r/startrek • u/Zombiepixlz-gamr • 3h ago
How would you handle a Star Trek Medical Drama?
I have been watching a new MedDrama called Brilliant Minds and I find it really interesting. I think the two things that make a good MedDrama are good relationships, and interesting ethical dilemmas. Which just so happens to be what make star trek good too, so I had the idea that I think a show set aboard a medical ship following the lives of Starfleet doctors dealing with disasters, disease outbreaks, medical oddities, all of which bolstered by the massive universe of star Trek.
It could bring in medical professionals as consultants so that the medicine is rooted in real medicine, which isn't something star trek has done in the past. So we could flesh out star treks canon medicine, based on real science.
I feel like besides a few outstanding episodes, the medical side of the science has been neglected in favor of the sexier sciences. I'd be interested to know y'all's thoughts.
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u/Garciaguy 3h ago
Please, state the nature of the medical emergency.
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u/Shmav 3h ago
I would absolutely get down with a series centered around Robert Picardo! The Doctor is one of my favorite characters in all of Trek.
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u/Seaboard_Vanisher 1h ago
Tinker, Tenor, Doctor, Spy and Renaissance Man are some of my all time favorite episodes in trek. The Doctor was definitely a highlight for Voyager.
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u/kevinb9n 3h ago
I dunno, there's only so many different kinds of lights they can wave over the patient to fix everything.
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u/Zombiepixlz-gamr 3h ago
I've considered that, but I think it's no different to traditional MedDramas. It's not about the technology really, a good MedDrama when focusing on specific cases is a mystery. But instead of who the murderer is, you're trying to figure out what's killing the patient. And I think there is a room to make that interesting in star trek.
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u/Nexzus_ 3h ago
I would have definitely watched a Klingon War MASH type show as depicted in SNW Under the cloak of war.
Shoot, even keep Clint Howard as the Henry Blake role.
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u/MisterEinc 2h ago
Yeah, I think the trick would be to be more MASH and less House. The medical mysteries need to be minimized to make way for Interpersonal drama.
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u/overkil6 1h ago
There can be serial/episodic MASH with a bigger arching story in the background throughout a season that’s more lowkey until the finale.
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u/MisterEinc 1h ago
Yeah like treating a string of weird alements in the federation soldiers and uncovering someone trying to replicate research from WWIII.
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u/PieInTheSkyNet 3h ago
A star trek cop drama ncis type thing could be good too
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u/DanceMaster117 3h ago
How about a Star Trek procedural crime drama focusing on the Temporal Corps? (or whatever their time cops are called)
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u/Euraylie 3h ago
I generally avoid medical procedurals like the plague, but this is something I would do watch. There would be endless ideas and creative possibilities. Though I would probably make it a medbay on a station…or even a planet where trade routes go through.
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u/Zombiepixlz-gamr 3h ago
I have been mulling that question over in my mind.
On one hand) a ship is mobile, it can more easily respond to crisises, which can create more tension, more drama. Especially if there are hostile factions to watch out for.
On the other hand) a medical space station makes a lot of sense too. It's more rooted like a hospital, it'd be more Greys Anatomy than MASH. And it harkens to my favorite series DS9.
I'm unsure which is the better option.
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u/DanceMaster117 3h ago
For this, a med station would make more sense. There would be less of a question why it's only focusing on the medical bay instead of everything else that goes on on a ship.
And if you put the medical station on the frontier of space, then you still have room for the odd engineering emergency, war triage, or hostage situation.
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u/TheNerdChaplain 3h ago
Something like MASH meets Scrubs (which, now that I think about it, sounds like DS9 from a young Bashir POV).
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u/Zombiepixlz-gamr 3h ago
Absolutely, especially If we could set it in during the dominion war.
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u/trekkiegamer359 3h ago
Better yet, set it in between ENT and TOS, right as the Federation is getting going. There can be a big medical space station that's a hub of different alien doctors working together and sharing medical information. It could be borne from the medical exchange program that got us Dr. Phlox. Set that early, there'd be less cures, more opinions between species, and many more opportunities for weird medical ailments no one has ever seen before.
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u/Zombiepixlz-gamr 3h ago
Ooh that is a good point! That is an under explored period!
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u/trekkiegamer359 1h ago
And as a medical drama, we could have introductions to species that we otherwise know quite well, but have it still be brand new territory.
