TNG referenced to TOS throughout the series as I expect in a generation after next show. They even had Bones on the first episode.
Do fans want the prime timeline back?
- Thread starter Beyerstein
- Start date
I think you hit the nail right on the head, GregYou know, I sometimes wonder how much the objection to reboots simply comes from seeing one's encyclopedic knowledge of pop-cultural trivia rendered obsolete. "No, not after I memorized all those Starfleet registry numbers and Cardassian history!"
On one hand, I understand that pang. I have stacks of DC Comics reference books and back issues that can no longer be relied on for research purposes. On the other hand, that's not really a compelling reason to bring back a discarded continuity.
STAR TREK is more than just an encyclopedia of fictional facts about an imaginary future. In the grander scheme of things, Trek trivia contests are not as important as telling compelling stories that will appeal to everyone, not just those of us who can recite all of Kirk's exes by heart.
Plinket (i think that's spelled right) did a short vid on it.
One that comes to mind is Kirk doing another space shoot jump.
The whole "Dear god, what have I wasted my life doing?!..None of it matters anymore!...I...I am a basement dwelling nerd!...no...no...NOOOOOOOOOO!" moment.You know, I sometimes wonder how much the objection to reboots simply comes from seeing one's encyclopedic knowledge of pop-cultural trivia rendered obsolete. "No, not after I memorized all those Starfleet registry numbers and Cardassian history!"
On one hand, I understand that pang. I have stacks of DC Comics reference books and back issues that can no longer be relied on for research purposes. On the other hand, that's not really a compelling reason to bring back a discarded continuity.
STAR TREK is more than just an encyclopedia of fictional facts about an imaginary future. In the grander scheme of things, Trek trivia contests are not as important as telling compelling stories that will appeal to everyone, not just those of us who can recite all of Kirk's exes by heart.
I can see it.
On a serious note: You're probably right. And then toss in the concept of Hate Reading, and some things start becoming a little clearer about the more zealous of the anti-reboot crowd.
Not saying some people do not have a genuine dislike for the new movies. That I can get: people have different tastes, the wheel in the sky and all that. The people who take it as a personal affront, who make it an issue of being personally owed something, who go after the production team on a very personal level, those people have lost touch with reality--IMO.
Most? I already listed exceptions with the TDK trilogy and Craig Bond films. There are some versions of previous works that leave a big mark, no doubt about that. I don't see something like that in the Abramstrek films. They have their 15 minutes of fame but then they will be "forgotten", especially if TOS gets rebooted again and again.
Better, but I really do think that remakes get a bum rap. Hollywood history is littered with classic films that are remakes: BEN-HUR, THE WIZARD OF OZ, THE MALTESE FALCON, TARZAN THE APE MAN, THE MARK OF ZORRO, SOME LIKE IT HOT, THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, THE HORROR OF DRACULA, VICTOR/VICTORIA, THE THING, THE FLY, etc. In some cases, there are several classic versions of the same story.
I'm not sure when we decided that remakes and reboots are the devil. I mean, nobody objects when the Met puts on a new production of "Carmen" or Broadway stages a revival of "Death of a Salesman." But remake an old movie or TV show . . . sacrilege!
I agree with most everything you said there up until the end. The 09 movie(annoyingly without a name still), was at least fresh and seemed to indicate they might go outside the box by destroying Vulcan, even if you apparently had to buy a comic book to realize Nero really isn't an idiot who was just twiddling his thumbs for 20 years waiting for Spock.
Into Darkness... well that one really offered us nothing new at all. It cherry picked elements from across the franchise, tossed them into a blender and viola! "New" movie! By all accounts they set themselves up for another re-hash of Khan in the third movie out for revenge, though I guess we'll be a few years waiting and seeing on that one. Still, nothing we haven't seen it would seem.
There has always been a fad in Hollywood for rebooting things. It's a lot easier than coming up with anything original after all, and the people will pay every time. I'll agree the Dark Knight triology was a good example. Though to me Pierce Brosnan is the Bond I grew up with.
