Daystrom Institute

The Tholians are at the top of my list. I was absolutely thrilled when it seemed that ENT was going to properly examine them; it's a huge shame they never got the chance. STO tried to tackle them, but they were heavily limited by the bounds of canon.

A very close second - though they've definitely gotten more love since ENT - are the Andorians. My biggest problem with Trek's portrayal of the Federation is that it's very much a Humans Club. At best, it seems like the Four Founders are really the Humans, their babysitters the Vulcans, and the two jerks they found.

Would love to dig in more on the political realities of the balance of power between Earth, Vulcan, Andor, and Tellar.

Honestly, the Federation itself. I always thought you could make a really interesting show that was a mix of Federation politics and Starfleet intrigue; maybe a show about the Federation government on Earth that delved into Federation society and dealt with an overarching plot. Like maybe a season where a Federation colony at the edge of Federation space gets into conflict with another race/government, and for a season you get a mix of stories from the colony, a Starfleet ship sent to the colony to support, and the Federation Council on Earth.

Federation politics could be really interesting, but the shows always paid kind of disappointing lip service to it. One key example is in the DS9 episode “Rapture” when Bajor is being accepted into the Federation; the fact that a Starfleet admiral rather than a civilian Federation representative was overseeing the proceeding was lazy to me. Plus the entire ceremony was tiny and anticlimactic (and obviously barely got started since Sisko interrupted). Great potential for some real insight into the government but instead it’s just some rando admiral.

Starfleet personnel are a subset of the total human population. Off the top of my head I'm not aware of any canon figure about what percentage of the human population is in Starfleet, or the total number of Starfleet, but presumably it is not a huge percentage of the total.

There are numerous notable civilian characters in Trek, but in general the franchise presents us with a vision where, contrary to the in-universe reality, civilian life is sort of at the periphery of Starfleet. Civilians are people that Starfleet personnel find to be colorful characters, sometimes become romantically involved with, people who serve Starfleet personnel when they're on vacation or otherwise at leisure, sometimes criminals, etc.

The notable civilian characters we see on screen tend to have their entire lives circumscribed by Starfleet -- think Jake Sisko or Keiko O'Brien.

I'd be really curious to see not just a human civilian character but a civilian world fully developed over the course of a series. What is it like to be "just some person" living their life?

The biggest gap in the existing series is the one-two punch of the Romulan War and the founding of the Federation, which we only missed due to ENT's cancellation. Finding some way back into that era, beyond Riker's holodeck program, would be number one on my wishlist.

As a Relaunch Litverse fan, I really liked the introduction of the competing Typhon Pact as a way to bring in a number of the less profiled species.

Having a different kind of interstellar government from the Federation in a Cold War rivalry for planets and civilizations was an interesting backdrop for the entire era. Creating an opponent that brought together a number of the less known species including the Breen, Tzenkethi, Tholians, Gorn as well as remnants of the Romulan Empire was inspired.

We never got to see as much of the Typhon Pact in the books as I would have liked. The concept though was inspired and one that would fit well in the early 25th century portrayed in Picard.

As for the Sheliak, the novelverse has them in conflict with the Breen for additional complexity.

The newest era of Trek hasn’t hesitated to integrate some of the more successful experiments from the novels, including Una’s name and Illyrian genetic modifications. The Typhon Pact of the Litverse has a lot to offer without being a direct competitor to the world building since Nemesis.

I thought the Miradorn were interesting. The twin bond that they have seems to suggest they have some kind of mental abilities, some way to connect the two people. They were listed as 'quarrelsome', could be an interesting mirror for the Tellarites, coming from a non-Federation species. They sided with the Dominion in the war, too, so they don't seem to think much of the Federation. Could make for an interesting antagonist.

edit: Thought about this some more. What if the twinned Miradorn didn't refer to brothers from the same mother? Perhaps their whole society consists of twinned people. Perhaps they have some sort of process where they bond two of their people together, for life, and that's how they run their world. Think of how dangerous an adversary that would make, there's always two of them. Even better if they have some sort of 2 person hive mind between them, so that they can work together seamlessly, even at a distance. Like some kind of organic grassroots Borg.

I think I’d prefer if they explored strange new worlds more than calling back to existing lore. Then again, what the TNG era did with the Klingons was amazing, and if somebody had made that argument then, we would’ve missed a LOT of quality content.

