Brian Bellmont (see below) has recently become the 289,004th person to suggest that the latest version of Trek might improve itself by hiring noted genre writers. After all, people like Ellison and Sturgeon wrote a couple of the original series’ best.
This likely won’t happen, but it begs a question. What might Enterprise look like if your favourite genre writer/director (dead or alive) had a hand in penning or directing an ep?
H.P. Lovecraft: the Enterprise sends a landing party to a small New England planet which harbors a horrifying, eldritch secret. Archer will continue to dictate a log of the events, even whilst being devoured by a sea-food-like eldritch alien with an unpronounceable eldritch name.
Stephen King: see above, but the characters will speak less ponderously.
Robert Heinlein: a technical problem will require that the crew make a tough decision. Archer will explain how anyone who disagrees even slightly with the philosophical underpinnings of the decision he ultimately makes is a weak, stupid ass who is incapable of proper rational thought and should probably be vapourized.
Kim Stanley Robinson: the crew of the Enterprise spend a couple of generations terraforming a planet for future colonists.
Joss Whedon: the crew of the Enteprise, as agents of the Alliance, must track down a fugitive brother and sister thought to be on board an unlicensed ship.
Cecilia Tan: After being exposed to a potentially lethal space-STD, T’Pol must spend a really long time in the decon chamber with various members of the cast. More esoteric decontamination protocols require that Tucker experience a threesome with Phlox and one of his wives, and Hoshi receive a spanking. And let’s not talk about what happens to poor Porthos.
Larry Niven: while exploring a remarkable feat of engineering, the crew encounter the Kzinti, who have them for lunch. Hoshi finally figures out what the Klingons really meant when they referred to the Kzinti as “a bunch of pussies.”
Serious suggestions will also be appreciated.
Egads the possibilities
And more…
Neal Stephenson: The Exlporerator (Enterpise) finds a link between the Xindi and an ancient Sumerian cult, after Hoshi uses her 1337 cryptography skillz to crack the Xindi database. The story somewhat randomly flips between Cpn. Archer’s mission and his father’s exploits as a wily warp-drive engineer. Lt. Reed replaces Enterprise’s phaser cannons with Reason, for those special “diplomatic” missions.
Isaac Asimov: “Future-guy” turns out to be Daneel Olivaw (a descendant of Data, of course ;). The Xindi are really humans with big brains, living on a sentient world. Earth is eventually destroyed, but no one cares because we’ve colonized other planets by then. Patrick Stewart plays the elderly guru Hari Seldon –forever muddling popular perception of the Enterprise, TNG, and X-Men franchises.
Frank Herbert
The Suliban take one of Phlox’s wives hostage and force him to betray Archer, allowing them to seize control of Enterprise. Archer narrowly escapes with T’Pol in a shuttle and crash land onto a water-scarce planet. There, T’Pol trains Archer in the mystic Vulcan arts. Together, they gain the trust and allegience of the primitive native population, who turn out to be surprisingly lethal in combat.
Meanwhile the Klingon empire builds an elite military force from the baddest survivors of Rura Penthe, and send them to find and destroy Archer. And back on Enterprise, Trip dies heroically trying to fend off the Suliban. Reed, thinking that Archer is already dead, is forcelly made to serve the Suliban. Mayweather manages to escape and return to life on a freighter, biding his time, and plotting revenge on T’Pol, whom he thinks was the traitor.
…And Then L. Ron Hubbard Returned From the Dead (again) and Wrote….
….Enterprise’s first full legnth movie (4 hours long) in which the Xindi decide not to destroy Earth but to enslave it instead. John Travolta stars as the head Xindi, named Xemoo, who begins subjugating and terrorizing the people’s of Earth.
Meanwhile back in the Expanse, Enterprise has just blown out it’s warp engines trying to penetrate the voodoo clouds on the way out. Enterprise is forced to limp back 200 light years home on impulse drive. Fortunately Einstein hasn’t been copmpletely forgotten in this movie so it only takes a year ship’s time to reach Earth but over 200 years have past on Earth. Enterprise returns to find Earth doninated by the evil Xemoo.