You're right about the plot, down at it's core, people simple enough you could swap out generations, characters and what not and not have to change too much. I will say you're wrong about the NuKirk, Spock and McCoy not drawing in people. They are, even if they're in reality just names attached to different people that are completely different than the heroes of old. But most people don't know or care about that and just want a good action movie, and figure they've heard of that Kirk guy and he's good for it. It's historic fact in Hollywood you can repackage the same product and keep selling it over and over again. Just the way it is.
Exactly. Hollywood has been in the remake business since the silent era. My favorite example: The Unholy Three (1925), a truly bizarre crime thriller starring Lon Chaney Sr., was remade as a talkie only five years later--with largely the same cast!
And people complain that Spider-Man was rebooted too fast!
(And, famously, the classic 1941 production of The Maltese Falcon was the third movie version of that story to be released over a period of only ten years.)
So, yeah, rebooting Star Trek is just standard operating procedure. You live long enough, or watch enough old movies, you see everything get remade--several times over!
Hollywood makes movies to make money. Given the current state of the motion picture industry, a "Great BIG Trek" a la Abrams makes sense. But as Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy shows, that in no way means you have to throw away quality of storytelling. And I would argue that trilogy will end up more profitable than the Abrams Treks in the long run.
Having said that, if JJ Abrams goes off to do Star Wars and leaves Trek behind, then somebody else can pick up the reigns and do something better with his alternate timeline. It isn't as if all the eps of TOS were high quality, yet all things wonderful in TNG, DS9, VOY and ENT proceeded from that!
However...
From what I understand, the film industry is in serious flux. With the price of tickets what they are, and competition so increasingly diverse and readily accessible, we'll see what happens. If making three or four Treks for the internet costs a tenth as much as STID yet makes one quarter the profit, then we're talking a very different business plan for exploiting the franchise, which in turn impacts the possibilities quite a lot.
Such a scenario might well provide for alternate series/films in different continuities, each with a distinct "look."
Having said that, if JJ Abrams goes off to do Star Wars and leaves Trek behind, then somebody else can pick up the reigns and do something better with his alternate timeline. It isn't as if all the eps of TOS were high quality, yet all things wonderful in TNG, DS9, VOY and ENT proceeded from that!
However...
From what I understand, the film industry is in serious flux. With the price of tickets what they are, and competition so increasingly diverse and readily accessible, we'll see what happens. If making three or four Treks for the internet costs a tenth as much as STID yet makes one quarter the profit, then we're talking a very different business plan for exploiting the franchise, which in turn impacts the possibilities quite a lot.
Such a scenario might well provide for alternate series/films in different continuities, each with a distinct "look."
One more movie that segways into a show to restore the timeline. So yeah, I want it back, but eventually...
Some Superman fans want Tom Welling to headline the movies (never mind his long-standing disinterest in ever wearing the suit) and want the John Byrne-instigated comics continuity restored.
Some Batman fans want the Bale/Nolan franchise to continue and want anything other than the Frank Miller-influenced version wiped from existence.
Some Spider-Man fans want his marriage reinstated as if nothing ever happened, never mind that it would require glossing over the fact that he betrayed everything he ever stood for by guilting MJ into taking Mephisto's deal and violated Aunt May's dying wishes by doing so.
Some Star Wars fans want the prequels and cartoons scrubbed from existence, and would be perfectly happy to see Return of the Jedi get tossed, too.
A ton of Fifty Shades of Grey fans want Charlie Hunnam and Dakota Johnson fired from the movie and want Matt Bomer and Alexis Bledel -- two actors who weren't interested in the project, probably have never worked together, and never bothered to audition -- forced to replace them.
Some Lord of the Rings fans want either a word-for-word replication of the novels or a drastic alteration of the story a la John Boorman's failed 1970s pitch out of the belief that Peter Jackson's minor cuts and edits to the story are an insult to the material.
What am I getting at? You can't always get what you want, especially when it's not realistic or feasible. A Trek movie or TV show designed to divert back to the old timeline would be completely improbable and, to be honest, destructive to the franchise. You'd be heading right back to Trek being an insular niche franchise and sacrificing any chance of it having mass appeal...the very opposite of what it started out as. What would be the point? What purpose would there be to backtrack and make Trek nerd ghetto fare again?