Maybe it’s possible to dig deeper into some existing species, if done right.

I was very happy to see the Pakleds come back in Lower Decks.

Would be fun to see what happened to “time machine inventor” Berlinghoff Rasmussen.

I had a similar thought about the Denobulans the other day (I'm on an ENT watch through). I guess I missed them in Prodigy.

Back on point, have the Suliban or the Xindi been mentioned at all since ENT?

The automated repair station from ENT's Dead Stop (AKA The Ware) The novels presented an interesting idea of these rogue clumps of machine learning forming symbiotic relationships with sentient life that have the developed grey matter the Ware needs, but are filtered from becoming advanced, tool using, space fairing civilizations due to essentially lack the physiology like the opposable thumbs common to progenitor seeded humanoid races.

I would really like to see a series which focused on establishing a colony and the specific challenges that settlers face. There are probably a lot of interactions between civilian Federation organizations, civilian individuals, colonial governments, and Starfleet. I think there's a lot to explore here.

I would like to point out that Denobulans have appeared a few times on Lower Decks as well.

Whatever happened to Paris and Janeway’s salamander kids from Threshold? Show us what happened there like a few million generations later. Have far future salamanders create time travel or whatever and then come back to the “present” and cause some hijinx. I know the Threshold episode is… controversial, at best, but it happened. Use them salamanders.

I'd love to see more about the cultural and social revolutions which occurred in Ferenginar which were happening in the background of DS9 that resulted in the first Ferengi to be a trade union leader becoming Grand Nagus.

I think Nagus Zek and Moogie were working on ways to modernise Ferengi culture but the realpolitik of it means it can't just have been the two of them. I feel like there was a coalition of feminists and Ferengi workers in the proletariat growing in popularity.

Ferengi's seem to have been isolated from the Dominion War but it doesn't mean they weren't impacted by it, as the 3 biggest Empires closest to them were all actively in full scale war mode. I also think it's likely that prior to the war there may have been a kind of Gold Rush into the Gamma Quadrant which left many Ferengi investors overextended when the war started and the quadrant was cut off.

I think Zek and Moogie were trying to reform in this context. It's Russia in 1916-17 without the overt involvement in the war.

Ferengi workers and women, surrounded by the cultural hegemony of the Federation must have been causing strikes, protests and riots in the background, and the wealthy class of Ferengi were weakened due to their gamma quadrant investments failing.

While Rom was radical to lead a strike in the first place, it's possible he was seen as a moderate by the time of Season 7 after a few months of continuous disruption to Ferengi economy and politics. Also as a hero of the Allies fighting the Dominion who saved millions of lives with his role in keeping the wormhole closed and the resistance, he'd have a good diplomatic influence to regain trade with those powers and access to DS9 as a port.

So my working theory is that there was a gradual revolution in Ferengi culture, and that a coalition of Ferengi trade unions, feminists, Federation enthusiasts and socialists and democratic reformers were able to claim victory at the same time as the war ending.

But of course the FCC and the power of Capital amongst the elite must still have been immensely strong. 100% of a culture won't change overnight - but however the Ferengi left coalition gained influence (I'm thinking at least a general strike and riots - why else is Zek's message to Quark so garbled that he thinks he will be the next Grand Nagus) Rom was seen as a good compromise by both sides. The FCC working on their prior intelligence will see him as the moron brother of minor barkeeper they may be able to keep in line and manipulate, and who at this time is less radical than demands of some Ferengi revolutionaries, but to the left he's hugely symbolic as their first trade union leader. Both sides also accept that diplomatically he's going to be popular with the Federation.

There's no way Rom gets to be Grand Nagus without massive social and political change, without some kind of Marxist dialectic happening in the background.

I think Rom is the Social Democratic compromise between various political movements and also the first wave of further integration into the Federation and its ideals.

But we only get the surface level information of it. I think there's at least a double episode in it. Maybe a future Ferengi Star Fleet officer in Discovery could retell this story of cultural evolution after first contact with a particularly capitalist new alien culture.

Memory Alpha - Sheliak

Link for the clueless like me.

A regular sitcom set in the ST universe. Think Seinfeld with jokes about replicator food.

Call me crazy, but I need specifically a Lower Decks episode on Edo. I think they could have some fun with it while also digging into how their laws evolved over the years (and maybe were impacted by the whole Wesley Crusher thing).