Anachronistic Views May Kill New Trek Series From The Start

[Harken]

I want your opinions on my thoughts on this matter and also your input on the matter.

While I hope CBS picks up the new Trek series I think it is doomed to fail from the start. Trek needs to find a way to be relevant again the way TOS and TNG were when they first aired, with actual science fiction plots that explore issues relating to science, technology, politics and their combined effects on the people living with them that the audience can relate to.

Being relevant and relatable is much easier said than done while trying to keep with Gene Roddenberry's vision of the future however. In my opinion it will be next to impossible to explore any currently relevant science and technology issues positively through his outdated vision. There has simply been to much of a values dissonance since he originally conceived of it and frankly a future without more wide spread use of robotics, genetic engineering, pervasive data mining and cybernetics is much more difficult for a person living in 2011 to relate to or find relevant than someone from the era Gene was from.

Relatability and relevance is to important to the success of any such project and shutting itself off from viewing or portraying issues related to those technologies positively because Gene thought they were bad will contribute to killing it.

I understand the show is not just about science and technology and that it is not all it will take to make the show successful but I do know a lot about science fiction as well as literature in an academic sense. The way people use technology is however key to the way that they live and I feel if the characters on such a program were to continue giving technology the 90s treatment it will rapidly lose relevance and relatability to the way viewers use it in their lives and foresee using it in the future.

Anachronisms kill science fiction faster than they kill any other genre, I just don't see how keeping within Gene's original vision will do anything but hasten the speed at which this happens.

 

[Captain Robert April]

If the producers of this hypothetical new Star Trek series keep to either Gene's vision circa 1967 or the DS9 approach towards Gene's vision, then things will be fine.

 

[Harken]

You are going to have to explain how it will be fine because I don't see it. At least in the case of Gene's 1967 vision you seem to be entirely ignoring how irrelevant it has already become. Many of the things he opposed are becoming a reality and as that happens it will lose all relatability.

 

[MacLeod]

Well I disagree with you premise that a future without more widespread use of Robotics, genetic engineering etc.. is more difficult for a person to relate to.

There is widespread trust of genetic engineering today when it comes to things like crops, and the ST back history had the whole Eugenics war, Were the species was evolved using genetics it didn't turn out so well. So understandably they are weary of that technology. So augmenting humans with technology ala cybernetics would no doubt be viewed in a similar light.

When you set a show in the future the characters look back at events to shape how they feel out but certain technologys.

Whilst we as a viewer look forward.

 

[Harken]

MacLeod in universe justifications do not matter to casual viewers and they are who the show will be made for. I don't think you understand the concept of values dissonance I am getting at here.

Lets ignore the concept of genetic engineering for a minute and let's just look at data mining technology and the integration of social media into everyday life. Roddenberry's vision of the future is anti-this use of technology, some of you will argue that he could not have envisioned it but analysis of other things he disliked tells us he would have opposed it due to its ability to control people and the dehumanizing effects it can have. Contemporary audiences have polar opposite views on this type of technology however and the absence of more advanced forms of it in Trek breaks suspension of disbelief for people who don't care about his rational for it / know it even exists.

I'll be back in the morning.

Edit: I would like to add that over all I enjoy Star Trek for being what it was when it was made but I do feel it is a product of a bygone era. We are currently living in a world has is already the opposite of Gene's visions of the future and moving rapidly further away from it. Anachronisms absolutely kill science fiction because how important suspension of disbelief is to audiences. Don't agree with me, too bad, its my job to know these things and it's people with my job that will likely get this project cancelled in development.

 

[Brainsucker]

make an another universe of Star Trek. Not a Stardate Star Trek, but other, like Future Date or something. Just see Gundam as the example. When their prime universe, The Universal century has become old, they go to AC, CE, FC era that entirely different to the original one.

Then, use the vision of 23th Century from the view point of people who live today. Like, well... holographic keyboard or computer screen, etc. And forget Gene Roddenberry vision. Because I dare to say that if Gene is still alive, he'll be more flexible than the people who see Star Trek as it is today.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Which new Trek series is the OP referring to? Right now there isn't one.

