ONE OF MY TWO STAR TREK IDEAS

Even after the better part of a week, I'm still too PO'd about the subject of the post I want to write to talk about it without descending into an incoherent rant. So you get this one, which has been sitting around in some form or another for a couple weeks now:

I'm not a huge Star Trek fan (in terms of devotion--even in terms of t-shirt size I'm not the biggest there is, they can be a burly crowd...), but will probably end up seeing the new film at some point, in all honesty more for JJ Abrams' contribution than for Gene Roddenberry's.

(And now that I finish writing the post I began a couple weeks back, I've seen it and yeah. Abrams (and Kurtzman/Orci) did a really good job. But hey, that's no reason not to muddle forward with the previous post. Where was I...? Oh yeah:)

I'm of mixed emotions on the reboot aspect of the new film. On the one hand, if they're going to make a go of things, they needed to do something drastic to really get the franchise moving again. On the other...well, I worry that in the end, it's not going to be what I think of when I think of 'Trek. What's done is done--the thing's pretty much a lock as a blockbuster and I highly doubt there'll be any return to the format/mythology I grew up with.

(Or maybe there will be. According to Orci and Kurtzman, the rights to Star Trek the film are held by Paramount, while CBS controls the rights to Star Trek the TV series. So there's a possibility of a Terminator: Salvation/Sarah Connor Chronicles situation there, which could be interesting, possibly in a "may you live in interesting times" sense of the word.)

If one spends countless hours sitting around drinking in various sci-fi consuites, it's pretty much inevitable one's going to end up considering what one would do given the chance to mess with established franchises like Trek. For several years, whenever the subject came up, I had a pitch for a theoretical next TV series, a simple premise that would build on all the pre-reboot mythology while still leaving room to move in all sorts of new and interesting directions.

As I stopped writing fanfic long before I knew the term even existed and I wasn't talking to a producer who might be in a position to get a new Trek show greenlit, the pitch never went much beyond two words, the title for the proposed new show:

TIME TREK

Enterprise faltered largely for the reason the new Star Trek film succeeded: how it dealt with continuity. (This is actually one of my major concerns when it comes to BSG spinoff Caprica--the whole thing's kind of poisoned by the last hour of Galactica...)

Voyager and Enterprise both dealt extensively with time travel, and the basic skeleton of the Trek Universe's "future history" already exists. The diplomats in space/"what new and funky alien foreheads are we going to meet this week?" approach was and is pretty much played out. As far as Trek's concerned, space is no longer the final frontier. Time could be, and arguably has been since at least STIV: The Voyage Home. Why not embrace it, and the new settings and story possibilities it provides?

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MY OTHER BIG STAR TREK IDEA...

...Might still be usable--maybe not as a Trek-related project (probably not, actually), but easy enough to alter to a different or brand new mythology. Some day, some day...

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IN OTHER NEWS

I and Fred Van Lente got namechecked in the preamble to an interview with Trek screenwriters Alex Kurtzman and Robert Orci for co-writing the Cowboys & Aliens graphic novel.

And here's a doodle of a character I drew when I should've been writing about the same character instead:


















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