The problem is that they’re not really trekking anywhere at that point. I remember that being a big criticism of DS9 when it was first airing. DS9 partially made up for it by having a very cosmopolitan setting and the occasional offworld episode, but it wasn’t until a few seasons that they were regularly having adventures off station.
Interestingly, I think DS9 was also the most war-related series, at least of the first four. Voyager had their ongoing Odyssey combat adventures, but not a larger war the way the Dominion War was portrayed. Generally speaking, wars with the Klingons or Romulans just provided context for episodic plots, not drive a multi-season story arc.
I even think there were several MASH-like episodes - stories like Nog playing medic, Jake as a war reporter, Kira being forced to evict that farmer, and some others. They showed the cruelty and absurdity of war, but of course without MASH’s humor. And I think that’s what made MASH, MASH. The bitter, jaded, drafted doctors and medical personnel using humor as a defense. It’s not war that’s non-Trek so much as that kind of human attitude (even if it did surface in later episodes of later series). There’s no Burns and Hot Lips versus Hawkeye and Trapper kind of dynamic in Starfleet.
Come to think of it, Q was a literary trickster character, like Hawkeye. They both had a bemused but sometimes quite angry disregard for authority and did what they could to show it up as absurd. That analogy never occurred to me before. Q is what Hawkeye would be given the power of a god.
ArcticAmphibian@lemmus.org 10 months ago
The difficult thing about planet-side battles in Star Trek is the phasers. When one is hit with a phaser on high power, there is nothing left worth saving by a medic. Weapons in Trek are too efficient to make surface war particularly entertaining.
cheery_coffee@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
Yeah, with Trek technology war would be pretty terrible and boring and come down to energy production.
In DS9 the Cardassians build automated weapon platforms and the Federation builds self replicating mines. At that point I find it hard to imagine that war wouldn’t just become a matter of industrial replicators churning out autonomous weapons and defensive systems as fast as possible. Your only need a few control ships in an area with subspace communication to manage massive fleets.
It also seems like Federation tech is pretty near the end game since they’re competitive in all the quadrants (I haven’t finished Voyager though, I can’t remember how they fare against Borg tech), so overwhelming enemies in quantity and energy reserves would be an acceptable strategy.
Especially_the_lies@startrek.website 10 months ago
So maybe we don’t see many phaser wounds, but saying that there’s nothing there ignores all the other ways people can get injured in a battle (explosions, crashes, etc). There may not be analogs to bullet wounds, but I bet there are plenty of other ways.