A more down to Earth Star Trek

2021/09/14
447th: A StarTrek without everyone having  a snowflack backstory.
Because seriously, how much of VOY was some sort of sleeper-agent?
Chakote, Tuvok, Paris was in jail, Bashire was a super-baby,  Anyone with the Maquis background. Tasha was from a rape-gang planet which thankfully never got fleshed out.   Ugh, and Spock's sister...
Wesley had that nonsense with the traveler.
Kes was some sleep-agent demi-god or some shit.
Archer's dad made the ship. That's pretty tame. And it's up-front and makes sense. It's part of why he's the captain. All the rest is bullshit late-reveal crap because writers are lazy. There's that desire to "be epic" and save the world or re-write history *cough*Abrams*cough*. But that's shoddy work. It's the easy out. It demeans all the rest of it.

Yeah, the opposite of that.
-Makey -recent academy grad. Earth born. Green. The blank slate everyman to identify with.
-Gor'Bath - Klingon  colonist. Felt like joining military but really just had to get out of that backwater town.
-Susan -older, research station drove her crazy.   Commander. Not even cpt, the ship is too small for that.
-John - Family history in starfleet, busted down from Cmdr->LT for bar fights.   ie, kirk
-Alena - Their Vulcan chronicler who loves hearing stories over subspace. Works deepspace relay network, spotty connection, transcribing, taking notes. Bored. shunned by vulcans for being too emotional. "on sabbatical". Secret shrine to gor'bath. Loves action stories.   "We beamed in and shot them. Afterwa-..." "Sir, do you mind having Gor'Bath provide a tactical recollection?"

The adventure-seeking crew out past the border.
Corvette scout ship "Oh god, even smaller than voyager-class?  Enterprise has all the stuff that would be useful out here. Yeah, but this is cheaper and there's a LOT of space"
Kirk-like ruff'n'tumble unknown space exploration. They're sent where probes don't come back from.
Mixed with extreme boredom and empty space because they do "probe work" when no probes are missing.   The gap between spiral arms just doesn't have as much stuff.
Big probe repair bay. Like a carrier or a torpedo bay. Big engineering bay. Lots of self-sufficiency stuff.


Crashed on a planet again. Tow truck dispatched. Engineer has a bailing wire and duck-tape fix. But wants emergency beam-out in case it doesn't work. "Should we even risk it?"   "I've been working on this for 2 months man, I NEED to see if this works"


An alien space animal wears a destroyed probe hull like a skin to sneak inside and suckle energy conduits.  "Well... It's harmless sir, but I think it's been destroying probes." "So shoo it away or something".


Q encounter. Sudden flash. 2 Q, one focusing on a glowy ball. Ugghh, now there's a ship. With PEOPLE.
It's small are you sure there's people? "Ahem"   ah... deal with it.
Deal with it Q says. Deal with it. <turns to cpt>  ok, We're sorry about all you probes, but Q business. Fuck off.
....yeah. ok. We can do that. We'll cordon off uh, how much space you need?
snap, main screen: That star, 20 light years
That's huge!
mummer: 10 light years will be plenty
ok fine, 10 light years. Is that reasonable?
For sure. Full stop, send a message to Alena on subspace.
Thank you. Huh, Q was wrong about you. FLASH.
Rest of the episode is the crew talking about what they'd do with Q power. Yeah, you think it's an adventure episode, but no, boring downtime because the captain did the rational thing. The theme for this series is reasonableness. Whole thing ends with the murmuring Q flashing in "I'm bored of work! IT'S Q TIME!" FLASH! and they all generally get their wish to some extent. Whole ship is decked out like Carnival, Susan gets her photo of her son, The one person who just wanted a bar of latnum is beside himself. "20! 200 bars of latnum!" screaming into the ceiling.  GorBath is tackled by a ravenous animal and they fight because of course he said he'd wish for an epic battle.