Folks may know that DS9 veteran Manny Coto is serving this year as show runner on the now-final season of Star Trek: Enterprise.
He’s doing good stuff.
What folks may not know is that a slot as executive producer on the show was offered to Joe Michael Straczynski (JMS) of B5 fame, but he turned it down.
He did, however, collaborate on a work that was sent to UPN about how to revitalize the Star Trek franchise.
In the wake of Enterprise’s cancellation, just after midnight, he sent out
Among other interesting things, he wrote:
Bryce Zabel (recently the head of the Television Academy and creator/executive producer of Dark Skies) and I share one thing in common. We are both long-time Trek fans, from the earliest days, who felt that the later iterations were not up to the standards set by the original series. (I’m exempting TNG because that one worked nicely, and was in many ways the truest to the original series because Gene was still around to shepherd its creation and execution.)
Over time, Trek was treated like a porsche that’s kept in the garage all the time, for fear of scratching the finish. The stories were, for the most part, safe, more about technology than what William Faulkner described as "the human heart in conflict with itself." Yes, there were always exceptions, but in general that trend became more and more apparent with the passage of years. Which was why so often I came down on the later stories, which I did openly, because I didn’t feel they lined up with what Trek was created to be. I don’t apologize for it, because that was what I felt as a fan of Trek. That’s why I had Majel appear on B5, to send a message: that I believe in what Gene created.
Because left to its own devices, allowed to go as far as it could, telling the same kind of challenging stories Trek was always known for, it could blow the doors off science fiction television. Think of it for a moment, a series with a forty year solid name, guaranteed markets…can you think of a better time when you take chances and can tell daring, imaginative, challenging stories? Why play it safe?
When Enterprise went down, those involved shrugged and wrote it off to "franchise fatigue," their phrase, not mine.
I don’t believe that for a second. Neither does Bryce. There’s a tremendous hunger for Trek out there. It just has to be Trek done *right*.
Last year, Bryce and I sat down and, on our own, out of a sheer love of Trek as it was and should be, wrote a series bible/treatment for a return to the roots of Trek. To re-boot the Trek universe. Understand: writer/producers in TV just don’t do that sort of thing on their own, everybody always insists on doing it for vast sums of money. We did it entirely on our own, setting aside other, paying deadlines out of our passion for the series. We set out a full five-year arc.
He said that, though he had lots to keep him busy until 2007, he’d set it all aside for the chance to do the Trek series he had in mind.
A few hours later (JMS stays up crazy late at night) he sent out
He expressed hope, though, that when Paramount is ready to reactivate the franchise that his schedule will be clear and he’d get a shot at doing the show.
I don’t necessarily agree with JMS about the quality of Trek declining after Next Gen. My current impression (this may change after the DVD release of Enterprise) is that the Trek series are to be ranked from best to worst in this way:
- Deep Space 9
- Next Gen
- Original Series
- Enterprise (if the fourth season is counted)
- Voyager
- Animated
I thus feel DS9 rather than TNG was the highpoint.
Nevertheless, I think JMS doing Star Trek could be awesome.
I’m a little cautious about his use of the term "re-boot" in connection with the Star Trek universe. I’d like to see existing Trek continuity stay intact, though I have to admit that I’ve pondered where the franchise might go next, given all that has been established. They’ve written such an extensive backstory that writers may be boxed in creatively. After Voyager closed, their best chance for finding new creative room was in doing a prequel, and they botched that (until the current season). This prevents them from doing another prequel to TOS. If they go further into the future than VOY, they run the risk of having so much technological wizardry that it overwhelms the story. ("Activate a trans-warp conduit! We’ve got to get to the other side of the galaxy before the next commercial break!") So I’m at least theoretically open to the idea of a re-boot.
I suspect that most fans are not, however. Jettison all their beloved stories and intricate continuity and chronology debates and they will be far less understanding than comic book fans were when DC rebooted its universe.
On the other hand, I suspect that JMS may have been using the term "re-boot" in another sense: Just a reinvigoration rather than a complete restart from scratch.
Either way, I’d like to see him get his shot.
I think he could do for Trek what Ron Moore did for Battlestar Galactica. (Though I’m not entirely satisfied with the latter, it’s still several Quantum Leaps [pun intended!] above the 1970s version.)
Shouldn’t Voyager be LAST after the animated series and perhaps even the Great Space Coaster? Despite the fact that the Great Space Coaster was not even Trek, I’ll take the exotic Gary Gnu over some dude with the all-seeing eye pyramid tattooed on his temple.
