As a followup to THIS POST, I had a half-formed idea that I posted in comments OVER HERE. I’ve decided to expand upon my idea a bit.
In short, people have recognized that in Star Trek, the federation – and in particular the Humans – are essentially mad scientists. Everybody else out there got from early industrialization to spaceflight over a span of millenia, carefully and painstakingly working their way up one reasonable rational step at a time. Humans, on the other hand, said “hold my beer” and charged from “I wonder if I can use steam to do work” to “maybe if I invent a faster than light drive I’ll get to bang a lot of hot chicks” in record time. This feature of humanity has been repeatedly shown in Trek, but I don’t believe it has been really called out as such, except for the occasional throwaway line. Well… what if, instead, a series leaned into the idea? A combination not just of Star Trek, but “Eureka” and “Warehouse 13” with a huge helping of “Stargate: SG1.”
“Star Trek: Bonkers” features Captain Liam Shaw, the best new character in Trek since The Doctor and Seven of Nine, unwisely killed off (apparently) in season three of “Picard.” Here, he has been resurrected by Federation mad science, put in command of the USS Rotwang (an Emmett Brown-class “science” vessel) tasked with researching rumors of super-science and advanced weapons that can be used to defend against existential god-level threats such as V-Ger, Organians, Q-Continuum. Episodes include:
* The one where the crew capture a rogue Q and break his mind by exposing him to the most diabolical psychological weapon yet devised: “Star Trek: Discovery.”
* The one where they accidentally shut down all fusion reactions in the Large Magellanic Cloud. That means stars, too. Whoopsie.
* The one where Emperor Kahless attempts to capture the vessel for the greater glory of the Klingon Empire. Captain Shaw zaps him with the new Trans Ray; whereupon the other Klingons tear Kahless into bits and back off from Shaw and the Rotwang, not willing to risk getting struck themselves. There are, after all, fates worse than the dishonor of retreat.
* The one where an invasion fleet of Kelvans from the Andromeda galaxy is intercepted while still 100,000 light years from Federation space… and the cubic lightyear of volume enclosing the fleet is converted from a 3-dimensional space to a natural log of 9-dimensional space.
* Based upon fragmentary documentation that survived without adequate historical context from before the Third World War, the engineers on board the Rotwang create a device that rips a hole in space which leads to a warped realm of chaos and demonic entities. A few probes are sent in, they realize the place really kinda sucks, and they close it up again. “Nope,” says the lead engineer on the project, Engineering Commodore Montgomery Scott.
*Following those events, Scotty goes on a bender. While blind drunk he creates four dimensional whisky. His first thought is “It’s green,” but in actual fact it’s an indescribable color that Man has never before encountered. As an experiment, the Rotwang taunts the Q loudly over subspace radio; one shows up and threatens to snap them out of existence. they offer him a drink first… and get him blind, stinking drunk. Then they interview him, receiving billions of teraquads of new information about reality-bending, and leave him passed out at the side of a nearby neutron star. When he wakes up he doesn’t remember what happened.
* Another Planet Killer/Doomsday Machine is discovered. It’s asleep, but seems to be waking up… and unlike the one Kirk encountered, this one is virtually pristine. There’ll be no stopping it. And since it’s neutronium, there’s no landing on it or beaming into it. So what to do? The recorded memory/personality engrams of Admiral Archers pet beagle are downloaded into it. It now wants to follow the Rotwang around like a happy puppy. This is of course a problem. Until a warp drive and massive impulse engine are bolted to a sizable moon; the warp drive knocks the effective mass of the moon down almost to zilch, which the impulse engine accelerates it at tens of G’s. Enough fuel on board to last for centuries. The Planet Killer Puppy is then told “fetch!” Asteroids control systems keep track of the PKP and maintain a constant distance, and lead the PKP on a path slowly out of the galaxy. PROBLEM SOLVED FOREVER.
* The Captain holds a contest to design, build and fly a one-man craft. It’s a race: not just to build it within a short time, but to fly ten light years out and back again. Teams from as few as three to as many as a dozen work feverishly for two weeks on their craft. But the night before the scheduled launch of the five craft that are finished, Ensign Skippy, who has not been involved, sneaks a drink of Scotty’s 4D whisky. He staggers down to the torpedo bunker and modifies a Class 8 probe and, five minutes before the race time, enters it. Everyone chuckles as he drunkenly gets in and is launched… and then promptly vanishes. The other craft go out and come back in various impressively short times, but Ensign Skippy does not return. Until he shows up for duty the next day with a pounding hangover and no recollection of the day before. A search shows that the probe is back in the torpedo magazine, the modifications burned out; sensor records show that it quietly reappeared in its rack, followed by Ensign Skippy staggering away from it and back to his quarters, two minutes before it launched.
* A new threat emerges in the Gamma Quadrant. A previously unexplored dust cloud turns out to have a single star and Earth-like planet within; the culture that evolved there has never seen another star, so they were unaware of the outside universe. Upon accidental first contact with the Rotwang due to a navigational error, the locals realize that they aren’t alone and decide that all life in the universe would have to go. Their technology, based on white servant-robots, is not particularly advanced; but evidence shows that they will very quickly become a galaxy-wide threat exceeding that of the Borg. So Captain Shaw has Scotty re-open the warp gate on the planet, spilling hellish chaos onto the place. “Let’s keep this to ourselves,” Shaw says to the senior staff as they watch from a safe distance as the entire nebula folds in upon itself, sucked into an another dimension. No report is made to Starfleet.
* Years earlier, a miniature “proto-universe” was discovered at Deep Space Nine after a ship passed through the wormhole. Given that the expansion of that universe would destroy *this* universe, such things are obviously to be avoided. So the Rotwang crew decide to see what it would take to *create* a proto-universe. Purely hypothetically. Simulated only. Not at all real. Nope. Until… “Hey, hold my beer.”
Any other ideas?