IDW Star Trek Ongoing...

Discussion in 'Trek Literature' started by serenitytrek1, Nov 21, 2012.

  1. Nightowl1701

    Nightowl1701 Commodore Commodore

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    I don't see Zoe Saldana sticking around past the third movie (between the Avatar and probable Guardians of the Galaxy sequels, plus other projects, she'll just be too busy), and 42-year-old John Cho isn't gonna get away with playing a 23-year-old Hikaru Sulu much longer. With those two recast, you could get probably three more movies at most out of Pine and Company before they caught up with their predecessors' TMP ages.
     
  2. borgboy

    borgboy Commodore Commodore

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    Sulu would be aging though. I don't think a Sulu recast would stop them from making a fourth movie if the next movie makes money and the rest of the cast and tptb want to continue.

    Saladana has had a much bigger role, and recasting her would be a much bigger deal. But perhaps they'd write her out or reduce her role so that Saldana could do just a small appearance. There are other female characters like Chapel and Rand, or other characters like one of the Dax, who could fill that void. I'd really miss Saldana's Uhura though, the Spock/Uhura relationship is one of the most intriguing elements of the new movies, and I'm really curious to see that develop. I was imagining the other day that the reboot series could end with a Spock/Uhura wedding.
     
  3. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    Let's remember that all these roles have been recast for these movies. No reason they couldn't be recast again.
     
  4. borgboy

    borgboy Commodore Commodore

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    I agree, but there is going to be a bigger deal made over some recasts over others.

    I don't think tptb would blink over recasting Sulu or Chekov. Uhura being recast would be a bigger deal. What about Kirk and Spock? Would they continue without Pine and Quinto? At some point we might well get new recasts, I just don't know if they'd continue this version with new leads. I'd be really sad if there were no future Trek tv or movies. It's already been too long without a new Trek tv series, and there's only one more guaranteed Trek movie. The uncertainty make me nervous.
     
  5. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    They recast everyone at once, except Spock Prime. People made quite a big deal over that. Then people saw the movie, and generally liked what they saw. Fandom always raises hell over casting decisions in future movies, but all that really matters is the actual performance in the actual movie.


    I think John Cho and Anton Yelchin have both proven themselves very impressive actors and have pretty successful careers -- not quite on Saldana's level of success, but certainly rising in prominence and esteem. Cho has even broken an important glass ceiling: He's been cast as the romantic lead in an upcoming ABC sitcom called Selfie (loosely based on Pygmalion/My Fair Lady), which is the kind of role that Asian actors pretty much never get in America. (Almost as impressively, his love interest is Karen Gillan. Sulu and Amy Pond in the same show!!!!)


    We got three different actors as Batman in four films in (at least nominally) the same series. We had Batman's love interest recast between the first two films in the next series. We've had four Jack Ryans, including Chris Pine. (Good lord, The Hunt for Red October was 30 years ago???) The feature industry is not inseparably attached to its lead actors.


    Paramount is not going to give up on its longest-running cash cow. How many movie series have continued more or less unbroken for 35 years? Not counting franchises that ended and were revived decades later, like Planet of the Apes or Star Wars. Basically James Bond and Godzilla are the only current/recent ones that exceed the Trek film franchise for both duration and number of films, and Friday the 13th, Halloween, and A Nightmare on Elm Street are the only other ones that really come close. (Tarzan probably beats them all, but it stopped being a regular series decades ago.) That makes Trek one of the most enduring motion picture franchises of all time. It's not going anywhere.

    And how do you define "too long" without a Trek TV series? There was a 13-year gap between the animated series and TNG, and an 18-year gap between TOS and TNG. It's only been nine years since ENT went off the air.
     
  6. ATimson

    ATimson Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    Affleck and Pine were both reboots of the series rather than continuing the continuity of the Baldwin/Ford movies, so I don't think they quite count. Your other examples seem fair, though. :)

    You say it's "only" been nine years since ENT went off the air, but I was two years old when TNG started. It felt to me like Trek had always been on the air.

    The break is probably better for any future show, creatively, but that doesn't make it feel like any less of an eternity!
     
  7. Oso Blanco

    Oso Blanco Commodore Commodore

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    Exactly, but Paramount seems to be blind on the Star Trek eye ... four years between the first and the second movie and three more years until the third movie, that's not enough to keep a franchise alive! They could make dozens of spin-offs if they wanted to!

