Yesterday I did a couple of posts about efforts by fans and now, possibly, by J. J. Abrams, to re-cast the characters of the original Star Trek series in order to allow new stories to be told about them more easily.
I did so to build up to this:
A PROPOSAL BY JOE STRACZYNSKI AND BRYCE ZABEL FOR THEIR VISION OF HOW STAR TREK SHOULD BE REJUVENATED.
(CHT to the readre who e-mailed!)
They sent this proposal to Paramount back in 2004 and . . . well . . . nothing came of it. But it’s an interesting proposal.
Basically, they propose rebooting the Star Trek universe so that the writers won’t be boxed in by all the massive continuity recent Star Trek writers have been burdened with. Giving the universe a fresh start would allow them to take the exciting, interesting things about the series that made it popular, without having to be constrained in the stories they can tell by all the material that later followed.
It would also let them re-cast the characters so that we could have new stories involving Kirk, Spock, and McCoy–the triumvirate at the heart of the original series.
The basic idea was to offer another take on the original five-year mission–this time giving it a definite story arc and retelling classic tales in a new way, while supplementing them with entirely new stories.
What they had in mind is quite interesting–putting a significant mystery at the heart of the series in a way that would tie it toghether. They write:
As noted above and as established in television history, Kirk was the youngest starship
captain in the Federation…but what led to this? We know that the Enterprise was sent out
to explore where no human had gone before…but if you stop and think about it for a
moment, isn’t that an odd assignment…to take one of the finest ships in the fleet, give it to
the youngest captain in the Federation, and tell them to just go drive around and see what
they can find?It’s peculiar…until you allow for the possibility that they were looking for something
specific…something they had to keep a secret even from the rest of the crew.
The series treatment gives you a pretty good idea of what Straczynski and Zabel intended the secret to be, and it would have been interesting to see them get the chance to do it.
I found reading the series treatment quite interesting from a
literary perspective. Not only did they have to do a lot of
salesmanship as part of their attempt to convince network execs to give
them a chance, they also spent a surprising amount of time explaining
the concept of a reboot and how it would work. I guess studio execs in 2004 couldn’t be expected to be familiar with such concepts and had to be given a "let me lead you by the hand" explanation. (Probably not a bad idea. JMS tells horror stories about his initial attempts to get studio execs to understand the idea of Babylon 5 having rotational gravity.) Now you could just point to Battlestar Galactica, tho.
On his blog, where Dark Skies creator Bryce Zabel posted the treatment, he indicated that they also held back a lot of what they had in mind from the treatment, indicating that they had in mind a reboot somewhat like the Battlestar Galactica reboot that Ron Moore did, which would have resulted in a much grittier, edgier, and (frankly) interesting series than the kind of clean-as-a-whistle, formal, polyester kind of series that we got in Voyager (for example).
He also mentions that he’s had a whole new set of thoughts about how Star Trek could be revived since the 2004 proposal.
So be sure to
Don’t tell me the goal of their five year mission was to actually head off to Iscandar for the Cosmo DNA to save Earth from the deadly effects of the Gamelon planet bombs!
What if they collide with the Argo (aka Yamato) along the way?
It sounds cool. I wish it had been picked up
This is a really stupid idea. Continuity is one of the greatest things Star Trek had going for it. The very term “Star Trek Universe” bespeaks of continuity. It is a universe because it has a history, it has notable individuals living and who have lived in it, it has particular worlds, technologies, cultures, and languages. It has its own taboos, its own prejudices, its own hot vacation spots, its own political culture, fears, joys, and curiosities. It is nearly as real a universe as our own. In fact, it could be said that it is as real to us as our own universe is to God (with the notable exception that when God knows something it actually comes to be). To ‘re-boot’ the universe would be to lie, to say something doesn’t exist which does. In the minds of millions of people, this universe is real. The Battle of Wolf 359 is as much a historical event as the Battle of Gettysburg, complete with a strategy behind it, a perscript and a postscript, specifc heroes, specific tragedies, casualty statistics, a roster of ships, and even aan aftermath of political, psychological, and cultural effects which effected individuals, governments, and society alike and which changed the course of history and had a profound impact on what followed after it, just like the battle of Gettysburg or the Vietnam War. To start over would be to do violence to this universe, to rip it apart at the seems and to murder the people who live in it.
