Do you think Star Trek needed a reboot?

[nightwind1]

DalekJim wrote:

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Well, I prefer Star Trek when it makes me think. Just my own personal taste. I know there are fans that prefer it when it is frothy action-adventure but I'm not one of them. Any show could do that kind of stuff.

Wrong. The 4 TNG movies, DS9, VOY and ENT are all due to the success of TNG. DS9 is obviously a TNG spin-off.

And none of them would have existed without TOS.

There's a reason all of them were called "Star Trek", not "Random Space Station 9" or "Lost In Delta Quadrant".

[Admiral Buzzkill]

newtype_alpha wrote:

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But that of course sets up the question of whether or not the spinoffs are worthy of a reboot in the future as well, or if the new continuity will spawn a whole new series of 23rd century spinoffs.

Yes.

Everything that's been part of Star Trek is grist for the mill, and future producers and writers will combine, recombine, slice, dice and use it in every which way if they think they can get a successful production out of it.

You can pretty much bank on Kirk one day confronting the Borg, one way or 'tother.

You can call TOS the "least sophisticated" or "worst understood" part of Trek, but that's a backward way of looking at its strength as compared to the later versions: it's more open, simpler, less self-consciously over-delineated than the 24th century elaborations. I've always found the modern Trek shows to be far less plausible in terms of story, faux history and technobabble technology precisely because they tried to answer too much and did it in pretty narrow and under-imagined ways. They created a fake future by the simplest kinds of analogies with the present, based on representations of present and historical events in overly broad, simplistic strokes in order to make their invented details quickly identifiable and accessible to a large audience.

TOS was brilliant in telling us very little about the culture which spawned Kirk and McCoy and the other folks. We had to assume it was similar to our own - we didn't even know, back in the day, how far from now the show took place - because the people talked and thought like us and seemed to have had similar experiences to ours. But the only part of that culture we really got even a passing look at was the Star Fleet, portrayed mainly as a contemporary navy. That was very clever, given that due to a quarter century of general conscription most Americans at that time had a reasonable familiarity with military life and could intuit that our people lived more regulated, tradition-bound and less luxurious lives than the great unseen mass of folks they served in the name of.

It's not necessary to know a thing about the Federation government or economy to understand the lines of authority and social structure aboard a vessel when the characters wear the rank of American naval officers.

[BillJ]

My Name Is Legion wrote:

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You can pretty much bank on Kirk one day confronting the Borg, one way or 'tother.

I'm pretty sure it'll happen before Abrams and Company move on.

[SeerSGB]

BillJ wrote:

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I'm pretty sure it'll happen before Abrams and Company move on.

If Abrams does the Borg, and he gives them a proper horror movie feel to them, actually makes them a menace again and somewhat scary, I will kiss his feet. From First Contact forward, I was never able to take the Borg seriously as a threat in a story. Hells, even a little blood and guts wouldn't be off putting to me.

[BeatleJWOL]

SeerSGB wrote:

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Hells, even a little blood and guts wouldn't be off putting to me.

Star Trek: Final Destination

[DalekJim]

I thought the Borg were more menacing in First Contact than in their final 2 TNG stories personally. They were excellent in Q Who and BoBW, then the decay set in.


Would LOVE more Borg though .

[SeerSGB]

BeatleJWOL wrote:

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Star Trek: Final Destination

Star Trek: BorgRaiser

Imagine a Barker or Giger style Locutus saying something along the lines of "The box. You opened it. We came. Now you must come with us, taste our pleasures."

DalekJim wrote:

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I thought the Borg were more menacing in First Contact than in their final 2 TNG stories personally. They were excellent in Q Who and BoBW, then the decay set in.


Would LOVE more Borg though .

I Borg was okay, Descent was the start of the fall. First Contact turned into aliens of the week. Nothing against the actresses that played the Queen over the years, but gods I loath that character. The all the crap with Data (the only TNG character I don't like) just drove FC into bottom of my list of fav ST movies.

[DalekJim]

I need to rewatch First Contact. There's a lot I like about it, it's just that the script is so dumb and full of holes. Definitely one of the best directed Trek films though, along with the first 2 movies.

I Borg is awesome, it's just a shame it kinda pussified the Borg.

[Franklin]

DalekJim wrote:

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Well, I prefer Star Trek when it makes me think. Just my own personal taste. I know there are fans that prefer it when it is frothy action-adventure but I'm not one of them. Any show could do that kind of stuff.

