Honest question: Would a sci-fi show with the same premise of NCIS or JAG actually work? Do these courtroom Trek episodes work because we have many more episodes with other things going on?
Lary Niven was written some good scifi detective stories but the difficulty is that the mystery has to be solvable for it to be a good detective piece and it has to be leaning on things that don’t exist in our world for it to be scifi. To make a mystery solvable and not feel like the answer is pulled out of nowhere the “rules” of the scifi part have to be clear and firm and we’ll established. Unfortunately this is very difficult to pull off; Lary Niven is a top of the line scifi author but even he only managed to make about half of his scifi detective stories really work. It would be a moments undertaking to squeeze enough creative juice out for even a handful of scifi mysteries in a series I think. It would be fucking awesome though.
Honest question: Would a sci-fi show with the same premise of NCIS or JAG actually work? Do these courtroom Trek episodes work because we have many more episodes with other things going on?
I’ve thought more than a few episodes of Babylon 5 were basically “JAG in space,” so yeah. It could work.
Lary Niven was written some good scifi detective stories but the difficulty is that the mystery has to be solvable for it to be a good detective piece and it has to be leaning on things that don’t exist in our world for it to be scifi. To make a mystery solvable and not feel like the answer is pulled out of nowhere the “rules” of the scifi part have to be clear and firm and we’ll established. Unfortunately this is very difficult to pull off; Lary Niven is a top of the line scifi author but even he only managed to make about half of his scifi detective stories really work. It would be a moments undertaking to squeeze enough creative juice out for even a handful of scifi mysteries in a series I think. It would be fucking awesome though.
Yes, though the fact that Trek is already a very well-established world with very well-defined rules probably makes that at least a little bit easier.