There is however a new movie series. Shooting on the second film in it will begin in January. You may have heard of the first entry released in 2009. It was extremely successful, yet it had quite a few anachronisms, which kind of negates the premise of the OP.

What an audience finds charming they aren't really bothered by.

 

[F. King Daniel]

ST2009 was firmly rooted in the 1960's version of Trek, with only the most minimal of visual updates. And people loved it. Why? Not the universe, not the faux-future technology, not some trite political analogy, but the iconic and lovable characters. Get them right, and Trek can prosper on TV again, even on a shoestring budget.

 

[Christopher]

I agree that eventually the Trek continuity will have to be rebooted to portray a more updated vision of the technological future, one that incorporates transhumanism, nanotechnology, and the like. But it's an error to assume that Roddenberry was locked into a single vision of the future. He would've been the first to agree that his universe should be reinvented and updated with the times, and that's exactly what he tried to do in TNG; by that point he actually considered a lot of TOS to be apocryphal and saw TNG as a new start that he deliberately kept as distant from TOS as he could. He consciously tried to have TNG represent a different vision of the future than TOS did, a more forward-looking philosophy and a more updated view of technology. And he never hesitated to ignore or contradict past continuity if it got in the way of his desire to keep the franchise moving forward. (Like when he had the Klingons' makeup redesigned in TMP and asked fans to pretend it had always looked that way.)

It was Roddenberry's successors who tied TNG and the other shows more tightly with TOS after his death and did things like introducing a ban on genetic engineering in DS9 in order to explain the lack of transhumanism in the franchise. That wasn't something Roddenberry himself ever advocated. Keep in mind that while Roddenberry was still alive and in control of TNG, they made "Unnatural Selection," an episode which stated outright that the Federation did engage in experimental genetic engineering.

In the Trek Nation documentary, there's a quote from Roddenberry (which has, of course, been cited elsewhere, but that's the most prominent current source) saying that he hoped people would eventually reinvent Star Trek and improve on what he did with it, take it to new places beyond what he could've imagined (or words to that effect). He wouldn't have wanted it to remain a static artifact growing increasingly out of date, but would've preferred it to be constantly reinventing itself to fit the times and casting off old continuity and ideas that were no longer relevant. The later Trek producers who let their loyalty to what they saw as "Roddenberry's vision" drive them to keep the show rooted in its history were arguably going against Roddenberry's desire to keep the show forward-looking, progressive, and adaptable to a changing future.

But then, it's always thus for visionaries, isn't it? When they're alive, their vision is a dynamic, evolving thing, but once they're gone, people look back on it as something static and insist that it (or the parts of it they focus on in their attempts to mythologize it as a fixed, singular thing) must be preserved in a pure state and never tampered with. I've seen the same thing going on with The Muppets, where the makers of the new movie insisted that preserving Jim Henson's "vision" meant doing it entirely old-school and eschewing CGI, whereas the people who actually knew Henson in life have pointed out that he was a pioneer with new technologies and was fascinated by the potential of CGI, and probably would've been on the forefront of CGI filmmaking if he'd lived. Too often, the self-appointed defenders of a creator's legacy mistake their own nostalgia for the creator's message.

So the assumption in the original post is incorrect. There's absolutely no discrepancy between preserving Roddenberry's vision of Star Trek and updating the show to keep it relevant and relatable. Because Roddenberry wanted it to keep evolving and modernizing. He wasn't locked in to any specific views on technology -- compare TOS's portrayal of artificial intelligences as dangerously rigid and tyrannical with TNG's far more sympathetic take on them. Fundamentally his only view on technology was that it was a force for good if managed responsibly, and as a humanist he believed that humans did have the ability to learn how to master any technology and use it wisely and constructively rather than letting it overwhelm us. I really don't think he would've approved of DS9's portrayal of the Federation as so paranoid and luddite about genetic engineering that they've absolutely banned it for four centuries. That's not "Roddenberry's vision," it's just a story fix the writers injected to rationalize the show's '60s vision of unaugmented future humanity in the context of what was known in the '90s about the future potential of genetics.