On top of it all, all they did was steal the plot of one of the lamer Next Generation episodes, The Chase, and propose to turn it into an entire series.
Sounds like a cool idea. But they should wait 20 years before doing it.
Also, remember that one of the reasons it was possible to reboot Battle Star Galatica so succesfully is that there were only a small handful of episodes in the original series. BSG was never a universe, it was a small collection of episodes that were just enough for fans to say, ‘hey this could’ve been cool if it had a chance.’ It was just a small seed of what could have been, and that seed was picked up developed into a full universe. Star Trek has been a full fledged universe now for decades. It’s far beyond the point of what BSG was.
It’s the difference between finding a small, unfinished snippet of what was to be Beethoven’s 10th symphony and deciding to build on the themes in it and develop a full fledged symphony out of it, and taking his 9th symphony and taking the main themes and rewriting the rest of it.
What if for a reboot they did a Crisis-of-Infinite-Enterprises type story?
“To ‘re-boot’ the universe would be to lie, to say something doesn’t exist which does. In the minds of millions of people, this universe is real.”
Whoah, take a deep breath.
Was J.R.R. Tolkien “lying” when he changed the text of “The Hobbit” to dovetail with “The Lord of the Rings”? Or for that matter when he issued revised editions of “The Lord of the Rings,” “The Sillmarillion” (sp?), etc?
Was Sam Rami “lying” when he made Spiderman’s webs shoot out of his wrists instead of from mechanical webshooters?
BESIDES…
The “Star Trek” universe ISN’T a UNIverse, but a MULTIverse. Remember the “Mirror, Mirror” universe? Remember the infinite universes Whorf was falling through in that one “Next Gen” episode where everything was changing on him?
Why couldn’t a “Star Trek” reboot just take place in one of those other slightly different universes? 🙂
The “Star Trek” universe ISN’T a UNIverse, but a MULTIverse. Remember the “Mirror, Mirror” universe? Remember the infinite universes Whorf was falling through in that one “Next Gen” episode where everything was changing on him?
Why couldn’t a “Star Trek” reboot just take place in one of those other slightly different universes?
A new series taking place in one of the OTHERverses could make for an interesting episode or two where they wormhole/warp/whatever into the universe most commonly referred to as THE Star Trek Universe. Could you imagine new Kirk seeing Shatner’s Kirk and being like, “why do I stammer in the universe, and my goodness, what’s wrong with my hair?”
Jokes aside, they dealt with parallel universes before (as in the episode where Tasha Yar is still alive, but they are at war with the Klingons, and losing badly). Granted, that episode did not handle it in the best of ways, but it has been tackled before. Maybe some episodes would be an attempt to learn from their own mistakes in alternate universes, so as to not repeat them in their home universe. (Much like how we are proposing learning from the mistakes of the multiple previous ST series and novels, so as not to repeat those same mistakes in a new ST series.)
Just my $0.02
“This is a really stupid idea. Continuity is one of the greatest things Star Trek had going for it.”
And all of that will still be around, Jay. Nobody is proposing it should all be scuttled and “replaced” with the new version.
But a re-boot and a fresh start would be an exciting project, a way to let “the next generation” have a crack at the mythos and see what happens.
There are plenty of potential Star Trek universes to go around.
“It is nearly as real a universe as our own.”
Not really. Not even given the exception you noted. If we were to keep writing it and building it for decades, it would still be an almost infinitely tiny, cramped and prosaic universe compared to our own.
+J.M.J+
>>>Why couldn’t a “Star Trek” reboot just take place in one of those other slightly different universes?
An alternate universe “reboot” might just work, but JMS’s idea would still be a deviation from Gene Roddenberry’s original vision (if that even matters to anyone anymore).