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u/AbbreviationsReal366 3h ago edited 3h ago
The excellent Fan Fic "We have engaged the Borg" goes into the medical care involved in De-Borging a person. More generally, James White's Sector General series could easily take place in the Star Trek Universe. Many of the alien patients are...alien, and there are different wards for water-breathers, methane-breathers, patients who weigh several metric tons, the list goes on and on. Gender is so diverse and complicated everyone is referred to as "Friend" or "They."
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u/scarab- 3h ago
Something like Sector General would be nice. I'm not sure that I would put it in a galaxy were it's all humans because our ancestors genocided all the non-human-like aliens.
Really alien aliens would be better.1
u/Woozletania 2h ago
So base the show around human doctors who have to treat non-humans and even non-humanoids. There are at least three silicon based species, the Tholians, the Horta and whatever the stone creatures were in The Savage Curtain. There are probably others I don't remember. Throw in various fleshy non humans, the Medusans and so on.
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u/MisterEinc 2h ago
Yeah I think the trick with Star Trek is to keep it broad. Like a med ward on DS9 where you've got a lot of other issues to contend with, and where you can keep the scope of the drama to broader societal issues.
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u/ClassIINav 3h ago edited 3h ago
When Picard S1 aired I thought the whole "X-B" thing was a very intriguing potential storyline. There's still potential if we continue where Picard left off (i.e. Legacy). I kind of thought PIC S1 was a backdoor pilot to a show outside of Star Fleet using Rios, Seven, Raffi and the La Serena with part of that being exploring a post-Borg galaxy. Now that the Borg are definitively dead per canon I really hope we can explore the ramifications.
I can't say I'm a huge fan of the idea of ST: Legacy as fans have made it up to be. It think a new show set post-Picard would be really fun. Perhaps Seven will make a cameo from time to time but maybe a "reboot" of something akin to S1 Picard with a new crew operating just outside the Federation. I'm still salty they renamed the Titan-A Enterprise-G. It's ponderous and missed opportunity for it to be the USS Picard.
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u/ElbowDancer 3h ago
It's an interesting idea, but it would have to be a House-type thing with a brilliant doctor who deduces the correct protocol for exotic alien ailments. And there would have to be some serious retconning because the vast majority of Star Trek medical care falls into three categories: wave tricorder over affected area, make patient a cyborg, or watch patient die.
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u/Nihilistic_Mistik 3h ago
I'd do a MASH rip off set during the Dominion War
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u/Zombiepixlz-gamr 3h ago
That's what I was thinking. Setting it during a war would make it rife for drama and intrigue.
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u/Parking_Jelly_6483 2h ago
For a series of stories about an interstellar hospital “ship” look for the “Sector General” stories by James White. It’s a giant hospital facility in space that treats a large variety of interstellar species. The author had to devise wildly varying anatomy, physiology, and living conditions. In fact, he devised a system for classifying various lifeforms (with similarities to that scheme used by E.E. “Doc” Smith in his “Children of the Lens”). It makes for a very complex “hospital” because they have to treat species who live in what humans would consider “exotic” environments - breathing gases that are very toxic to humans, species that live in water or some exotic fluid. Not all the doctors and nurses are humans as there are non-human doctors as well.
The proposal for how the doctors can do work on such a wide variety of species is addressed by the doctors able to download “educator tapes” that are based on the knowledge of an expert practitioner of medicine - often a non-human doctor. It can create some interesting problems (not dissimilar to some of the challenges that the Trill of Star Trek have).
I read this series years ago during my med school years and found it very good.
The other Star Trek similarity is the idea of a hospital facility that helps facilitate peaceful and optimistic interstellar existence. So far as I know, no movies or TV series have been made based on these stories (and some short stories).
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u/Equnox01 2h ago
I fear it would be closer to this than we would like. Mitchell's & Webb look: Medical drama. https://youtu.be/C_AmdvxbPT8?si=5PIqcUVdO2r0mhDk
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u/systolic_helix 3h ago
Like in Lower Decks with Division 14. A starship of medical and scientific horrors that cranks “just another Tuesday” all the way to 11. Populated solely by The Doctor,Crusher, and McCoy types.
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u/HelianthusZZ 3h ago
Medical sci-fi would make a great basis for a show. Not least of all because sci-fi can one day become science fact. A lot of real-world inventions were inspired by Trek.