Fortunately, one of the Maaco men, played by Tom Cruise, leads a rag-tag bunch of renegades to eventual victory using 200 year old galvanic technology found in an abandoned Radio Shack. Capt Archer dies in the fracas but Porthos is revealed to be an ancient spirit who escaped from a volcano and took the form of a dog so he could befriend the Captain and eventually accompany humanity on it’s first voyages to the stars. Using his ancient wisdom, Porthos devotes the rest of his life (in dog yeatrs) to restoring humanity to the greatness it once knew.
B&B decide to spin off a new franchise based on Porthos called “Star Beagle”.
The End
A few more…
David Brin: Enterprise, with trained super-monkeys in place of the MACOS, travels the galaxy trying to get away from more powerful species, who believe Enterprise carries something important.
Stephen Baxter: Enterprise makes uses of a wormhole to free humanity from enslavement, but is leads to further enslavement. Then they use a pair of cosmic strings to travel through time and space to reach an escape route from the heat death of the universe into a universe with different physics. Meanwhile, Phlox becomes noncorporeal and sticks around to create another universe when this one gets boring.
Robert J. Sawyer: Phlox’s wives cheat on him… wait, that doesn’t work… Umm, Archer gets married, then she cheats on him. Meanwhile the crew must deal with a planet of dinosaurs and/or a nasty intellegent virus.
Philip K. Dick: First contact was with the Romulans. Phlox gives Hoshi some pills that give her the ability to shift through time. She shifts to a world where first contact was with the Vulcans, but decides that it is a horrible place and returns home except that some of the facts of the world have changed, like Mayweather being a robot. The ship gains a few stowaway shapeshifters that occasionally try to eat someone. Trip and Chef are both big blurs and may be the same person. Meanwhile Archer has dreams that he feels are communications. He starts to keep a lot of notes and becomes convinced that he must smuggle a child from a far flung colony back to Earth.
Re: A few more…
Which of Dick’s story is that? I know of “A Sound of Thunder” from Ray Bradbury which is very similar to your description.
Re: A few more…
Well that part you quoted is from a mix of three Dick stories. The first, about the Romulans and Hoshi not liking the more “normal” world with the Vulcans, from
Man in the High Castle
. The part about Hoshi using a drug to shift through time is from Now Wait for Last Year. The part about one person’s shifting altering facts a bit unpredictably, … well, darn I forget where that comes from, I seem to recall that it also involved a business which speciallized in antipsychics, and doors that demand to be paid before they will open.
Re: A few more…
Sorry about the double post. Hit the wrong button while I had the wrong tags in. Is it possible to get that one erased?
Well that part you quoted is from a mix of three Dick stories. The first, about the Romulans and Hoshi not liking the more “normal” world with the Vulcans, from Man in the High Castle. The part about Hoshi using a drug to shift through time is from Now Wait for Last Year. The part about one person’s shifting altering facts a bit unpredictably, … well, darn I forget where that comes from, I seem to recall that it also involved a business which speciallized in antipsychics, and doors that demand to be paid before they will open.
Re: A few more…
Thanks, I never read Now Wait for Last Year, so I missed the time shifting reference.
Here’s a few:
Lets see… directors
David Cronenberg: The Enterprise would be deluged with images and signals which cause them to doubt their reality and existence whilst trying to fend themselves against a foe which may or not be real. In the end the Xindi were a mental projection from a video cassette player which achieved sentience and the enterprise instead of destroying the Xindi home-world actually destroy earth.
Francis Ford Coppella: Archer would seclude himself away in his quarters, shave his head and gain weight and sit in half shadow talking about the horror of it all.