The whole peaceful-future-of-cooperation-and-exploration thing that people poo-poo today as lame and simplistic came from the GBOTG himself. If you discard that, I’m sure you could make a smashing SciFi series (as B5 was), but would it really be Star Trek?
In Jesu et Maria,
“Jokes aside, they dealt with parallel universes before (as in the episode where Tasha Yar is still alive, but they are at war with the Klingons, and losing badly).”
Another good example. The larger point, of course, is that each universe in principle is as “real” as any of the others, and there’s no reason why only ONE universe has to be at the center of any possible Star Trek series.
I think the “other universes” idea would be a good way to “reboot” Star Trek by reimagining/updating/revising the continuity we know the way that comicbooks are always doing, without even necessarily contradicting the continuity we already know.
If someone wants to create a new Star Trek mirror universe with different things and a slightly different history, say, by picking one point early on in the Star Trek chronology and branching off so that the future following that point is different from the universe we know, that’s fine. However, you can’t go calling it the Star Trek Universe anymore. It would be one portion of a multiverse. That’s not what the proposal seems to suggest.
“If someone wants to create a new Star Trek mirror universe with different things and a slightly different history, say, by picking one point early on in the Star Trek chronology and branching off so that the future following that point is different from the universe we know, that’s fine. However, you can’t go calling it the Star Trek Universe anymore. It would be one portion of a multiverse. That’s not what the proposal seems to suggest.”
But ALL the Star Trek series to date have ALWAYS been set in “one portion of a multiverse.” Within the world of Star Trek, the “series universe” (for lack of a better term) that we know isn’t “THE” universe – it’s just “A” universe – one among many that the series have HAPPENED to focus on, no more “real” or valid than any of the others.
To its own inhabitants – the Trek crews we know – the “series universe” may be “THE” universe, but all the other universes would just as much be “THE” universe to THEIR inhabitants. And in a series about them that universe would be just as real to them as the “series universe” is to the versions of the characters we know.
I understand your point, Jack, and I don’t disagree. What I am saying is that the proposal that these men have made does not reflect that idea.
Why do you say that, Shane?
JMS and BZ’s proposal refers to the “series universe” as “Universe A.”
They propose setting their new series in “Universe B.” They say that in “Universe B” they will accept many of the things that happened in “Universe A,” but change the way they happened.
Why shouldn’t “Universe A” and “Universe B” all be part of the same inter-series Trek multiverse? To put it another way, assuming that the new series keeps the idea of the “multiverse,” who’s to say that “Universe A” (the series ‘verse) isn’t one of the other ‘verses out there?
At the very least, I don’t see anything in the proposal that excludes or contradicts this idea.
I can still remember Sister Jean Marion telling us first-graders in 1970, “Do you know why they call it dope? Because you have to be a dope to take it.” OK, I don’t know if that was the real reason, and I know that we don’t call it “dope” anymore, but come on guys! You must be smokin’ some messed up weed there.
I know we live in the Clintonian Age of simply redefining reality whenever it pleases us, but this goes too far. I knew that there was something familiar about this historical revisionism but couldn’t place my finger on it until I read this — “It’s peculiar…until you allow for the possibility that they were looking for something specific…something they had to keep a secret even from the rest of the crew.”
A-ha! Star Trek Gnosticism! They are possessed of some secret knowledge that the rest of us are not privileged enough to have. And more than that, history as we know it is really all a big scam, probably created out of whole cloth in some Hollywood studio! No doubt, there will be Albinos out there pretty soon to suppress this expose.
History is what it is. The Universe (that is, our Universe, not the Evil Parallel Universe, where Spock and Cartman have goatees) cannot be changed by the mere stroke of a pen.
I dont either, but reading it that isn’t the impression that comes across. I think their intention is to just reset the whole thing. If they are just making it another universe in the multiverse, they need to make that explicit.
