Bad Astronomy and Universe Today Forum - View Single Post - The only good idea for a new Star Trek show

John M. Dollan · #15 (**permalink**) 07-July-2005, 08:20 PM

In many ways, I'm quite sad to see what is apparently, for a while anyway, the end of the Trek universe. I can still remember sitting in our basement when I was about 7 or 8, in the great big black arm chair of my great grandmother's, pretending it was my own captain's chair. The original series influenced me quite a bit in my likes and dislikes of science fiction.

With the newer series (I still consider TNG "new"), I still thoroughly enjoyed them. Voyager really started to wear on me, though, at least as far as the writers were concerned. With the blatant tossing out of continuity, I fell into the status of simply watching the show on an episode by episode basis, without really connecting them to the greater Trek universe at large.

Enterprise, I felt, had a lot of promise. But the writing was pretty sad. I don't really think the acting was bad; the actors were pretty much limited by what the writers presented, and from what I've read, little room for even minor improvisation. Unfortunately, the episodes were simply rehashed tales from the other series. There was nothing outstanding, nothing to mark this as its own series.

A lot of people had a major problem with the introduction of Enterprise. For myself, I liked it as a nice change. but really, if you judge the show on the basis of the intro, you'r essentially ignoring the entire meat of the series. Unfortunately, the meat of the series was somewhat tainted. After all, the biggest hurdle was to make the show appear pre-TOS. How can you do that and not look just plain silly when TOS was made in the 60's? Even dials and meters looked more advanced!

In the end, it was not until the fourth season that the show began to become what it should have been all along: an introduction to the Star Trek universe, and a set up for TOS. We saw the Andorians, the Tellerites, we saw a fairly good story line involving the Vulcans (though this was more to make up for thier shoddy treatment of that species in the earlier seasons than anything that *needed* explaining in the Trek Universe). Had the show not been cancelled, we would have been able to see the Romulan War, far more exciting in my view than some new, uber-enemy like the whole bloody temporal time war thing.

So what is to become of Trek now? I had thought that movies were the way to go, but I tend to agree more with Humphrey (was that who said it?). Movies would only be a waste of time. I like the movies, but they are still little more than extra long television episodes. In my view, I would like to see some well thought out, well done mini-series, set in various points along the Trek time line, dealin with key events. It's time not to let one ship hog all of the action for a given time frame.

At any rate, I'm out of time and I have to go back to work. I had more to say, but it has pretty much been said, and people tend to skip these long posts anyway!

...John...