The Wachowski Brothers: The crew realise that everything they have done since they first launched (since the pilot, hey it would get round continuity problems) is a lie and they are caught in an artificial reality. T’Pol and Hoshi start wearing tight leather Archer gets l33t-kung-fu-skillz a they while Phlox is betraying them to the Xindi who are running the matrix to ascertain how much of threat these “humans” pose… oh yeah and lots of bullet time with phasers
and finally…
Stanley Kubrick: Who knows, literally. It would become a series of images, sounds and scenes attached by some unknown etheral connection which could only be understood if you were on drugs and standing on your head. But would be so visionary and amazing that even though it made no sense, it would be incredible.
Re: Lets see… directors
Sam Raimi: Enterprise is haunted by the resurrected body of Trip’s dead sister. A special alien bounty hunter (guest star Bruce Campbell) is brough on board to exterminate the threat. Fascinating camera work ensues as the laws or relativity bend the perceptino of the universe while the camera follows a phaser blast towards its intended target.
George Lucas: Astounding special effects, although the dialogue is attrocious. Mayweather doesn’t appear at all. The continuity of the entire series is broken through this poorly concieved prequel. Besides the vastly improved theme song, fans don’t notice any difference.
John Hughes: A mischevious omnipotent ten year old comes aboard Enterprise. Entire plot of the episode reduced to a series of excuses for Malcom Reed to get socked in the groin.
Orson Welles: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
Neil Gaiman
Hoshi went in through the airlock. She wondered what the abandoned Xindi ship would be like–if that was what it was.
Hoshi walked down the corridor uneasily. There was something very familiar about it. The flooring was made from the same alloy used on the Enterprise. The panels on the walls were the same too.
She knew where she was: she was in her own ship. She hadn’t left. She shook her head, confused.
Hoshi stared at her tricorder, trying to scan for any signs of a temporal or spacial anomaly. The appearance of the numbers on the display seemed different somehow. The rythm in which they flickered gave her the impression of something very evil indeed.
She almost had it when somebody said, “Hoshi?”
It sounded like her science officer. Hoshi went into the mess hall, where the voice had come from. A woman stood there with her back to Hoshi. She looked a little like T’Pol. Only…
Only her skin was white as paper.
Only she had taller and thinner ears.
Only her fingers were too long, and they never stopped moving.
“Hoshi?” the woman said. “Is that you?”
And then she turned around. Her eyes were big black buttons.
“Who are you?” asked Hoshi.
“I’m your other sub commander,” said the woman. “Go and tell your other captain that lunch is ready.”
Writers and Directors
Douglas Adams: The Xindi comes to Earth to construct a interstelar highway and succed. The Enterprise, leaded by a multi-headed captain Archer, travels through the galaxy with its continuity hole hyper-drive trying to find something to do. Meanwhile the Borg collective disbands as Data the paranoid android convinces them that life isn’t worth living.
Garth Ennis: A texan Archer and his girlfriend T’polip travel through space doing The Right Thing and meeting bizarre alien spaces. Meanwhile the Xindi are plotting to bring armageddon to the Galaxy so they can raise their messiah James T. Kirk.
David Lynch: The Enterprise crew has to figure out what the hell is happening before the cowboy dressed Q appears again, ’cause in the second time they see him it’ll be very bad.
Terry Pratchett
Sensors detect a planet with an erratic orbit, as though it is self-propelled through the cosmos. Further scanning reveals it to in fact be an immense lifeform, reptilian in nature. Although signs of intelligent inhabitants are seen, it is thought best to avoid contact.
my $0.02
Bah. There hasn’t been good sci-fi on since Farscape got cancelled and I’m still upset over that. Enterprise is just watched because I have nothing better to do until smallville comes out.
i’m just so fricken tired of it. I haven’t watched Wednesday’s episode yet and don’t know if I want to.
By the Way Timeshredder
This was a GREAT topic idea (G).
Very amusing responses all around .
Re: By the Way Timeshredder
Well, if nothing else, our ideas were more interesting than anything I saw in two years of Enterprise.