What made the original Trek great was its original connection with Californian counter-culture. And as that culture became more part of the status-quo, it started to lose its connection with reality to the point that it inflicted great pain on any viewer whose IQ happened to surpass that of eyebrow mites.
The real shame is that ungrounded fluff like ST: Enterprise can be given four years of second chances while the incredibly insightful and gritty series Firefly is cancelled in its first season.
My advice: let Star Trek go to the grave. If Gene were so worried about the series dying in his absence, then he should have been insightful enough to appoint someone as a guiding father-figure with absolute authority over disputes. He could have signified the whole deal by changing the person’s name: “You are Kirk, and to you I leave the helm…”
But ST is un-poped and therefore doomed to peter out..
Also, Gilligan’s Planet, another stinker by Filmation (the same studio that did the animated Trek) has nearly the exact same plot as Voyager. Coincidence? I THINK NOT!
<< Despite the fact that the Great Space Coaster was not even Trek, I'll take the exotic Gary Gnu over some dude with the all-seeing eye pyramid tattooed on his temple. >>
No gnus is good gnus with Gary Gnu! LOL
As someone who (gasp!) actually liked Voyager, take my words with due suspicion: Why not have a pre-sequel? I mean, why not have a sequel to TOS set after TOS but before TNG?
That’s actually one of the few options open to them, a Star Trek: The Missing Years series.
I can’t believe you have Voyager at 5, I personally thought it was the best of all of them… Here is my ranking:
1 – Voyager
2 – TNG
3 – Original
4 – DS9
5 – Enterprise
6 – Animated
I’m happy that someone finally agrees with me that DS9 was the high point of the franchise. I found it fascinating that it, unlike its brethren, had story arcs that were sustained over entire seasons. It wasn’t entirely episodic in the way the others were. Voyager sustained some of its story arcs, but not in the way DS9 did. When I get spare cash (HA!), I plan on buying the Chinese DVDs on eBay–they have the entire series for $100.
To weigh in on the Voyager question, I thought Voyager got off to the strongest start of any Trek series at that time, and had some knockout episodes in the first season.
My favorite is the one where they discovered a wormhole to the Alpha quadrant and established contact with a Klingon ship. Eventually it was clear they were going to be able to beam people through the wormhole, and for awhile you couldn’t imagine how it was that the series wasn’t going to end here and now with everyone beaming home to the Klingon ship. What a great twist that episode had.
But the series foundered seriously in subsequent seasons.
Neelix and Kes got in the way of the story rather than adding anything; the creators were wrongly grooming Neelix as the designated Breakout Character(TM) when the correct choice, as was obvious from his very first scene and almost his first line of dialogue (I think it was actually the third or fourth line), was The Doctor.
Most of the characters were short-changed dramatically. Tuvok was too unconflicted to be very interesting; what made characters like Spock and Worf interesting was precisely their conflict. B’Elana also lacked an interesting degree of conflict, though for the opposite reason: she was so anti-Klingon that her Klingon-ness never got very interesting.
Chakotay and Tom Paris were like the two halves of what had made Riker two-thirds of an interesting character, minus the beard, poker, playing the trombone, and libido. Their characters were the very soul of playing it safe, and from now on whenever I think of them I shall remember JMS’s Porche analogy.
Seven of Nine did inject some life back into the series, although I wish they hadn’t de-Borgified her. She was a lot more interesting as a Borg than a generic supermodel in a catsuit.
Kate Mulgrew added a lot of watchability to the series, but I never felt that the writers knew what to do with her.
And the series finale ended on such a disappointing note. Did nobody tell the writers that it was important not just to show us that the crew gets home, and to provide a suitably Trek-tastic way for them to get there, but also to give us some idea of what that homecoming was like, what happened in the immediate aftermath, and were the characters went after that?
My favorite is the one where they discovered a wormhole to the Alpha quadrant and established contact with a Klingon ship. Eventually it was clear they were going to be able to beam people through the wormhole, and for awhile you couldn’t imagine how it was that the series wasn’t going to end here and now with everyone beaming home to the Klingon ship. What a great twist that episode had.
Actually, it was a Romulan ship, not a Klingon ship.
Ah, right, thanks, Pub. I saw the show only once when it was first broadcast, and it stuck with me, but obviously I don’t remember it as well as I thought I did!
If Gene were so worried about the series dying in his absence, then he should have been insightful enough to appoint someone as a guiding father-figure with absolute authority over disputes. He could have signified the whole deal by changing the person’s name: “You are Kirk, and to you I leave the helm…”
Ha, like a Star Trek pope?