So I agree that ST needs to shake off anachronisms in order to remain relevant in the future. But those anachronisms are not the result of "Roddenberry's vision" -- just the opposite. The people who've insisted on keeping ST consistent with the continuity established over 40 years ago are Roddenberry's successors and fans, people motivated by loyalty and nostalgia for something from their past. If Roddenberry were still alive, he would've kept on reinventing the Trek continuity and tossing out old ideas that got in the way of that, just as he did with TMP and early TNG.

 

[BDJ]

Yeah! What He Said!! (I do mean Christopher btw)

I recently watched Trek Nation and immediately remembered that quote from Roddenberry when I found this thread.

He did not believe in standing still. His basic vision was that humanity will grow out of it's infancy and learn to get along and work together for mutual benefit.

That can always be applied to any contemporary society.

 

[Harken]

@ Brainsucker

This is what I hope they do. Maybe not literal holographic key boards and displays but as far as visual effects go that would work. I feel the show woefully underutilized Augmented Reality technology and neural interfaces, they get mentioned occasionally but the rate those technologies are advancing at now they should really be a stable of the series. I know they have technically used the Holodeck for this kind of thing in past series but even that is underutilizing it and misrepresents holographics.

@ Comet and Cupid

I am talking about the one David Foster is reportedly preparing to pitch to CBS. You can google it yourself.

@ KingDaniel

I defiantly do agree with you that a loveable cast of characters is critical to its success, however the last two Trek series did suffer from poor casting. I supposed I am simply not optimistic enough to hope for the best in this area which is why I feel the series will need to do more than just have interesting and well cast characters.

@Christopher

Great post first of all. I really do hope they manage to update instead of keeping with established canon out of a misguided sense of loyalty or fandom. I just feel that because the treatment the last two trek series received (dumbed down / the fans are stupid / wont know the difference attitude) that they will shy away from issues like Posthumanism and other Extropian ideals. When discussing contemporary science fiction literature with my friends as well as with students the general consensus seems to be that it is to smart for television audiences. They attribute the lack of representation of contemporary science fiction is media in general to this. Despite the elitist nature of that statement (given it is coming from superior feeling lit majors) I cannot help but feel that at least for the time being that it a correct one.

A positive portray of posthumans will be viewed negatively by many for any number of reasons (religion or having no context for "fixing/improving people" outside "it's what them nazis did, must be bad, lalala not listening"). Many dislike the Monist foundations of Extropian thought and simply think you can't/shouldn't just make people better through a physical process. The idea that if Human nature is the biggest part of a problem you should change Human nature is just beyond to many people currently. It scares them for many reasons the most fundamental of them being it means people (and thus they) are not special, that they are a sum of their parts and if all factors that created them both biological/social could be replicated perfectly you would have the same result and thus the concept of free will entirely disappears.

 

[Christopher]

This is what I hope they do. Maybe not literal holographic key boards and displays but as far as visual effects go that would work. I feel the show woefully underutilized Augmented Reality technology and neural interfaces, they get mentioned occasionally but the rate those technologies are advancing at now they should really be a stable of the series. I know they have technically used the Holodeck for this kind of thing in past series but even that is underutilizing it and misrepresents holographics.

The problem with neural interfaces is, how do you make them visually interesting or informative? Just having an actor sit there silently and pretend to interface internally with the computer doesn't convey any information to the viewer or make the scene interesting to watch. This is why ST shows have always had their computers rely more on verbal interfaces than keyboards -- because that makes it easier for the audience to know what's going on. Dramatic license/necessity always trumps realism.