“History is what it is. The Universe (that is, our Universe, not the Evil Parallel Universe, where Spock and Cartman have goatees) cannot be changed by the mere stroke of a pen.”
But Bender, as the later series established, there were LOTS of other universes, many of them with very recognizable versions of the characters we knew, but in different situations. Eg. Tasha Yar could be dead or alive, Whorf could be married to Deanna Troi or not, etc. the Borg could be taking over the galaxy or not, etc.
Instead of “rebooting” the Universe, with the perverse idea that we are God, able to change reality by our mere word, perhaps a better idea would be to reboot the idea of centering a series around one group of characters.
The Star Trek Universe is now big enough and diverse enough to allow for more of an anthology approach, where they tell a different story, with different characters, in each episode. They could go back to many old characters and see what they’re doing today, or what they did before we first encountered them. They could even use the same actors for the series, but playing different characters each time.
DS9 — which was the superior version of any of the Treks (the Original aside, to suggest anything would be better than the Original would be heresy) — had the actors play different characters on a number of occasions. Or they could have characters go back to old episodes, like they did with the Tribbles in DS9. Now that was good.
They could go back to many old characters and see what they’re doing today, or what they did before we first encountered them.
I’ve wondered whatever happened to Seven of Nine. I hope she snapped Chakotay’s neck for daring to defile her. (now, putting them together was a bad story turn). Or, they could go into greater depth the Hansens’ trip and Annika’s capture.
A couple more episodes about Benny Russell would be interesting. I’d like to know what has happened to the Emissary in the Celestial Temple or Jake Sisko. I remember reading a book where Zarabeth (Mariette Hartley) had Spock’s child. There are a lot of interesting ideas.
“Instead of ‘rebooting’ the Universe, with the perverse idea that we are God, able to change reality by our mere word”
This is getting ridiculous.
You might as well say that CREATING fictional universes in the first place expresses a “perverse idea that we are God,” able to speak reality into being by our mere word.
OF COURSE we can change FICTIONAL reality by our mere word! That’s what fiction is!
Say, friends, anyone here ever see The Wizard of Oz? Did you happen to know that by their mere word the filmmakers CHANGED the universe of L. Frank Baum’s book in many ways? Yes! For example, in Baum’s story Glinda and the Good Witch of the North were two different characters. Does that mean the filmmakers had a God complex?!
Did you know that when Superman was first created, he couldn’t fly? Does that mean that all subsequent versions are LYING when they show Superman flying?
What’s your favorite Disney fairy tale cartoon? Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, The Little Mermaid? Not one of them is exactly like the “classical” version of the story as told by the Grimm brothers or Perrault or Hans Christian Anderson or whoever. And guess what, those guys didn’t tell the stories exactly the same way people before them had told them either.
Did you know Shakespeare told old stories new ways? Yes, and CHANGED things. Compare Troilus and Cressida to The Ilyad. Same characters, different events.
The Star Trek universe even has a built-in mechanism for allowing different versions of familiar stories… and people are talking about “lying” and “the perverse idea that we are God”?
Why am I thinking of William Shatner on Saturday Night Live shouting “GET A LIFE!!!”?!
I find it interesting that the existing universe is regarded as “cramped.” It’s a whole UNIVERSE, for crying out loud! Why can’t people find new things to write about, especially considering that you can go as far ahead in time from the existing series as you like? This smells to me like some people just think they can do a better job with the original characters– which is certainly a fair thing to think, but it shouldn’t be sold as some kind of creative necessity.
To be honest, the parallel universe rationale is a sounder one than I had given them credit for when I first heard about JMS pitching a Trek Reboot.
To me, Star Trek was always about the people, about the ability of fun, larger-than-life characters to affect the colorful world(s) around them for good or evil, and secondarily about interesting thought-experiments built around alien societies. Turning a couple of creative types who specialize in hideously awful characterization (though Zabel at least has decent casting instincts) and elaborate conspiracy theories* loose in that particular sandbox does not appeal to me.
