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kostmayer wrote:I dunno, is it possible to accurately portray character promotions in a series whilst still keeping your main characters around?

Not if you want to keep the series going for more than 3 - 4 years and restrict it to a single ship or station. Promotions, while they're important, are the most important issue - what's crucial is moving people around, so they develop experience in as many different roles as possible. Without that experience they're unlikely to get promoted, and certainly won't reach the higher ranks.

In that case, if a new series was produced, could it succeed with crewmembers changing rank, new members joining the ship, whilst existing characters leave (or die)?

It happens in other TV series, in many cases too much to be realistic.

This was pretty much the Boeg's apex. Not since were they this scary.

I like to refer to Babylon 5. I don't think there's one single character who remained in the same post between the beginning and end of the series. Many of them changed jobs several times.

Captain Seafort wrote:I'm not qualified to comment on whether Clinton was as right-wing as the current Democratic Party, but I wouldn't be surprised.

More so than Obama. Clinton won on a combination of raw charisma and a centrist, inclusive moderatism that the Democratic party hadn't seen in a while. He surrounded himself with more traditional democratic figures, however.

kostmayer wrote:In that case, if a new series was produced, could it succeed with crewmembers changing rank, new members joining the ship, whilst existing characters leave (or die)?

It happens in other TV series, in many cases too much to be realistic.

I think so. IMO the BEST was to do it would be to do a spin off series following the more popular characters, and the others with guest spots or whatnot.

Mark wrote:

kostmayer wrote:In that case, if a new series was produced, could it succeed with crewmembers changing rank, new members joining the ship, whilst existing characters leave (or die)?

It happens in other TV series, in many cases too much to be realistic.

I think so. IMO the BEST was to do it would be to do a spin off series following the more popular characters, and the others with guest spots or whatnot.

Band of Brothers dealt with the issue pretty well. But then again it was helped by the fact that a lot of them just flat out die during the series.

I think it is doable but you need a different setting than the lone ship out exploring and is the only ship in the sector nonsense you get with TNG. In that scenario you can't promote anyone without them just flat going away. If you were to do a series based around say an organized fleet you could have it make sense. The show could start with a Captain and his crew and grow from there as the Captain moved up to command say a division, then a wing of the fleet and the people under him moved up as well.

Yeah. How TNG was set up, it was eventually impossible to move anyone up without sending them off the E-D. Maybe start them lower in the chain of command and follow their promotions?

RK_Striker_JK_5 wrote:Yeah. How TNG was set up, it was eventually impossible to move anyone up without sending them off the E-D. Maybe start them lower in the chain of command and follow their promotions?

You really can't do a show in the Trek universe where you are not having a command level officer as the main character. When dealing with naval ships there is really only 1 person that really matters, along with some others that help he or she make decisions. Everyone else is pretty much a captive to what the captain wants to do so the show would quickly become boring.

If you had like fighter pilots it could work, because they get out and can do their own thing. But I just don't see how you could do a show about say the Chief Engineer week after week and have it be very interesting in the long term.

Yeah, good point. I like keeping an ensemble cast.

Anyone else notice that modifying the deflector dish like this was such a huge deal? Evacuate part of the saucer section and the forward half of the engineering hull IIRC.

RK_Striker_JK_5 wrote:Yeah, good point. I like keeping an ensemble cast.

Anyone else notice that modifying the deflector dish like this was such a huge deal? Evacuate part of the saucer section and the forward half of the engineering hull IIRC.

No doubt a fair bit of radiation was engendered from firing the deflector-weapon.

A lot better than Voyager, lemme tell yah.

I thought the problem with the Dish weapon was that the Enterprise would get destroyed in the blast, so they had to increase the range. I still wonder wether the weapon would have worked if they'd have used it point blank, before Picard was assimilated. The Enterprise was surely worth sacrificing to stop the Cube.

In the trek book Vendetta (granted, its been a long time since I read that book), another ship successfully used the deflector beam to destroy a cube, citing that while the cube had adapted to Enterprise's energy and weapons sig, and had come to expect that move from the E-D, another ship was able to get away with it.

Otherwise that was a silly book. Guinen's "sister" went out and found another Doomsday Machine and was using to to slaughter the Borg, the Borg ships pulled a Devestator move and "United" to make an uber cube, and they assimilated a new spokesman/face of the Borg. A Ferengi.

Mikey wrote:

RK_Striker_JK_5 wrote:Yeah, good point. I like keeping an ensemble cast.

Anyone else notice that modifying the deflector dish like this was such a huge deal? Evacuate part of the saucer section and the forward half of the engineering hull IIRC.

No doubt a fair bit of radiation was engendered from firing the deflector-weapon.

It could have also been from the risk of the thing detonating and taking out a chunk of the ship if it did indeed go screwy.