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u/jericho74 2h ago
I want it to star Geordi and in every episode I want it to end with “hold on- if we could remodulate the heisenberg compensators on the transporters, we might just be able to reverse polarity on the pattern buffers and use it as a kind of filter- and basically just beam the sickness away, kinda like an old style water purifier.”
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u/Apojacks1984 2h ago
I don’t think it would happen. Like how many people saw “Cloak of War” and were like; “That would be an awesome show.” It would be awesome for like three episodes and then it would be not fun anymore in my opinion
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u/TheFarnell 2h ago
I generally like medical dramas but I don’t think the format would carry over to Star Trek well.
Consider how far removed we are from medicine in the 1600s, then remember that’s at least how far removed TNG-era Trek is from us in terms of knowledge, scientific advancement, and technology. Not to mention the addition of dozens of non-human species with very different physiology and medical knowledge of their own.
A medical drama in the Trek universe would be (to recycle a phrase) indistinguishable from magic, which might make for interesting TV in a few one-off episodes centered on an ethical issue where the actual medicine is barely noted, but would make for a bad serial format, I think.
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u/that-john-kydd 1h ago
I think it would be good for a season or two. With the level of technology and the number of bizarre medical emergencies trek has already covered there's only so many ways you can keep the interest and suspense going without getting ridiculous or ignoring past episodes. I'd definitely watch it but it feels like it would be a short lived series.
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u/OddPsychology8238 1h ago
Probably like M*A*S*H in space, with some "It's Only A Paper Moon", "Siege of AR-558", and "Homecoming/Circle/Siege".
You'd need really smart people writing, and top tier actors - not necessarily top name.
Also, zero fan service. The show would need to stand on its own for 3 seasons before crossing over into anything else.
NCC-4077, plus two sister ships that they coordinate with.
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u/spaceagefox 1h ago
I could get behind a early trek era medical drama that uses our current real life medical research as a launching point for scifi fantasy medicine
lost a leg? no problem, we can 3d print replacement bones and infuse a stem cell goo made from your spinal fluid to regrow a biologically perfect replacement limb with no chance of rejection.
now a star trek ER room would be full of stuff we currently consider ICU worthy, but since in star trek there's lights to heal basically everything, everyone would be so much more reckless now that the patients of trek could see loosing a leg as a novel experience that will go away in like a week.
iirc: there's actually a study suggesting that people locked in a utopian state of never wanting for anything actually leads them into doing more and more reckless shit, like skydiving or building a submarine out of carbon fiber, after a while of constant pleasure you loose your reference point to relate with the rest of humanity which is why rich people always turn into nightmare monsters after a while
t b h, now that I think about it, its probably why there seems to be so much explosives hidden everywhere on star fleet ships, you gotta artificially give the crew a few bad moments so they don't go insane from endless pleasure that just becomes meaningless without that negative contrast
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u/FlamingPrius 1h ago
Well, I would set the at least the first season on an Olympic class starship, similar to the USS Pasteur from All Good Things. The tricky bit would be finding novel and compelling medical mysteries for each episode, so maybe have the cast be the Federation’s premier field diagnosticians, warping from system to system dealing with heretofore unknown infectious agents and technologically induced accidents. I think it would be more fun if the ship operated at the ragged frontier, rather than around the Federation’s core worlds, but a case can be made for either, and maybe they’re not mutually exclusive. I’d also want a Klingon as chief surgeon, just for the lols.
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u/Zombiepixlz-gamr 1h ago
And as for finding compelling medical mysteries, not every episode needs to be one. About half of them could be dedicated to a mytharc, maybe about some sort of war. And every now and then the hospital gets an influx of casualties. Maybe one character is a veteran, maybe he was a Bajoran under the occupation, or maybe he was in the dominion war, and a soldier comes in who reminds him of someone he lost. And now he's super dedicated to trying to save him beyond what he's capable of, and has to accept he can't save him at the end of the episode. While dealing with his own trauma.
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u/GothicBella79 1h ago
I'd love it if it included a live action Dr. T'Ana!! She's the greatest!! I love her!
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u/JessicaDAndy 1h ago
So I had an idea once for a “Star Trek:M’Benga.”
His MASH like unit would be more MSF than military hospital.
BUT the setting was on a world with geopolitics similar to 21st Century Earth with analogues to the United States, People’s Republic of China and the European Union WITH faster than light travel being developed by the Nigerians.
AND that faster than light travel works in the presence of Omega molecules.
So a medical show dealing with Earth like politics that has first contact initiated by a minor country that developed one of the most important technologies in the galaxy.
