Some Thoughts on "Star Trek"

            "Star Trek" as a franchise is effectively now just going to be movies I think.  The last television series, "Star Trek Enterprise" was poorly executed because it was preachy, boring, and really betrayed a lot of the concepts that the mythos had taken as its core bailiwick.  It was more like the first season of "Star Trek The Next Generation" than it should have been, and didn't have the good music or original concepts that kept that series moving forward.

I won't deny that it had potential, and I blame the creative over seeing for the issues that it faced.

             "Trek" had attempted a cartoon show in the past, and while I think that the writing and voice work were as good as the original series, mostly the animation was bad and being that it was supposed to be aimed at kids it was neither action and fun oriented enough for a younger audience, nor was it high stakes enough for the older crowd (for instance, there were force field belts for the crew, this means that not only did they not have to animate space suits, it means that phasers were now even more useless as a means of intimidation and danger).  But sadly, much like live action, I think this is a dead venue.

I won't say it didn't have potential.  I blame the animation industry at the time.

             Really I think a lot of issues come up in this area: When do you set it?  Where do you set it?  And what will be the cast make up?  We already know what "Star Trek" is about, a group of adventurers heading out to space to explore and occasionally fight evil or be turned into pawns in a cosmic chess game by some obnoxious godlike being like V'ger or Q.  If I were to try and make the series this is what I would try to do with it.

Pompous Prick.

             Take a look at the last movie, and set the series at just after the events there in.  The Federation is rocked by the time traveling terrorist, Nero and the Vulcans are all but extinct.  What remains of the Vulcan security forces join with Star Fleet completely (as they have no where else to go and the future of the Vulcan race rests with the Federation).  This intelligence and security force would be the precursor to Section 31 that was seen in "Deep Space 9".

Had Potential, which it fulfilled.

             The show will take place in an unexplored region where the Federation will be looking for new colonial worlds in hopes of spreading out to the stars in an aggressive fashion, in hopes that if a force like Nero ever appears again humanity and their allies will simply be to far flung and numerous to ever wash away from the galaxy.

You know, so they will never be... Lost in Space.

             I think that the cast will be a group of settlers out on the edge of space, they will have a Vulcan intelligence officer who will be far too willing to shoot first and ask questions later, and the central tension of the cast will be between the need of the Vulcan's to secure themselves against threats, and the desire of the rest of the Federation to continue to explore and make peaceful contact.  I think that the chief antagonist outside of this cast tension should be the Romulans, who want the remaining Vulcans to simply come and join with their civilization and cease to be a distinct race at all, a tempting offer to the members of the crew who think that the Federation are not taking the steps necessary to secure the Vulcan's as a society anyway.

            I would say that you could have a new version of Q as part of the conflict, a Founder that was sent off from the dominion, and even the Borg, since the timeline is altered you don't have to delay their introduction.

            It's not like the thing would be hard to cast, there are legions of genre actors that have just gotten off of "Lost", "Heroes", "BattlestarGalactica", "V", and "Stargate", not to mention everything that Joss Whedon has ever touched.  You could have Michael Shanks play a ship doctor, Anthony Stewart Head play the ship's Captain, and get Morena Baccarin to play the Vulcan security officer.

He could totally pull off being a Star Fleet Captain.

            It's not like other projects haven't been spinning around Hollywood since the whole damn idea got going.  People, a lot of people, would like this to get going, and I really don't think there is anything wrong with trying out something.

Holy shit.  That is Bryan Singer.

             Truth be told, while I loved the last movie it would not have been the ideal way to restart the franchise.  Creating original characters and having them do adventures based off of something previously established in the shows would have been the ideal solution, you could set it a couple decades after the last movie, have a character that wears gold face paint and suggest that the designs for Data were used, after his death, to create more androids for Star Fleet's use.  Have Bruce Greenwood play the captain, Chris Pine play the young recruit, and Zachary Quinto playing a Vulcan science officer... Hey look at that you don't even need to find a new cast, they all fit anyway.  What would the story be?  Captain Sisko, a Federation hero who disappeared after the Dominion War, having been abducted by godlike time traveling aliens has returned and is heralding a great warning, a giant planet destroying ship from the future is coming to attack the Federation.  This mysterious ship appears, destroys Vulcan with a strange super weapon and begins heading to Earth.  The crew manages to beat it, by infiltrating it and discovers a new alien threat.

Captain Ben Sisko, he's so badass that the only surface large enough to record all of his accomplishments, is his dick -SFdebris

            You have successfully tied together "The Next Generation", "Deep Space Nine", and if you wanted to you could grab Jeri Ryan to reprise her role as Seven of Nine, she having barely aged all of those years because she is part Borg, there you just tied in "Voyager" as well.  Want a reference to "Enterprise" and the original series?  Then call the new ship the "Archer" or the "Kirk" and you are done.  But honestly you shouldn't be referencing "Enterprise" nobody liked that show, even the people who claim to are just lying to themselves.  No confusing time travel, the aliens are left mysterious and thus you don't need motivations, they are just time traveling assholes.

Though I guess we do already have a science fiction icon who deals with time traveling assholes.  Worst comes to worst though and I have a winning idea: Crossover!

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