Wrong. The 4 TNG movies, DS9, VOY and ENT are all due to the success of TNG. DS9 is obviously a TNG spin-off.

TNG was a TOS spin-off, even if there was about 17 years between the end of the one and the beginning of the other.

It's also likely that if the TOS movies to that point had not been popular, there would've been no TNG. Those movies showed there was still a market for Trek on TV.

Also, I personally can't think of a time any form of Trek really made me think. A lot of its moralizing was ham-fisted or preachy ("The Omega Glory", "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield", "A Taste of Armageddon", and any number of Picard's speeches come to mind).
Despite what some still think, no Trek series was really cutting edge or controversial in commenting on the moral or social issues of the day, and it wasn't particularly philosophically deep. At least not more (or less) than any other TV series that did at least try to be intelligent. Believing otherwise buys into the Trek propaganda, of which there's plenty.

[teacake]

REBOOT THE FRAK OUT OF IT.

That's what I say. I expect to be 80 years old and lusting over re-re-re-rebooted Kirk and Spock with actors that have yet to be born.

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Franklin wrote:

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TNG was a TOS spin-off, even if there was about 17 years between the end of the one and the beginning of the other.

Absolutely Right(TM).

TNG probably didn't happen if it weren't for the confidence that Paramount's people had in the soon-to-be released fourth TOS-based movie, The Voyage Home. During the summer of 1986 they were so happy with that thing that after two reasonably successful films that failed to increase the audience for Trek above a certain ceiling - TWOK and TSFS - they believed that Trek was a property with growth potential.

Of course no one would ever have made a TNG movie without the track record of six TOS movies. The studio saw TNG as a sequel series from the beginning (they even planned to add it to the TOS syndication package as a "fourth season" if the sequel had failed to catch on) intended to extend the life of the property as Shatner and the other actors aged.

Now that the studio has seen that Star Trek can be successfully restarted using the core characters and setting and that this approach yields much bigger box office returns than the older model we can expect them to do it again and again - as others have with Batman, Spider-Man, the X-Men, James Bond and so on. The old faux "future history" is an additional source of characters, premises and story situations (did I mention Kirk versus the Borg ), not a template to be followed again in "evolving" Trek forward.

[Dale Sams]

Did I mention Kirk versus the Borg

I will be very surprised if at the end of this upcoming film, there isn't a direct sequel hook in the last shot (ala "Casino Royale") or after some credits (Ala "Avengers")

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Yeah, I expect that the sequel hook is leading to (further) Khan stuff.

[mos6507]

BillJ wrote:

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Why must it be one or the other? I believe it was that type of thinking that sunk Modern Trek to begin with. It quit being fun.

Why does fun preclude thinking? At its best, Trek was both, although usually not both at the same time, but spread over the entire series run, certainly, or even the movies (TMP vs. IV comes to mind).

If you look at anything that is classic and timeless, usually there is complexity there. Look at music for instance. Think of the Beatles catalog, or Led Zeppelin. That's a wide variety of genres present. Those bands were not one-trick ponies, and TOS covered a lot of ground.

I think in this cynical "I know something you don't know" internet culture, people love to come onto forums and be provocative and try to tear icons down to size. But really, great shows were great shows, period, and Trek was great. There isn't any sort of vandalist deconstruction that will be able to take that away.

[mos6507]

BillJ wrote:

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I think there are a world of flaws in Star Trek 2009 (as anyone here can tell you ) but it's also the most fun I had had with Trek since midway through TNG's run...

I agree with you that the TNG era went off the rails. At best, it was watchable, not must-watch TV. I don't agree with you that the nu-Trek approach was the right solution. I think it's possible to hate how Berman and Braga slowly ground the franchise to dust while not welcoming JJ Abrams and his lens-flare with open arms. All they really needed to do was find a better steward of the franchise without having to pass the ball to someone who saw Trek itself as something that was broken and needed a hip-hop ADD do-over.

Hollywood has a bad habit of understanding the origin of success and attributing blame for failure. They are all too eager to throw the baby out with the bathwater in order to find a successful formula to pander to prime demographics. Sometimes it pays off and sometimes it doesn't, and oftentimes the critical payoff doesn't match the financial, hence perennial arguments on boards like this.