So those are my rambling thoughts on a new Star Trek series... maybe it'll be good, but Voyager and Enterprise have left a bad aftertaste, and I'm having a hard time working up any enthusiasm for a new series.
Well, the first trailer for the new Star Trek series, Discovery, was released the other day. I knew there was a new incarnation of Trek coming, but I haven't paid any attention because, frankly, I haven't been interested. I did, however, watch the trailer and found out that it is set ten years before the events of Star Trek: TOS. Huh. The last time a series was set before TOS, we ended up with Enterprise, which made almost every Trek fan feel like this: This is a really early trailer and doesn't actually tell us anything about the show and I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt and hope that the producers have learned from past mistakes and are going to make a quality show, but there are a couple of worrying signs. To begin with, the trailer says that this is ten years before "Kirk, Spock, or the Enterprise." This may seem nit-picky, but while this was before Kirk, it wasn't before the Enterprise or Spock, who served under the previous captain of the Enterprise, Christopher Pike. I get that they're trying to give viewers a frame of reference, but this is the sort of thing that irritates fans, because it makes it seem like the people making the show didn't do their homework. Good Trek can be made by non-fans- case in point: The Wrath Of Khan, inarguably the best Trek movie ever made. Before embarking on developing the storyline for it, however, Harve Bennett went back and watched all of the episodes of TOS. The Trek universe is a lot bigger now, and it would be unreasonable to expect the writers of a new series to never trip over continuity, which makes me wonder why they would decide to set it pre-Kirk, and in the original timeline. They could have set the new show in the movie reboot timeline and not had to worry about continuity, or the limits which the TOS canon will necessarily place on them- such as not knowing what Romulans look like. Or, if they were determined to have it in the original timeline, they could have set it later so as to avoid a lot of these problems. But having insisted that Discovery is set when and where it is, it's just going to tick fans off if they then go ahead and ignore TOS canon. What I really hope is that the new series won't be used as a soap box to preach to viewers about the correct attitudes to have about contemporary issues. This is what irritated me the most about a lot of TNG; usually when there was some sort of conflict over a moral, social, or political issue, we were told that the choice was between the reasonable, rational, enlightened Federation side, and the incredibly backwards, unreasonable and obviously wrong other side. Very few episodes bothered to present the truth about such issues: that both sides can be well-intentioned, have legitimate points or grievances, and that such things usually aren't clean cut and morally unambiguous. This is why I think that DS9 was a far superior show- they didn't shy away from pointing out that many of the issues being dealt with were messy and complex, and sometimes there were no morally or ethically pure solutions. So those are my rambling thoughts on a new Star Trek series... maybe it'll be good, but Voyager and Enterprise have left a bad aftertaste, and I'm having a hard time working up any enthusiasm for a new series.
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