(This was originally posted before the announcement of Bryan Fuller's Star Trek: Discovery on CBS All Access, but the points are still valid.)
I've recently been re-enjoying episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation (on BBC of all channels).  And we constantly hear that old properties are being rebooted all the time, especially Star Wars.  Then it occurs to me that the (next) next generation of Star Trek, or Fourth Gen if you prefer, is going to happen eventually. It's all but inevitable.  But what isn't inevitable is whether any Fourth Gen will survive beyond the first season.  Enterprise and even The Original Series itself never made it beyond four seasons to the modern standard of seven. But these are some cogent suggestions to make sure the same doesn't happen to Star Trek: The Fourth Generation, whatever form it may take, whenever it ever arrives.

Check out our suggestions for the new Star Trek TV series below, and for more on all things Star Trek, be sure to take a look at our recent coverage:

1.) No More Warp Drive

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Image via Paramount

Wait, what?  Yeah, warp drive is as much an integral part of Star Trek as anything.  Matter and anti-matter mix in a containment chamber, creating a high-energy plasma reaction, plasma gets funneled through some warp coils, a warp field that isolates the ship in a region of subspace is created, ship go zoom.  And by the Fourth Generation - let's shoot for mid-25th century here - it's got to be obsolete.  There have been numerous modes of travel introduced in the various Star Trek series, particularly TNG and Voyager, that make warp drive look like it's standing still.  For instance, in the Voyager episode, “Hope and Fear”, an alien named Arturis (Ray Wise) arrives and "decodes" a message from Starfleet to guide the stranded crew of Voyager to a new class of Starfleet ship, one outfitted with a "quantum slipstream" drive.  This drive was on a ship that ended up not being from Starfleet but actually alien in design, with advanced technology throughout.  But the key in this episode is that the crew was able to adapt its slipstream tech to Voyager, for a short time at least, before the stresses of the extreme velocities would have destroyed the ship.  To the producers' credit, this new drive wasn't just forgotten about.  They did explore it again in the subsequent episode,” Timeless”.  In this follow up, a guilt-ridden Harry Kim worked with fellow survivors Chakotay and the Doctor, to try to correct the test of a quantum slipstream drive that destroyed Voyager fifteen years prior.  Voyager might not have been able to use a quantum slipstream drive, but come on, you want to believe that Starfleet doesn't develop a ship - or better yet a fleet of ships - that can and does use it going forward?

There are other methods.  In the TNG episode, ”Nth Degree”, Lt. Barkley (Dwight Schultz) has his intelligence super jacked and uses it to form a "subspace inversion" that transports the Enterprise to the center of the galaxy.  The advanced race that gave him the means to do this, the Cytherians, may have restored him to normal, but they sent the Enterprise back to Federation space with supposedly decades worth of knowledge to explore.  Even if the subspace inversion method wasn't included, wouldn't the Enterprise have a record of how they did it?  Also in TNG, an offshoot of the Borg used a system of pre-fabbed transwarp conduits to do hit and run attacks across a vast region of space.  The Enterprise was likewise able to use the conduits.  Now the Borg may have constructed these only in certain sections of the galaxy, but certainly Geordi or a Starfleet team of engineers and scientists could recreate these in between major routes of travel, especially trade routes between planets?  Then of course there's the whole transwarp network the Borg have in various sections of the galaxy.  Kind of hard to construct one of those, but if you have a star just sitting around and you've got a hundred years or so, who knows what the Federation could come up with?  Oh, and finally, you know the Federation is going to adapt the shit out of that chrono deflector gizmo that Admiral Janeway used in Endgame, the Voyager series finale; if not the time travel aspects then certainly the space warping aspect.  Hell they only had that thing a couple decades into the future.  So warp drive could always be a good propulsion backup, but in the 25th Century, it's got to have gone the way of the dodo.

2.) My…God! (No More) Shields!

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Image via CBS

Again, probably a viable backup, but there are really two things that have to take their place by the Fourth Gen.  The first is the phasing cloak, not the cloaking part, but the phasing part.  What better defense, and probably nowhere near the energy drain that shields are, than a field that makes the entire Enterprise ethereal, where weapons pass right through them like they were (space) ghosts?  And the Treaty of Algeron doesn't apply, as long as the Enterprise stays visible.  Nice little loophole for sure.  Now of course the Federation's regular adversaries, particularly the Romulans could adapt phasing weapons to counter, but if the Enterprise can adjust the frequency of its phasing, good luck to the bad guys trying to adapt to that.  But if you don't like the phasing idea, then there's definitely the armor delivered, again, by Admiral Janeway in “Endgame”.  The Borg adapted to it quickly, but they're the Borg.  The Romulans, the Cardassians, pretty much anybody else--it's going to be a while.

3.) Transporters Rule Your World (Er...Galaxy)

Image via CBS

What does that mean?  It means that by Fourth Gen, there should be no more transporter pads.  Turbolifts would be obsolete.  And doctors should be half medical professional, half engineer.  It's abundantly clear, that with site-to-site transportation having occurred for years in the time of TNG, that transporter pads are completely obsolete.  Likewise, future ships won't need turbolifts.  Future screws should be able to beam anywhere on the ship or anywhere on a planet without visiting a transporter room.  But even more importantly, transportation medicine should be the norm in the future.  There shouldn't be a physical wound that can’t be fixed instantly by a quick trip through the transporter.  If K'ehleyr had been able to be beamed and have her physical injuries be repaired or rebuilt by the transporter, well hey, things would have been a lot happier for Worf (On a complete side note, Suzie Plakson would have been a great addition to the regular cast, either as K'Ehleyr or Dr. Selar.  Don't know why that never happened).