@Christopher

Great post first of all. I really do hope they manage to update instead of keeping with established canon out of a misguided sense of loyalty or fandom. I just feel that because the treatment the last two trek series received (dumbed down / the fans are stupid / wont know the difference attitude) that they will shy away from issues like Posthumanism and other Extropian ideals. When discussing contemporary science fiction literature with my friends as well as with students the general consensus seems to be that it is to smart for television audiences. They attribute the lack of representation of contemporary science fiction is media in general to this. Despite the elitist nature of that statement (given it is coming from superior feeling lit majors) I cannot help but feel that at least for the time being that it a correct one.

It's not that the producers of SFTV think the audience is dumb, it's that most of them don't read much prose SF and simply aren't acquainted with the full range of ideas that are familiar to prose readers. It's always been the case that ideas from SF literature take a decade or two to trickle out to the mass media -- with a few rare exceptions, like Max Headroom being a cyberpunk show just a few years after the cyberpunk genre began, and ST:TNG starting to use the idea of wormholes only four years after Sagan and Thorne raised them from obscurity. And it's not just a function of the SF genre. The bottom line is, most of the people who watch -- and produce -- television and movies do not read books as a matter of course. So current trends in prose tend to go unreflected in the mass media unless they're part of something that really catches on big like Harry Potter or The Hunger Games (or, alas, Twilight). And that effect is amplified when it comes to SF because it's the one genre that's constantly reinventing its concepts and assumptions as our scientific knowledge advances. How a murder is committed or how two people fall in love stays pretty consistent from one generation to another, but how the future is perceived is a lot more fluid, so the lag between literature and mass media is more pronounced.

Really, it's not just Star Trek that overlooks trans/posthumanism in its depiction of the future. It's most SFTV and film. Look at, say, Terra Nova. The characters there are from 2149, but they don't have any transhuman enhancements, and their technology isn't significantly more advanced than ours today except for the stock mass-media sci-fi tropes of stun weapons and transparent display screens and midair holograms. And look at Cameron's Avatar -- they can cross interstellar distances and create teleoperated artificial organisms, but can't cure paraplegia? Most futurism in mass-media SF is just a recycling of tropes from earlier shows and movies, because the creators don't read much. So it tends to overlook a lot of possibilities, or just introduce those ones that serve a particular story while overlooking others.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

Foster's pitch will never come to fruition. He doesn't have the clout to make it happen. Other people like Bryan Fuller, Seth McFarlane and Orci & Kurtzman who have expressed interest in doing a series might have a chance.

If it airs on CBS, it's doomed from the start because the CBS audience doesn't want sci fi and the standards for survival-level ratings are higher than even other broadcast networks.

A hypothetical series needs to be geared to wherever it is shown. Showtime, CW, NBC, TNT, AMC, The Cartoon Network, etc. All of those would require a different approach. Until we know where it's going, it's futile to worry about specifics.

ST2009 was firmly rooted in the 1960's version of Trek, with only the most minimal of visual updates. And people loved it. Why? Not the universe, not the faux-future technology, not some trite political analogy, but the iconic and lovable characters. Get them right, and Trek can prosper on TV again, even on a shoestring budget.

That approach could work on cable, sure. (I think broadcast networks are a non-starter for space opera at this point.) The best thing they could do is to return the cop-on-the-beat aspect of TOS that has been largely forgotten in the other series. That's a very relatable element.

Anyone who is interested in a space opera involving "posthuman" characters should be rooting for Robert Hewitt Wolfe's proposed series for SyFy (which sounds very Starfleetish but isn't using the Star Trek brand name):

Universal Cable Productions said it's working with Wolfe on a show set in a postwar era on the Starship Defender looking for lost worlds requiring law and order. The ship is helmed by humans and trans-humans, who don't get along very well, as part of the newly formed Unity Democracy

A positive portray of posthumans will be viewed negatively by many for any number of reasons

I don't see why that would be a negative. I expect most of RHW's posthumans to be sympathetic - the fish-out-of-water type that people always relate to, because of their outsider status and the resonances with victims of bigotry. And I imagine there could be villainous posthumans as well.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

@ Comet and Cupid

I am talking about the one David Foster is reportedly preparing to pitch to CBS. You can google it yourself.

