "Where My Heart Will Take Me".
The song originally appeared in the movie Patch Adams where it WAS actually sung by Rod Stewart. I am sure that the Enterprise production didn't have the budget to actually pay Mr Stewart for this version of the song.

 

I know that this is picky, but There's a part of me that likes being correct.

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