Anyway, neither cold bug nor virus should be able to resist a trip through a transport beam once identified by medical professionals.  Hell, that should have been the case going back to TOS, but whatever.  I can except that there are lifeforms that can hide in a body no matter how intense the scan, but certainly not once it’s been identified.  If Dr. Pulaski can have her aging disease eliminated by rewriting her altered DNA molecule by molecule back to its original state in the transporter (as it was in the episode “Unnatural Selection”), then hell, almost any disease should be curable.  And even with the holodecks and replicators, transporter technology has been way underutilized in all of the Star Trek series to date.  But that's probably because it eliminates so many narrative obstacles if fully realized that they deliberately had to severely limit it.  I can definitely see the reasoning for that now due to things like transporter duplicate Riker, gene spliced Tuvok and Neelix, and fountain-of-youthed Picard, Ensign Ro, Guinan and Keiko.  But by Fourth Gen, they're going to have to figure something else out or they're insulting the intelligence of their fan base.  Sort of like beaming all the way to other planets in a recent Star Trek film.

4.) Romulans and Klingons Need a New Shtick

Cloaking devices and having to de-cloak to fire have got to be cracked by Fourth Gen.  First of all, the de-cloaking before firing scenario has got to be done away with.  They solved that shit back in the 23rd Century.  Although to be fair, the last adventure we had in the time of TNG, the Remans did have a ship that could fire when cloaked.  But that's even more reason that there better not be this reversion to "de-cloak to fire" nonsense.  That's also to say nothing of the vulnerability the ships have when cloaking / de-cloaking.  Kirk got the drop on a bird of prey trying to get the drop on him coming out of cloak.  Riker shoved a torpedo up Lursa and B'etor's asses when he reset their cloaking device (doesn't make up for only shooting one phaser or not rotating frequencies though...not by a light year).  And Troi was once beamed off a warbird when it started to de-cloak. It's also been established that cloaks can be penetrated by tachyon sweeps and anti-proton beams. Data even once figure out how to target cloaked ships in a region of space flooded with particles.  So what should the new shtick be?  Obviously overcoming the firing while cloaked deal at the very least.  But with the proposed phasing shields for the Enterprise, that could just end up producing an update of the typical Federation / Romulan stalemate (e.g. cloaked warbird vs. Enterprise with shields up).

5.) The Next Big Storytelling Device

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Image via CBS

No doubt, the holodeck added a lot to the narrative tools of TNG.  Lot of good and bad stuff went down in those things.  Everything from Pop Goes the Weasel to pain stick walks, Dixon Hill mysteries, interstellar baseball games, James Bond adventures, Alamo battles to hailing frequencies closed.  Fourth Gen is gong to have to come up with something new though.  Deep Space Nine came up with the Orbs of the Prophets, mystical stones that had a variety of powers and uses, typically providing altered states of being or consciousness.   Likewise, the Celestial Temple, aka a huge artificial wormhole built by powerful, atemporal beings, was a huge device for the show.  Half the pilot episode of DS9 was told via this.  Some of the biggest episodes revolved around the goings-on of the wormhole and it also literally provided the conduit for storytelling in the Gamma Quadrant.  A new Star Trek series will also need this kind of series-long hook that separates it from everything that came before.

6.) Longform Storytelling

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Modern Star Trek was never better than the last couple of seasons of DS9Rick Berman, Michael Piller and Ira Steven Behr built up a powerful mythology and an even more engrossing and ongoing interstellar war to drive the narrative.  Enterprise also had some good episodes in instances when they went to season-long storytelling, and then multiple-episode stories late in its run.  Fourth Gen is invariably going to be compared to TOS and TNG, but the model that I think it should look to for inspiration in not only DS9, but also the Battlestar Galactica reboot especially.  Not saying that a non-serialized show for Star Trek couldn't work, but long-form ups the ante and the possibilities.  Pursuant to that concept, it also doesn't necessarily mean that a season for the Fourth Gen has to be 22-26 episodes.  I think it's becoming more and more apparent that shorter seasons make for better storytelling because there's far less padding that has to be done.  Personally, I want season or half-season long, or at least 3-4 episode arcs.  And I want them all at once on Netflix.

7.) Diversity

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A black captain, a female captain...an alien captain?  What about a show centering on a Klingon crew?  A Romulan crew?  A Maquis or a pirate crew in the Federation Universe (sorry Firefly fans)?  A Section 31 show?  These aren't new concepts, but there's little doubt that there are opportunities to be mined by hitting on a new concept.  Star Trek has always been at the forefront of diversity in sci-fi.  The time of a next gen Enterprise exploring the galaxy may be over.  Certainly a new concept could be entertained, especially if the current filmed franchise goes on for a decade or more (and why not, if the audience is there, this last film notwithstanding).  Who's to say what the concept should be?  I thought for years that a few surviving ships from a shattered Federation, victims of a Borg armada that wiped out Earth and everything else would be great, then Battlestar happened.  Whatever form the show takes, Battlestar and the ghosts of TOS, TNG and DS9 are going to loom large.  But these are some things that can help Fourth Gen get its own (and hopefully lasting) foothold on the Star Trek franchise.