    TNG, DS9 and VGR shouldn't even exist in the nuVerse ... the future has not been written yet and is entirely unpredictable. TNG, DS9 and VGR are a continuation of the Prime Timeline, which doesn't exist anymore. A reboot like the Abrams movies (with the same characters in the same places) wouldn't make any sense at all!

    It would make more sense to continue the nuVerse on it's own path, and to create ORIGINAL sequels and spin-offs.

    Please, no!
     
  8. Markonian

    Markonian Fleet Admiral Moderator

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    1) Paramount isn't turning a blind eye on Star Trek. We're having a movie trilogy, after all.


    2.1) The Prime timeline still exists. There's no reason it should cease to exists. We just got an additional timeline. The existence of the Prime timeline doesn't negate any of the parallel timelines in TNG "Parallels" either.

    2.2) The current Star Trek Ongoing arc features the DS9 characters in a possible future of the alternate reality. The futures of DS9, TNG and VOY may or may not come to pass but they aren't being negated outright. (Continuing on an original path anyway is never a bad idea, of course)

    3) Recasting is not a problem. Saavik's replacement doesn't impair the stories she's involved in. In a way, the Enterprise has been recast as well for TMP. :)


    To me, it seems Trek perished on TV because there had been an overdose. 17 years ongoing. Or maybe the producers (except Coto) ran out of idea, or the TPTB failed to address technological issues (syndication), or it was just the time of the sci-fi ghetto when we got a plethora of one-season-oneshots.

    Anyway, I like to believe the break was curative and that the Alternate Reality movie brought about a revival.

    A new series would have to be original to compete with all the other series on TV, but still recognizable and preferably not a carbon copy of BSG's concept.
     
    Last edited: Jul 20, 2014
  9. Oso Blanco

    Oso Blanco Commodore Commodore

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    So we have two movies in five years now, and by 2016 we will have three movies in seven years. Compare that to the Marvel franchise!

    Considering how Nero messed up the timeline, it's a stretch to even have the TOS crew together on the Enterprise. There is no way that the TNG era turns out to be even remotely close to what we've seen in the PrimeVerse.


    Agreed!
     
  10. Markonian

    Markonian Fleet Admiral Moderator

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    Yes, but Star Trek is not as 'cool' and appealing as, say, Star Wars. Superhero movies are popular at the moment and there's probably a large following of such comics. When you walk into shops, how often do you see Trek memorabilia? Without the internet, nothing besides novels would be available here in Germany, for example. Because Trek isn't cool enough to appeal to the masses. Star Wars is.


    It doesn't matter how much Nero messed up the timeline. It depends on the writers who'll be born and who won't. We have already have numerous diverse universes were people are born and meeting despite circumstances (Annika Hansen ending up on Voyager in "Places of Exile", Sisko and Yates meeting in the mirror universe). We have a universe were everybody is gender-swapped, yet they occupy the exact same positions in life (Parallel Lives).

    Correct me if I'm wrong, but DTI: Watching the Clock implied quantum entanglement between individuals and objects allow them to experience a similar existence across the multiverse.

    One more specific example. The Betazoids and Andorians are slaughtered in the mirror universe? Deanna and Shar are born anyway.
     
  11. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    I was thinking of "too long" not in terms of an individual's wishes, but in terms of its impact on the franchise's long-term prospects for survival. Star Trek has gone far longer without a TV series on the air, but a new TV series did eventually come along. So there's no reason to fear for the franchise's future just because it's been off TV for a while.



    I never said anything about anything "ceasing to exist." None of it actually exists, of course. Or rather, all of it will exist -- as stories -- as long as the recorded media endure. I'm speaking of Star Trek as an entertainment franchise in the real world, and how Paramount might hypothetically approach it as the basis for a multi-series film franchise of the sort that Hollywood is crazy about right now. The preference might be to continue the Abramsverse and spin other series off from that, but there are no onscreen TOS-era spinoffs, and the odds that Hollywood would adapt a book series like Vanguard or Seekers are pretty slim. It's more likely that they'd look to the part of the Trek franchise that's already sustained a multi-series shared universe, the 24th-century trio.

    And if they did bring those to movies, it's likely they'd reinvent them and recast them, because starting from the ground up would give them more freedom and younger leads would be better anchors for a multi-year film franchise. After all, it worked for the Abramsverse; the past two films did better box office than nearly all their predecessors with the aging original cast. That would be Hollywood's consideration -- not any fannish concerns about the "reality" of fictional constructs. Of course fans could still treat the Prime universe as ongoing, because a reboot doesn't preclude that -- especially if they decided to start over with a wholesale reinvention.