*This is the only point where Bender’s talk about Gnosticism makes any sense; Zabel and JMS are both VASTLY guilty of this in their other projects, and although it can and does make for good entertainment, it is a). not particularly Trekkian (DS9, which among the Treks prolly dealt the most in conspiracy theories, was mostly interested in the social effects of paranoia and the psychological effects of skullduggery rather than “hidden knowledge” per se) and b). does appear to be the result of an ideological bent in at least JMS’s case.
OF COURSE we can change FICTIONAL reality by our mere word!
Are you suggesting that Star Trek is fiction?? HERETIC!! Next you’ll be suggesting that the Hanso Foundation is made up too. (Where can we get a good post and some firewood?)
Bender, if you have been funning me all along, you are going to get such a noogie.
Even if Bender isn’t joking, his comments could do to the aesthetic desirability of a re-boot, rather than its morality.
above, “do” should be “go.”
“Did you know that when Superman was first created, he couldn’t fly? Does that mean that all subsequent versions are LYING when they show Superman flying?”
Boy, did you just open a can of worms! In fact, cleaning that sort of thing up is exactly the sort of rebooting that DC did. Rhys’s tongue-in-cheek suggestion of the Crisis on Infinite Enterprises, referring to the vast number of supposedly continuity-fixing events that have now cropped up in DC, illustrates the problem.
First, we had the multiple earths to explain the existence of World War II heroes and Silver Age heroes having both been “real,” but with inconsistent backgrounds. For example, there was Kal-L on Earth-2, who started out with limited powers that developed as Kal-L matured under Earth’s lesser gravity, while on Earth-1, Kal-El’s exposure to yellow sun radiation gave him full-on super-strength and a whole complement of powers from infancy. Then there was the matter of 30th century Earth-1 having a group of kids dubbed the Legion of Super-Heroes who had a bad habit of travelling back in time to interact with 20th century folks, including the teenaged Kal-El, aka Superboy.
That all started getting too ridiculous, so we had the Crisis on Infinite Earths to clean all that up. Many of the Earth-2 counterparts turned out never to have existed at all (including Kal-L and the Earth-2 Batman, who had been killed by that point). And the Legion’s history was more or less completely rewritten, with numerous pesky details regarding what had and hadn’t happened.
All of these continuity glitches started to become annoying, so DC released Zero Hour to explain all of the continuity screw-ups, which involved a complete reboot of the Legion (basically, none of the old stuff ever happened). That satisifed no one, so somebody had the bright idea of introducing “hypertime” to explain how all of these real-but-not-real worlds kept interacting (in The Kingdom, for those keeping score). But people were still wondering about all these dangling problems (for example, Kal-L had survived Crisis on Infinite Earths by going to some “other place,” but where was it?).
Finally, DC just gave up entirely and came up with ANOTHER massive reboot called … I kid you not … Infinite Crisis.
The lesson of all this being, if you are going to do a reboot, don’t make it at all possible for the universes to interact, or you will find yourself in a continuity nightmare (see also the post-Return of the Jedi Star Wars books clashing with the later-produced prequels). If they are going to reboot, they need to format the hard drive before the reinstall. I tend to agree that it would be a shame with this franchise, but they don’t really have the same freedom to keep extending things as Doctor Who, which can always drop a new guy into the role and clean up whatever troubles might arise using some time-travel explanation.
See, this is why Star Trek stinks.
Artists are usually allowed to approach scenarios and stories and give them their own twist. But you cannot do that with Star Trek. Why? Because it is not primarily a series of stories. It is commonly referred as a “franchise”. Which is exactly what it is — just like McDonald’s.
Star Trek is not art, it is business. And every time I see one of those episodes now, I start smelling burger grease.
These are myths. Myth is used to portray a truth, and the myth itself, in that sense, is truth. Not literistically, but, literally, truth- truth told in the way the authors intended to. The mythical characters can take on symbolic meaning, and be presented in new stories, new places, or even as the authors of new stories, without denigrating from who they are. Even if the myth is originally rooted in historical event, the characters can become cultural symbols, and be used in other contexts. Think of Adam- used to portray truth about creation into very different, and juxtaposed creation stories in Genesis.
