Too many people here have confused philosophy with entertainment. I'm going to quote a passage from Harve Bennett in Star Trek Movie Memories. Yeah, me again. Quoting the people who made Star Trek, past and present. Because I'm just one poster. Them, they're the people who actually made what we're arguing about.
Some context before I get into the quote. After Star Trek: The Motion Picture, control of the feature films was taken away from Gene Roddenberry and given to Harve Bennett. Harve Bennett then watched all 79 episodes of Star Trek before diving into making what would become Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. But Harve Bennett and Gene Roddenberry didn't see eye-to-eye on the philosophy of Star Trek.
Star Trek Movie Memories (1994), by William Shatner with Chris Kreski.
Interview with Harve Bennett (pages 108-110)
[Gene] resisted everything, every suggestion, every idea. I would see Gene every once in a while in the commissary or in the parking lot, and we'd wave to one another and be polite, but that was it. All of our actual business, at Gene's request, was conducted by memo.
Now, I'm a hands-on person, I like to sit in a room, belt it out, get it done, then see where people are having problems and find solutions. You simply can't do that by memo. For example, every story pass, every scripted draft, every thought that sprang from a writer's head and made it onto a sheet of paper, our thoughts, our stories and ultimately our scripts would go simultaneously to Gene and to Paramount management. And management would generally respond with notes of enthusiasm, "Keep going, it's lookin' great," stuff like that. However, Gene's notes would be... it's hard to characterize. Defensive, I think, would be a very good word. "This will ruin Star Trek, kind of stuff. I saved a lot of them, but I don't ever want to make them public because they're painful.
But I was stuck between a rock and a hard place. Gene had been asked to leave center stage and let someone else take over. It wasn't easy for him, and he quickly became very possessive with his child, Star Trek. I understood that, and I must confess to similar parental feelings when I produced The Mod Squad and when I did The Six Million Dollar Man and all those things. As a producer, you just don't want to step aside, to give it up to anybody else.
What I couldn't understand was Gene's concept of Star Trek. I was fresh from seeing seventy-nine episodes, and I thought I knew what Star Trek was in its original form, but when Gene's memos started arriving, they criticized everything we were doing on a basis that was from outer space to me. "Star Trek," he said, "is not a paramilitary show." That's not true. "Star Trek," in his words from the sixties, "is Horatio Hornblower." That's a paramilitary show to me. The analogy between the United States Navy or any navy and Star Trek is so preeminent that you can't possibly miss it. I mean, why then are we dealing with "admirals" and "captains," "commanders," "lieutenants," and so forth? The Enterprise is simply a naval vessel in at sea, in space."
"There was never", he said, "violence and conflict in the twenty-third century." Well, how do you deal with that when you are fresh from seeing the episodes where there was a great deal of violence? There were traditional roustabout fights; there were barroom brawls; there was nerve-pinching; there was exotic weaponry. There were always people doing bad things to people, very bad things to people.
And suddenly I saw the seeds of what had bored me in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. It seemed as though Gene, in his statesmanlike personal growth, had now begun confusing his own idealism -- which was wonderful -- about a peaceful future and man's ability to grow in the years ahead -- with Star Trek. In my mind, Star Trek's vision was very different and very specific. Things will change, parameters will change, technology will change, but human nature will most definitely remain the same. Why do I say that? Because recorded history tells us so.
Go back two hundred years to the seventeen hundreds, what has changed? What has changed since "let my people go" in Egypt and before that, from the recorded history of humankind? Will four hundred years of technology elevate that into bliss and karma? I think not, but somehow Gene had made that assumption in his later years. Or at least that was the basis of all his objections to the things we were trying to do.
Now I could assume one of two things, that Gene had become devoutly sincere about all this and it had altered his vision of what he himself had done on Star Trek, or the other possibility was that perhaps unconsciously he resented anyone, not just Harve Bennett, coming in, taking over and trying to replicate something that he'd created. If that were the case, and he simply couldn't accept the situation, perhaps he was reaching for any ammunition he could find in resisting my efforts. Perhaps that's what prompted his philosophical stance against everything we were trying to do in re-creating the feeling of his Star Trek.
End of quote.
Like Harve Bennett, I think that some people are against the efforts of anyone, Alex Kurtzman or not, producing any further Star Trek that's not exactly made the way they think it should be. I think they, like Gene Roddenberry in his later years, have become insistent that Star Trek must adhere to a perfect humanity and that any deviation must be shunned. If anyone acts as a Human of 2020 -- or a Human of 1820 for that matter -- then it can't be Star Trek and is not Star Trek.
They've confused a philosophy with a TV show. The entire point of Star Trek: Picard is about a man facing mistakes in his life that have caught up to him. You can't have mistakes in a perfect society. The Star Trek: Picard that these people want is a Star Trek: Picard where everything was "happily ever after" (except Data being dead). But that's not a story. That's the end of a story. "And they lived happily ever after." No one tells you about that part because no one is interested in that part. It's not going to keep an audience engaged. There's no reason to know what happens next in "happily ever after" because there is no next. That's it. Some people may be ready for it to be it, but I'm not. Neither are a lot of other people here.
We want to see the story continue. And a continuation means a plot. A drama. The root of which, like it or not, is conflict, stakes, danger, and a goal. Decisions to be made. Risks to take. If you're not invested, no one's forcing you to watch. No one's holding a gun to your head and saying you have to watch this. But a lot of us do want to watch this.
I like where Picard is going. I like it because it's taking the character further in his life. That's what makes Picard akin to the TOS Movies, my favorite version of Star Trek, and why I like it so much. Why I liked it more than I expected.