Lots of people would love to make a Star Trek series these days, so it's not like it was obvious who you were referring to. For example, Seth MacFarlane would also like to do a series. You can Google that yourself.

By the way, has David Foster gotten as far as getting a meeting scheduled?

 

[Christopher]

Lots of people would love to make a Star Trek series these days, so it's not like it was obvious who you were referring to. For example, Seth MacFarlane would also like to do a series. You can Google that yourself.

Right. And this Foster guy is an obscure filmmaker with, like, two IMDb credits tops. Lots of more prominent, experienced producers, like J. Michael Straczynski and Bryan Singer, have approached CBS with their own Trek proposals. At least they have enough clout in the industry to get a meeting, and they haven't gotten anywhere. Just because some guy announces on the Internet that he wants to pitch a Trek show, that doesn't mean it's going to happen. It just means he has Internet access and is trying to promote himself.

By the way, has David Foster gotten as far as getting a meeting scheduled?

I can't find any online information more current than August, so I doubt this has gone anywhere.

 

[WarpCore]

Relatability and relevance is to important to the success of any such project and shutting itself off from viewing or portraying issues related to those technologies positively because Gene thought they were bad will contribute to killing it.

I think you're right about being relatable, but relevance is less... relevant. No pun intended. I guess part of what you're saying/asking is... Did Enterprise fail because it lacked any bearing on real world issues? Perhaps partly. That can draw an audience in, but ENT imo actively pushed viewers away via Archer's character.

All of Kirk, Picard, Sisko, and Janeway were essentially good and only broke their rules or crossed the line when they were running out of options fast. Archer on the other hand quickly became an evil prick as his status quo, with the rare exception being expressing humanity. Most people won't empathize with that. Pile on 2 years of time travel mumbo jumbo with its conclusion being "Mission accomplished. None of it ever happened." and you're left with the few fans you have left wondering why in the hell they watched those 2 seasons.

As soon as ENT got away from that ridiculousness, they made about a dozen great episodes nearly consecutively. Unfortunately by then it was too late as the show had to be canceled to get them to produce anything worth watching. ENT went into it with arrogance and grandiose visions unlike any series before it except maybe Voyager, which is a complete contrast of how TOS and TNG both found their success.

 

[Tiberius]

I agree that eventually the Trek continuity will have to be rebooted to portray a more updated vision of the technological future, one that incorporates transhumanism, nanotechnology, and the like.

Nah, don't need a reboot. Just set the next trek series in the 28th century or something. Allow Federation technology enough time to have developed those things and they can be explored easily.

 

[Captain Robert April]

ST2009 was firmly rooted in the 1960's version of Trek, with only the most minimal of visual updates. And people loved it. Why? Not the universe, not the faux-future technology, not some trite political analogy, but the iconic and lovable characters. Get them right, and Trek can prosper on TV again, even on a shoestring budget.

ST09 was firmly rooted in the general public's misconceptions about Star Trek, which bore very little resemblance to actual Star Trek.

 

[Christopher]

Nah, don't need a reboot. Just set the next trek series in the 28th century or something. Allow Federation technology enough time to have developed those things and they can be explored easily.

But then the history of the show would still be implausible to the next generation of viewers, who'd be wondering why it took so long to get there. And what happens 52 years from now when first contact with the Vulcans and the invention of warp drive haven't happened in real life? If there's still Star Trek in production by then, wouldn't it pretty much have to reboot the continuity or else be stuck with being an alternate history or an exercise in nostalgia?

 

[Captain Robert April]

Star Trek is not our future, and never has been our future, any more than Star Trek's past was our past, because it never has been. It's a separate reality like Middle Earth, with its own history.

So quit trying to shoehorn Star Trek's history into ours, and vice versa. Doesn't work, never has, never will.