Star Trek needs to go away for 2 or 3 decades. Hopefully by then they will have some sort medical technologies available that will let me erase my memories of the utter horridness that was Ensign “I’m a child trapped in a man’s body” Kim’s acting.
BTW, the line from the Doctor that made me realize he was going to be a great character was in the pilot when he materialized in the middle of the chaos ensuing after (IIRC) Voyager was hurled into the Delta quadrant. His first line, of course, is”Please state the nature of the medical emergency,” and I don’t remember exactly what comes in between that and the line where he’s standing at a patient bedside and calls, “Tricorder.” Someone hands him one, and he looks down at it with surprised exasperation and clarifies, “Medical tricorder!” And just the way he said it made it clear to me that this was a character to watch. 🙂
JMS heading a new series is a SF geek dream. B5 is my favorite SF ever. I missed much of it while in the Navy, but finally got to watch it end-to-end when TNT played the whole thing sequentially. If JMS could again come up with the same “vision” in regards to a Trek universe it would really be compelling.
As for your Trek ratings, I concur. Voyager did start off OK, but after a while I just stopped watching it. Which is the harshest form of criticsm for a SF freak. I also really loved DS9 and I need to watch the whole thing sequentially since I also missed much of it while at sea.
DS9 was the most interesting for me, as well. I liked that it was confined to a space station, as was B5, & those shows are 2 sides of the same credit, in many ways. Also, for me, DS9 had the most engaging, unpredictable characters of any ST series.
But what I’ve found missing from ST in general is the romantic sweep (speaking in genre terms, not like Riker’s various liasons) that B5 definitely has. If JMS could bring that to ST, I’d watch again. I caught a few eps of Enterprise & it was kinda fun – haven’t been able to catch any from this season, though – & Voyager totally lost me during season 3. There’s just not the romantic scope I tend to like in my SF.
And I’m with Jimmy – I don’t think JMS’s idea of “re-boot” means that he’d jettison continuity. Obviously, he’s a fan as well as a writer. It’d be more what he’s done with Spider-Man; keep what’s happened but the changes would be informed with revelations previous unknown to the characters. I could go for that!
Those of us who recognize the supremacy of Deep Space Nine may be fewer than the TOS or TNG fans, but we do exist. 🙂
As for JMS doing Trek, it could be interesting. I think B5 started stumbling in Season 3 and largely fell apart as of “Into the Fire”, but he can do good work. He seems to have the same ‘transhumanist’ outlook as Roddenberry; I’m not sure if that’s a plus or a minus.
+J.M.J+
I never saw “Gilligan’s Planet”; in fact I never even heard of it until now. But when I watched the first few episodes of ST:VOY, I remember remarking to my husband that they all had a “Gilligan’s Island”-style plot: They’re stranded, an opportunity comes along which might get them home, they get their hopes up, then it slips through their fingers at the end and, shucks, they’re still stranded!
That was pretty much the plot of every “Gilligan’s Island” episode, and many of the early ST:VOY eps had the same basic plot. Fortunately, they moved away from that in later eps.
Also, I agree that ST:DS9 was the best of the franchise. It was always my fave.
In Jesu et Maria,
Love DS9, despise JMS. The man stinks at dialogue, his characterization and plotting are only mechanically competent, and his persistent Messianic/persecution complexes get on my nerves.
Plus, you can GUAR-antee that whatever else “reboot” means for him in regards to Trek, it means ditching DS9, which he’s always perceived as a B5 ripoff (completely oblivious to the fact that there could be some reasonably innocent explanation for the parallels, such as some Paramount suit who liked the B5 concept but didn’t have the authority to greenlight it when it was pitched maybe having enough stroke some years later to strongly encourage Berman and Piller to take the space station route on Trek). So, uh, with all due respect to Bryce Zabel, whose work I have some small affection for: thumbs down on this idea. Thumbs way, way down.
These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise.
Its five year mission:
To explore strange new worlds . . .
To seek out new life and new civilizations . . .
To boldly go where no man has gone before!
This is what it means to be Star Trek. It is the mission of Star Trek itself not just the Enterprise. It’s not “To have visitors from strange new worlds visit your space station”.
And that is why DS9, from it’s very inception (regardless of how GOOD a show it may have been) betrayed the Star Trek model and ought not be counted among the best of the Star Trek series. And why Voyager fullfilled it even if inadvertently.
1)ST:TOS
2)ST:TNG
3)ST:Enterprise
4)ST:Voyager
5)ST:TAS
And then there was Deep Space 9.