Again, as I said before, every incarnation of a franchise has an expiration date. The "prime timeline" went on well past its sell-by date and ended on a sour note. At what point do we accept it's over? At what point do we accept it's time for Trek to adopt, adapt, and modernize? I mean, there are incarnations of Superman and Batman that I like better than others, but I don't expect them to go on forever. They have their endpoints and I accept that. The same applies to Trek. The old timeline's done, and it ended in tatters. There comes a point where you have to acknowledge it's time to start over fresh, and you HAVE to appeal to newcomers and get new blood involved. Stubbornly staying the course won't appeal to anyone but a shrinking core of die-hards, and Trek can't survive on that.
It's one thing to miss the old stuff and be nostalgic for it. But to argue that the franchise should backpedal and go back to the old way of doing things...sorry, but that would make no sense.
But what is the practical advantage of restoring the old timeline at that point? And, no, "restoring the proper timeline" is not a worthwhile end in itself . . .
Unless it makes the stories better or attracts a larger audience, what's the point? Just to scratch a continuity itch?
Why couldn't you do a story where you had the future in the Abrams-Verse that turned out to be like the bad place from the "Parallels" episode of TNG, where the Borg were everywhere and so is the Dominion... go back in time, stop Nero, and that's the conclusion of a series or mini-series. If that works out, then fast-forward to this point in the future, 15-20 years after the Dominion Wars End, 10-15 years after future Janeway cripples the Borg, set up a small ship with a small crew, some new technology, and set them off on a trip with the use of a Borg transwarp network, set up alliances with familiar people in the aftermath of the Dominion War, help rebuild Romulan society or, better, have them part of the Federation, tearing THAT wall down, doing good works, exploring OUTSIDE of our own galaxy, learning new ways to transport the crew, instead of warp drive, maybe an artificial wormhole generator or something... I think it's enough of a departure from what we KNOW as Star Trek yet gives the stories a chance to be what science fiction is supposed to be. Maybe put an arc in there to keep people interested. Changing the way things are done (transporters, warp drive, phasers, torpedoes, shields) with the dominion war research and Borg tech, creating new, different, bizarre and intriguing sets and props to go with it.
I don't think it has to be a reboot for every generation. TNG was a great successor to TOS in many ways. Lots of TOS fans hated it, but TNG fans, some of who had never seen or been interested in TOS, were now involved in this thing that grew. Now, they're both lumped into Trekkies because they all... understand... the overall story. A new series set far in the future, after TNG and DS9, can give you that "reboot" without having an actual "reboot". The technology can be cool by TODAY'S standards, not just slightly more advanced versions of what was cool by 1966'S standards (i.e. phasers, photon torpedoes, warp speed, transporter beams). Make a ship with an artifical wormhole generator, make cool types of weapons, like energy damnpening spears, go back to BSG/WWII-style turrets and fighter planes, instead of transporters, have Iconian-style gateways on every ship, and blatantly play with time travel, backwards and forwards, have fun.
Sure, you could do that, but, again, why? What's the point of rebooting the franchise to attract a new generation of viewers if you're just going to go back to "the aftermath of the Dominion War" and all that old baggage? That defeats the whole point of rebooting and starting over from scratch . . ..
You keep assuming that the vast TV-going public wants the old timeline back, and that there's some pressing need to somehow get back to old timeline eventually, but that's not necessarily the case. Restoring the old timeline is not going to help the ratings of any new Trek show one bit . . . .
I'm not suggesting someone should do an aftermath story. That'd be boring. That'd be too blatant a tie in. What I'm saying is that if you set it far enough AHEAD of that time, like TNG did with TOS, you could do an original series, set on a ship (not an Enterprise), say with the technological boost, they're like today's astronauts, testing out these things and seeing if they really CAN go to ANOTHER GALAXY or backwards and forwards in time safely and responsibly, whether or not they SHOULD, that classic debate, but in a totally new and fresh context.
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