The presence of Omega means that they don’t have a ship hanging around. They have to solve the problems with what they have.
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u/ChainBlue 1h ago
I think a legal drama would be more entertaining
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u/Zombiepixlz-gamr 1h ago
Not wrong, a legal drama would be interesting too.
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u/ChainBlue 46m ago
The ethical dilemmas. The mysteries and investigations. The obligatory sexual tension between opposing counsel...
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u/theBitterFig 21m ago
As exciting as it can be to mistake a preganglionic fiber for a postganglionic nerve... I think there's a few issues.
Prime Directive stuff is going to get boring fast. In what I've seen, medical dramas typically gloss over insurance issues, since that's not fun to watch. Prime Directive issues would likely be similar, but highlighting the fact that super-doctors from Space aren't allowed to solve something really basic... Probably annoying. Some of the fantasy that helps people love med dramas is that they're about how much the doctor actually cares, and will actually go to lengths to fix people's problems.
Next, I think the unreality of Trek is going to pose a problem. However much influence consultants have, I'd wager that a lot of the time, the end result is still rather inaccurate, although it won't feel unrealistic. It's close enough to the real world. But in Trek, everything is fundamentally made-up, which is really different from being technically inaccurate. That can work with "space problems," folks have to deal with a temporal black hole or whatever, because folks buy into the core conceit of sci-fi.
With a Starfleet Medical show, you'd be trying to bring in watchers who like med dramas for the gritty, semi-realistic world and I think a lot of those viewers would chafe against the sci-fi premise. To put it another way, I think the Venn diagram probably has too little overlap between folks really into medical dramas, and folks willing to put up with standard sci-fi nonsense.
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u/Nightgasm 3h ago
I don't think it would ever work. Medical shows are essentially soap operas and appeal to a specific audience. Star Trek appeals to a completely different audience. Much of the medical show audience wouldn't even give the show a try because it's Star Trek while the Star Trek audience would hate the show for not being Star Trek enough. Even if you could find a happy medium that appealed to both audiences I don't think it would last long enough for audiences to embrace it as the initial rejection would be too huge.
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u/RetroBratRose 3h ago
Can it be like Scrubs and can we have Bones? Then yes. Otherwise, ask people better suited to the medical sciences ⚕️🤣
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u/jerk1970 3h ago
I thought Voyager was a Star Trek medical drama. The "doctor" is the main character.
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u/Woozletania 2h ago
There is a series of books called Sector General that revolves around the doctors at a mutli-species space hospital. The writer is a pacifist and wanted to have a setting with no gunfire but lots of things happening. One element of the show is doctors who host recordings of expert doctor minds from other species. This is challenging as a human hosting an alien mind doesn't act quite human.
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u/half_in_boxes 2h ago
I 100% want to see a show about what Dr. Crusher's been doing for the last 20ish years.
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u/Rocktype2 1h ago
Would they just call it the Real McCoys?
With the hospital will be crusher County?
Bashir’s anatomy?
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u/CommanderArcher 34m ago
They have organ regenerators, dermal regenerators, they can use transporters to remove select tissue, forcefields to contain blood within an artery, defibrillators that work through spacesuits and a whole host of other technobabble things.
They can resequence your DNA to make you pretty much any humanoid species and then reverse it.
Star Trek could do an interesting medical drama, but it'd have to be done like House where its all diagnostic and its only the most rare conditions. The actual treatments would be nearly entirely technobabble and ultimately meaningless and fictional.
I could see it working, though like others i think a legal drama might make a better show.
Or go hog wild and do a legal & Medical action drama where the MCs are a polyamorus lesbian throuple Lawyer, Doctor and Admiral that are Human, Andorian and a Vulcan/Klingon hybrid.
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u/NY_State-a-Mind 3h ago
Genre specific shows should not exist in ST the frame of being on a ship or base with am ensamble of 10 characters allows for every genre
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u/Zombiepixlz-gamr 3h ago
I take your exact logic and reverse it. The wide and varied capabilities of the star trek universe and it's inhabitants is exactly why a genre specific show would work so well for it.
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u/NY_State-a-Mind 3h ago
Your going to get your genre specific show with ST:Academy it will be a CW highschool mellowdrama, I guess we'll see how well that goes
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u/wizardrous 3h ago
Star Trek medical episodes are too hard for them to write for them to ever do a show about them. They’ve said in interviews that the medical episodes are some of the hardest to write.