The OT Hebrews knew that, JPII knows that, the PBC knows that, and apparently, so do about HALF the trekkies on here.
I’d like to see Star Trek: Ensigns where the focus is on all the other members of the crew, the “redshirts.” There would be a lot of episodes about the trauma they go through as their numbers thin, always dying on away missions while the officers always come back, sometimes injured but always alive.
It comes down to this: Roddenberry is dead. May God have mercy on his soul & and I hope we will meet him someday in Heaven & mercilessly rib him for his silly atheism. 🙂
That having been said, since he has now departed this world we no longer have his genius to tap into. So you are going to need somebody who knows what he is doing to write successful scifi. JMS is the logical choice.
Given a free hand in this, we could certainly detect whatever Babylonisms get into his work. No doubt the Organians would take on a more Vorlon-like personality. But I could live with that because this is the bottom line: if JMS were to create a new rebooted Star Trek it would be really, really cool.
As a literary hedonist, I watch scifi to be entertained. A new Star Trek would mean more entertainment & a different spin on an entertaining theme: something old & something new. I’m all for that.
I can’t think of Star Trek as sacrosanct that it has to be a certain way. After all there are probably hundreds of different Star Trek novels by now & they each have their different takes on the series. If you’ve ever read the novel SPOCK’S WORLD, it portrays the Vulcans as Deists. But if you’ve ever read DREADNAUGHT, it portrays them as atheist rationalists & even has a Vulcan named Sarda(a clear ripoff of Sartra) who makes all sorts of statements that reflect atheist existentialist philosophy.
So what’s one more take on the Star Trek multiverse? Especially by someone like JMS who basically knows whtat he is doing.
BTW, it may be slightly off topic but I wish JMS would help Doug Naylor make the Red Dwarf movie. There’s an example of an extremely excellent TV franchise that would make a great movie but its not going to get made because the people in Hollywood are morons(Hugh Grant as Dave Lister. I may wretch.)
In general, sci-fi, as a stand alone genre is dead. Dead as a heap. Henceforth, like murder mystery or travelogue, sci-fi is not a genre but merely an element to be subsumed into a larger, newer genre.
I, StubbleSpark command it.
Make it so.
Agg! I mean do it!
BenYachov-
Please tell me you’re bloody joking! That’s like… like… like casting Hulk Hogan as Dracula. Or Sean Connery as Dracula. It just doesn’t compute.
Two cents towards this…. I like Star Trek because there is at least a hint of a “real” universe.
The Klingons aren’t exactly like humans, they have a different culture. Ditto the Romulans and the Cardassians. Some folks make jokes about it, but if you have strong world-wide communication, there will probably be a dominant culture and they probably *will* all speak the same language, and if you’re meeting the military they’ll dress alike, too.
There are folks that go against the main culture (Like the Romulan that took care of the Klingon prisoners– Good Samaritan, anyone?) and all kinds of traitors and prisoners of conscience. (Like the Romulan that defected because he believed that the plans the Empire had would set them at war with the Federation, and thus destroy them.)
*looks at StubbleSpark* *Grins*
I’d have to say that Sci-Fi is strongest as an alloy with other things. Sci-Fi is just fiction in a theoretical future.
(I still hold that the first three Star Wars movies are fantasy with ray guns. The newer three are just confused.)
Paramount, or any studio, will not read a treatment sent randomly unless it’s sent by an agent. Random ones do get through, sure, but due to legal issues, most do not. If they submitted this without a resonse, they should try again with an agent.
If JMS is now pitching a Star Trek reboot that must mean that he has given up on any more B5 material. No that is a universe that would be interesting to see developed further. Too bad.
Since JMS is involved with this pitch, I wonder if one of the differences between the reboot and the original will be that an actual human religion will have survived into the future in the new universe. JMS did not shy away from having his human characters actually profess a religious creed, unlike Rodenberry.
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