Chris: ah, but who is the better explorer? The glorified eco-tourist who hits a new planet every week? Or the frontier colonist who makes it a point to try to understand the strange new civilizations he or she must live alongside of?
:PPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP
This is the problem I have with the Roddenberryists (well, one of them…the other being that they’re usually in deep denial about original sin, the one thing DS9 generally got right, even if its writers didn’t know the name of the phenomenon they were documenting).
How interested are we really in a “new Trek series that’s true to Gene’s original creation”? From what I’ve seen of the original series (only a few episodes, though I’ve read descriptions of more) Roddenberry was a very post-Christian modernist, who often attempted to debunk religious claims. One famous episode has Captain Kirk stumbling across the Greek god Apollo on another planet — apparently he was an alien all along. Roddenberry was big on the power of mankind and conquering the cosmos, etc.
Granted, this spirit, or lack thereof, imbues the large amount of science fiction of the last century. I’ve not enjoyed SciFi as much as I could because it tends to be very materialist and depressing. Straczynski is no exception, and the weakest parts of Babylon 5 are when he’s talking about religion or spirituality. It’s a pity that more SciFi like C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy isn’t being written, though I acknowledge his books have some problems.
My interest in the Trek franchise ran out after I realized that Voyager was falling apart and that Deep Space Nine had been boring me for years.
Pass.
Jon-that’s pretty much what others are saying above in remarking that JMS shares Roddenberry’s “transhumanism”, etc.
I’m a little puzzled by the “materialist and depressing” label-seems to me like you could say the same about the majority of fiction published at any time in any genre, beyond the “Christian” publishers, and THEY mostly put out unreadable claptrap.
A writer can say entertaining and penetrating things about human nature and its endeavors without having a fully developed understanding of God. Only a minority of them DO say entertaining or penetrating things about human nature or its endeavors, regardless of their belief systems. See Sturgeon’s Law.
I don’t know if I would agree that most fiction is materialist and depressing. Much modern-day fiction is post-Christian, to be sure, but it is rarely solidly anti-spiritual. SciFi grew largely out of the modernist movement which proclaimed Science as the cure for all of humanity’s woes. The classic science fiction books bear this out, with a few exceptions. The materialist dogma has been passed down through popular science culture, getting a boost in the 80s from Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series.
Unfortunately I have not read much contemporary SciFi, so I cannot say whether or not this philosophy is still prevalent. I would hope that today’s writers are more open to spiritual ideas, and even Straczynski has touched on this in bits and pieces throughout his writings. The last thing I want is a return to the glory days of modernist humanism (“transhumanism,” if you like).
And yes, a writer can be very insightful of human nature without knowing God. The ancient Greek philosophers are a great example of this.
Chris: ah, but who is the better explorer? The glorified eco-tourist who hits a new planet every week? Or the frontier colonist who makes it a point to try to understand the strange new civilizations he or she must live alongside of?
Oh gag! Spare me the Dances With Wolves sentimentality. Sure those efforts may be noble in their own right, but sitting back and “loving thy neighbor” while you wait for the action to come to you is not exploration in any real sense of the word.
Gene Roddenberry was a hyper-Freudian utopian who wanted to make Christ the villain in the first Star Trek movie.
Yes, I’m serious. Slanted and negative, maybe, but serious.
When I get spare cash (HA!), I plan on buying the Chinese DVDs on eBay–they have the entire series for $100.
Tim — I’d advise caution on that. According to other forums I visit, a good portion of the “Chinese imports” available on eBay are actually bootlegs.
I’d advise caution on that. According to other forums I visit, a good portion of the “Chinese imports” available on eBay are actually bootlegs
I think the fact that one can get the entire series for only $100 should be enough alone to suggest there is something rotten in the state of Denmark.
Or at least China.
I guy I met years ago who did a lot of business in China. He said it is going to be REALLY hard to get them to respect copyright laws. Their culture is such that in their view it only makes good business sense to wait for other person to invent things (hence they spend the money) and then just copy it.
DS9 was consistently disppointing with characters I did not find interesting (excepting O’Brien and Worf and Sisko when he was in “Hawk” mode) with some bright moments. I turned off Voyager after I came to the conclusion that if I was a crewmate, I would have no choice but to lead a mutiny against Janeway.
I like Stracyznski’s initial Spider-Man run (although many old time fans did not) although I think Dr Strange appeared more times than Spidey. I abandoned the series after the infamous “goblin babies” incident. Stracyznski showed a similar lack of judgment in the Dr Strange “rebooted” origin mini-series. Based on those examples, count me out of thinking he would do a good job revitalizing Trek.