Spoilers Starship Design in Star Trek: Picard

But that's what it is...and that doesn't preclude it making comments as pointed as necessary about the real worlds we live and move in.
Back to starship design...

 

My general feeling is that if you don't interpret Star Trek as always being about our future rather than 1966's future, then Star Trek will become irrelevant and die. It can only survive by being reinterpreted, even at the cost of retconning or contradicting old episodes.

 

Yes, but the problem there is that almost all of Trek is way outdated in one way or another. You really need to rebuild it from scratch to make it contemporary - at least, if part of what you're trying to do is to portray a possible future rather than a kind of sf-fantasy adventure world.

 

Which is why I thing a reboot is becoming necessary. There is a reluctance to let go of the 1966's vision of the future, and it has been enshrined to some degree as just Trek's alternate universe. Which, wasn't the point at all.

I have no issues with retcons but at some point a reboot would be better.

 

Abrams already tried a reboot. While I thought it was a reasonably decent attempt, Paramount didn't like the returns and temporarily killed the line (the ViaCom/Paramount/CBS merger gyrations didn't help matters any). Will see what path these next alleged upcoming movies take. I'm not entirely 100% convinced they're going to be in either the Kelvin OR Prime timelines.

 

No, that is not what happened. What happened was, Paramount wanted to continue making them, but at a reduced budget, and they were unable to come to a salary agreement with Chris Pine and Chris Helmsworth. Things are in limbo right now, but it's not that Paramount decided to stop making the "Kelvin Timeline" films because of insufficient returns.

 

Not a full reboot which is what I would want. Just like TOS Trek looking from the 60s forward (the 90s have a World War, etc) new Trek to look forward from 2020, rather than just reimaging a 60s interpretation of the future.

 

I suppose I should have been more clear. According to this 2/10/2019 article from TrekMovie.com, the reduced budgets that Pine and Hemsworth balked at were such because "box office results [were] below studio expectations." It all stemmed from lower returns. Had they received higher revenue from Beyond, the actor budget wouldn't have been as large a consideration and the film would likely have moved forward.

I just worded my original assertion quite poorly. Apologies...

 

There is a thread discussing this in the Kelvin universe subforum so I'll be brief. Yes, Beyond did below expectations but Pine didn't return because he already had a contract for the fourth film pre-Beyond and Paramount wouldn't honor it.

Basically, Paramount fumbled this ball.

And still not a full reboot.

 

While I agree a full reboot may be what the franchise needs, I think TPTB would be reluctant to take that nuclear option, for fear of the collective heads of the party-faithful fandom exploding all at once. Insert boycotts, death threats and accusations of childhood rapage here. The creation of the Kelvinverse manufactured enough butthurt for them. Doing a REAL reboot? That would be a total third-rail scenario. They don't have the sand for it.

Agreed to both.

 

Oh, I completely agree they don't do it. The fear of the fans is pretty much crippling Hollywood creative decisions because everything thing gets torn apart online nowadays.

One need only look at the discussion around the new Enterprise look to recognize that when a change is made it will receive backlash.

ST 09 got backlash because, despite being an alternate timeline, the technology was still considered to be a poor fit for the era.

Cue "Can't get No (Satisfaction).

 

I don't believe it is or at least that's not what it was intended to be. It should be a look at the future through the lens of today.

 

Indeed. Not just showing humanity's ills but also potential.

 

What role today would portray in that is dubious, though. Nowhere in Trek is the future built on the achievements of today, regardless of the applicable definition of today. In the sixties show, the sixties were but a hurdle mankind had to jump over (without nuking itself) after which the future happened on its own. In the eighties show and its spinoffs, the same. Early spaceflight was not taking mankind to the stars: the fantastic invention of warp did that trick. And no political or cultural achievement paved the way: instead, mankind just wallowed in its self-destructiveness until the pointy-eared aliens came and made everything good.

Mankind's potential in Trek blooms in a pure fantasy environment, as adjunct to a community of funny aliens and their magical technology. If there is reference to today, it is to contrast it with this fantasy, with the gap of centuries left unspanned.

In this respect, its all the sillier when mankind suddenly invents plasma screens or transparent monitors 200 years later than in the real world, and treats them as the epitome of cool. Or that it comes up with gender equality or fluidity 300 years later than we did. Every time Trek tries to "modernize" itself, it's actually setting mankind back by centuries - and making it look as if this could not yet have happened back when humans were going it alone, but required alien intervention instead.

Timo Saloniemi

 

reboots are so late 90s/early 00s...

 

That's exactly the relevance. Overcoming current humanity's challenges rather than fantasy humanity overcoming an imaginary war, i.e. WW3. Going back to the base conceit of TOS.

Hardly. Pretty much been a part of Hollywood since Hollywood's inception.

 

It would probably be easier that way. Can't complain that it contradicts canon if it's a brand new timeline, but I'm sure plenty would still find things to complain about.

I always suspected that another reason fans were upset over DISCO changing the visual aesthetics is that they find the notion that TOS looks dated pretty offensive, because for whatever reason they take it more personally than they should.

 

This is probably more accurate than is given credit for.

 

I don't get it. TOS, too, had mankind survive imaginary wars only: if there was an episode on, say, racial tolerance or proxy wars, it just sat there, not having affected mankind's ascent to the stars in any way. Indeed, man went to the stars while still happily waging the Vietnam War, only now with the Klingons. There was no learning curve involved.

In no incarnation of Trek did mankind overcome anything. It just persisted with everything, so that we could have allegory episodes or message stories or moral sledgehammering. TOS had its opportunity to claim that the stars opened up for us because we stopped killing each other, or stopped hating each other's skin color, or something - but it never took that opportunity. We just went to the stars, dragging all our ballast with us. Oh, perhaps Kirk in one adventure said that violence was a thing of the past, but he triumphed in the next one by punching his opponent in the jaw and threatening to blow up his planet. And if Picard went further with the pious 19XXs-folks-were-cavemen attitude, his planet-blowing antics remained pretty much the same.

Trek isn't about history. It's not about pseudohistory, either, but that's what forms the backdrop of all the shows anyway. A fictional launching of orbital nukes may be an event of some relevance, but it still coexists with an equally fictional nuclear war in the TOS context already; mankind in Trek doesn't learn, or solve. It just lives in a new reality that lacks certain types of challenge - but when faced with those, via a scifi twist (we now get to rasistically hate aliens rather than fellow humans, say) it's the very same one that faced them "originally" in the 1960s, having learned nothing, and exhibiting no role for the purported "potential".

Timo Saloniemi