Yes, it’s all over the interwebs, and making geek waves all over: The announcement that a new Star Trek TV series will be coming to us in 2017.
And I’m really not looking forward to this…
Not because I wouldn’t like to see a new Star Trek TV series… but because it’s reportedly going to be helmed by the people who gave us the last two Star Trek movies.
Yeah. The ones where Kirk is an utter asshole, Spock is an unbalanced psycho, ships are big enough to play pro football in the rec rooms, communications looks remarkably like a brewery and engineering has more plumbing than a Soylent factory… well. You get the gist.
Yeah, I’m a Trek purist… I admit it. In my Star Trek, the crew of the Enterprise was about exploration, learning about the galaxy and other cultures, and helping people with their problems. They did everything they could to avoid wars and conflicts, or to end them with as little bloodshed as possible, and come to peaceful understandings with alien races.
But in later years, Star Trek became about this:
It was Star Wars, but with the Empire as the good guys.
The NuTrek movies used one of science fiction’s worst tropes—time travel creating alternate timelines—as an excuse to do whatever they wanted with the original Star Trek characters, and turned them into the kind of people audiences would recognize from a primetime soap: Jerks, prima-donnas, morons, jokers and troublemakers, who are more predisposed to getting into elaborately-choreographed fights or unloading their arsenals on their enemies as working out peaceful solutions to anything. Its producers were allowing the nation’s fondness for first-person shooters to overwhelm ideas like thinking through problems and forging peace through cooperation, and were more interested in Kirk’s sex life with green-skinned aliens than his abilities as a diplomat and representative of the Federation is general, and the Human race in particular.
And I imagine we’ll have plenty of this to look forward to:
This is not my idea of Star Trek. This is pandering to tired old sci-fi cliches, and even more tired Star Trek cliches, in order to create titillation and stoopid crazy space-battles to thrill an audience that doesn’t want to think beyond the last pizza they ordered online. This is a parody of what Star Trek is.
And so, knowing that these are the people who are going to guide the development of the next iteration of Star Trek, I plan to steer in another direction. You guys want to do Star Trek: Travesty, go right ahead. I’ll be an another room, with a book. Or watching a movie. Or walking along the lakeside. Taking a drive. Anything but watching a NuTrek series.
So… prove me wrong. I dare you. I double-dog dare you.
Postscript: I’ve written on Star Trek once or twice before. Previous posts that fit the subject:
I can’t agree with you more. I’ve never really gotten into Star Trek (I only just recently started watching TOS and intend to watch through them all because they’re so iconic to the sci-fi scene), but the same thing seems to be happening everywhere. I’m big on gaming, and developers tend to move over time towards what I call “pornographic” game design. They appeal to as many people as possible through basic emotions by adding cool-looking stuff, big explosions, lots of guns, reflex-based gameplay and casino-style leveling systems to keep people playing, instead of focusing on artistic game design requiring strategic and tactical forethought and letting the gameplay speak for itself. I use Halo as a prime example, as the original game was excellent with a well-balanced and unique weapon sandbox, a barely-manageable number of tactical options, and slower-paced gameplay to allow thought to dominate over reflex. Bungie had originally planned only three games and wanted to move on afterwards, but Microsoft wanted to milk the title for all it was worth. Over time, it slowly changed to become more like other pornographic games, losing the features which made it a piece of art and gaining features that made it more appealing to the mindless masses. I’ve seen the same thing happening all over the place and it bothers me. Sorry for the rant, but it’s one of the few things I have an opinion on. I could right a book about my theory on game design.
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Seriously, if you want to write a book on game design theory, don’t let us stop you! But yeah, what you described in gaming is pretty much the same treatment that sci-fi in general has been getting from television in the last few years. I recently called it “potluck” television, throwing everything you can into the pot in order to appeal to everyone… and ending up with tasteless bathwater. The last two Trek movies were like that, as well as most of the recent non-Trek sci-fi TV series we’ve seen; and unless CBS puts a brand new creative team onto their NuTrek series, it’ll end up as bathwater too.
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I’m cautiously optimistic. This is supposedly not set in the JJ Abrams universe, so maybe we’re coming home to the Star Trek universe we grew up with. Maybe. I can hope, damn it.
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I have a hard time believing that they won’t tie it into their new movie universe… and at any rate, the people writing and producing the movies will reportedly be involved in the series; so, even if they set it in a different time/setting/whatever, it’ll still be done like the movies. I’ll only be optimistic if they bring in a completely different set of writers and producers, and without orders from Paramount to emulate the movies… which I doubt will happen.
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