    I mean, if I were a Paramount exec looking to turn ST into a Marvel-style multi-series franchise, I'd conclude that it would be better to just reinvent the whole thing from scratch so that it could be rearranged to fit the needs of the crossover series -- namely, put Kirk and company, the most perennially popular part of the franchise, in the same time frame as Picard's crew, DS9, Voyager, and whatever else I chose to adapt. Sure, the purists would freak out, but they're a tiny fraction of the audience, and it's no worse than the way the X-Men films have messed around with the timeline (e.g. having Storm be an older member of the team than Iceman, or having Havok be a generation older than Cyclops), or the way the Marvel films have removed Nick Fury's WWII-era origins and made the Howling Commandos Captain America's team instead. Heck, the Abramsverse has already flirted with that despite the alternate-timeline conceit, making Chekov older and the Enterprise newer and having the crew come together aboard the ship years earlier than they did in TOS.

    Or, I suppose, they could try something closer to the established chronology but have periodic time-travel crossovers serving as the Avengers/Justice League-style epics unifying the individual series. That's not as appealing to me, since time travel has already been done to death in Trek movies. But that might be just why a creative team in charge of such a reboot would deem it appropriate to include as an integral part of the series.


    Of course a reboot of Trek wouldn't be a "carbon copy" of another reboot, but I still say that if Trek is going to remain relevant and interesting to the next generation of viewers, it will need to reinvent its continuity altogether and slough off the residue of its antiquated 1960s ideas. To modern viewers, communicators and tricorders look technologically backward. The core casts of both TOS and TNG are too dominated by white males. The history is already problematical to reconcile, because we didn't have Eugenics Wars in the '90s or a manned flight to Saturn in the 2000s. And you know what I just realized? Starting just six months from now, in mid-January 2015, we will be closer to the date of Cochrane's first warp flight (April 2063) than to the premiere of Star Trek (September 1966). And the closer we -- and our children -- get to that date, the more obvious it will become that we won't have warp drive by then.

    Nostalgia for the original ST is fine. People still read the 1960s Marvel comics, the 1940s DC comics. We still read the original Sherlock Holmes stories even as we watch the modernized versions in Sherlock and Elementary. The new does not erase the old. But if we want Star Trek to continue to feel relevant and engaging to new generations -- to people who will actually be alive and in their prime in 2063, people to whom genetic augmentation will probably become a part of everyday life, people who will know for a fact whether there are habitable planets around Alpha Centauri or 40 Eridani -- it's going to have to be reinvented completely, rebuilt from a more modern starting point.



    Currently, sure. But nothing lasts forever. A quarter-century ago, Star Wars was all but defunct and Star Trek was the entertainment juggernaut. Fortunes shift.
     
    Last edited: Jul 20, 2014
  12. Therin of Andor

    Therin of Andor Admiral Moderator

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    The conclusion for Orci & Kurtzman's storyline for the "Countdown" mini-series, and the current IDW Q story, show very clearly that Picard et al continue to exist after Spock Prime journeyed through the wormhole. Unless I'm terribly mistaken.

    Did they specifically say that every single Betazoid and Andorian had been eliminated?

    Indeed. I also recall a very long hiatus for "Star Wars" action figures and novels post-RotJ (after three Solo novels and three Lando novels in MMPB, they seemingly dried up completely) - until there was a Lucas interview in "Starlog" where he'd commented jealously on the success of Pocket's Trek hardcovers.
     
  13. Oso Blanco

    Oso Blanco Commodore Commodore

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    Of course they still exist, but in their own (prime) timeline. In the new timeline, things should be very different in the 24th century. Which would make a reboot of TNG, DS9 or Voyager in the nuVerse impossible!
     
  14. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    No, it wouldn't! It's fiction! They can reinvent the universe any way they want. The creators of fiction are not prohibited to do things by the nature of their fictional universes, because they define how those universes work in the first place. Not to mention that there already is precedent in Trek, since the Prime and Mirror Universes had the same casts coming together in the same ships or stations in three different centuries. It's not "impossible," because they chose to tell the stories in that way.

    Besides, they don't have to continue the Abramsverse. The continuity's been reinvented once, so it surely will be again, just like so many other long-running fictional franchises. They absolutely could do TNG or DS9 in the Abramsverse if they wanted to, but they could -- and someone eventually, inevitably will -- create an entirely new version of the Trek universe. There's no limit to the possibilities.
     
  15. Oso Blanco

    Oso Blanco Commodore Commodore

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    Of course the writers can go anywhere they want to, but it wouldn't make any sense at all to do a TNG era reboot in the AbramsVerse. They got away with the Mirror Universe episodes because it was a cool idea in TOS, and you can explain the identical crews away by some quantum mechanic theories.

    I really hope that they will not reboot TOS again, and creating an entirely new Star Trek would be the worst idea ever. There are almost 50 years of Trek, there are virtually endless possibilities of creating original stories within either the PrimeVerse or the NuVerse, so why would anyone create yet another 'Verse? Has the movie industrie completely run out of creativity? We have the nuVerse now, so let's have some spin-offs that are not carbon copies of the primeTNG era!
     
  16. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    That's exactly how they've already explained the Abramsverse TOS crew coming together despite the changes, so it's inconsistent to argue that they couldn't do the same for TNG et al. Besides, it doesn't matter, because only a tiny fraction of the viewing audience even cares how you explain it. The alternate-timeline thing is just an excuse to appease the continuity geeks. To most audiences, this is just a new version of a work of fiction, and they don't care about the justification for the changes any more than they care about why the Christian Bale Batman has a different life story than the Michael Keaton one.


    Because that's how fiction endures from generation to generation: By reinventing itself. I've explained how many of Trek's ideas are already outdated. ST is 48 years old this year (50 if you count from the first pilot); audiences 48 years from now, or even 24 years from now, are going to find its premises even more outdated than they do already. If it doesn't reinvent itself, our children and grandchildren will see it only as something old, nostalgic, and quaint, with some very silly and naive assumptions about what the future would be like -- the way we look on something like Captain Video or Zombies of the Stratosphere. And that would be a shame, because ST was created to be something progressive and forward-looking, something that pushed boundaries, defied expectations, and took risks rather than timidly clinging to the familiar and conventional.

    You see, it's not about the details of continuity or the "facts" of what happened when. Those are superficial. It's about the underlying ideas, the spirit of Star Trek. We're talking about a series that broke boundaries, that inspired generations to believe in a better future and pursue careers in science and engineering and medicine and aerospace. It did that by encouraging its audience to look forward, not backward. And the franchise will lose the ability to do that if it still, 30 or 40 years from now, is clinging to a continuity grounded in the assumptions of the 1960s or 1980s.
     
  17. Markonian

    Markonian Fleet Admiral Moderator

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    To slaughter a population is not the same as exterminating a population. The Terrans engaged in severe reduction of population on Betazed and Andor. The genocide is left incomplete.
     
  18. Enterprise1701

    Enterprise1701 Commodore Commodore

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    You need to check the Mirror Universe series again. It was stated in Glass Empires - Age of the Empress that the Terran Empire exterminated all known telepathic species. Therefore the general public believed all telepathic species to be extinct although Betazoids clearly weren't and Vulcans kept their secret. The Andorians were a populous subject/client species of the Terran Empire throughout the Empire's history. In the mirror version of the Khitomer conspiracy in The Sorrows of Empire, two high-ranking Andorian generals are conspirators along with four Terran admirals. Rise Like Lions states that the conquest by the Alliance had led to the near-extinction of Andorians, but their continued existence must have been publicly known since there aren't any other obviously blue-skinned species with antennae.
     
  19. shapeshifter

    shapeshifter Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    No! No different. Only different in your mind. You must unlearn what you have learned.[/Yoda] ;)

    If a reboot of that era had all the characters same as before then there'd be no reason to reboot them, right? That it would be different is why story potential exists.
     
    Last edited: Jul 20, 2014
  20. Markonian

    Markonian Fleet Admiral Moderator

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    Thanks for the additional background. As I said - the Terrans didn't succeed in making the Betazoids extinct.

    Hoshi Sato II was known as the Butcher of Andor. That's where I got the idea of reducing the Andorian population without killing them off, from. The Alliance campaign you brought up also serves to underline the original point.

    Namely, that Deanna and Shar existed despite overwhelming odds to the contrary (= propability to be born despite near-genocide among one's ancestors). Which is the example to serve another point: regardless of events, the existence of characters depends on the creative decisions of the writers/authors because it's all fictional. :vulcan: