Poll Favorite Star Trek that didn't happen?
- Thread starter Lord Garth
- Start date
Absolutely. I feel like it would've been a great movie, even if it might not have been great Star Trek, if that makes sense.
But as soon as Tarantino announced that his next film would be his last, I knew it was pretty unlikely to happen.
In Trekpertise's 'The Trek Not Taken', JMS's is touted as 'hard scifi'...but I can't find anything about that. Just that it'll be with the original crew ensemble.
"We will keep the classic silhouette of the Enterprise, but fit her out with a level of amazing
technology based on what the best and the brightest minds tell us the future will look like in
200 years. Tricorders and communicators were predicted by the original Trek and are
already upon us in GPS technology and cell phones. What new wonders can we predict for
the future knowing what we know now?"
Doesn't ring 'hard scifi' to me (right now, as far as I know, the hardest scifi that is soft enough for Star Trek level shenanigans will produce a ship more akin to the XCV-330, not the classic silhouette of the Enterprise NCC-1701), it just seems like it's going to be more akin to 'We're going to try to future proof the props' - which TNG has already basically done?
To me, "Hard Scifi" is great! It's alluring. But in media, I've come to realise, it needs to be a dressing, a devil-is-in-the-details sort of thing. Technobabble is to be avoided, the focus on tech needs to be minimised, it's all about the characters - just like many a good piece of fiction should be, even a technothriller or world-work.
Mixed with a Space-Opera, what comes to mind is stuff like wearing suits when going to any new planet, lots of decontamination (and no, not the fan-servicey ENT kind). Lots of weird planets, different atmospheres, different Gs , lots of weird species, lots of hurdles in communications, that sort of thing. (One thing NuTrek got right was shoving that sort of stuff in there).
It could be done but at that point just make a new show; focus on the Local Bubble and have ring ships and all that, CGI aliens that aren't humanoid being the norm, lots of different strains of humanity going which way, radiators glowing dull red, stuff like that.
Everything else I'm reading about JMS's proposal is...retreading on already walked ground and linking things together that should be left well enough alone, such as TNG's the Chase, TOS's doomsday machine, the like. I'm also just not that interested in Young Kirk, Young Spock, etc. We saw that with the new movies. Didn't grab me then, JMS's wouldn't now, or in '06.
I'm gleaning all of this from this document.
"We will keep the classic silhouette of the Enterprise, but fit her out with a level of amazing
technology based on what the best and the brightest minds tell us the future will look like in
200 years. Tricorders and communicators were predicted by the original Trek and are
already upon us in GPS technology and cell phones. What new wonders can we predict for
the future knowing what we know now?"
Doesn't ring 'hard scifi' to me (right now, as far as I know, the hardest scifi that is soft enough for Star Trek level shenanigans will produce a ship more akin to the XCV-330, not the classic silhouette of the Enterprise NCC-1701), it just seems like it's going to be more akin to 'We're going to try to future proof the props' - which TNG has already basically done?
To me, "Hard Scifi" is great! It's alluring. But in media, I've come to realise, it needs to be a dressing, a devil-is-in-the-details sort of thing. Technobabble is to be avoided, the focus on tech needs to be minimised, it's all about the characters - just like many a good piece of fiction should be, even a technothriller or world-work.
Mixed with a Space-Opera, what comes to mind is stuff like wearing suits when going to any new planet, lots of decontamination (and no, not the fan-servicey ENT kind). Lots of weird planets, different atmospheres, different Gs , lots of weird species, lots of hurdles in communications, that sort of thing. (One thing NuTrek got right was shoving that sort of stuff in there).
It could be done but at that point just make a new show; focus on the Local Bubble and have ring ships and all that, CGI aliens that aren't humanoid being the norm, lots of different strains of humanity going which way, radiators glowing dull red, stuff like that.
Everything else I'm reading about JMS's proposal is...retreading on already walked ground and linking things together that should be left well enough alone, such as TNG's the Chase, TOS's doomsday machine, the like. I'm also just not that interested in Young Kirk, Young Spock, etc. We saw that with the new movies. Didn't grab me then, JMS's wouldn't now, or in '06.
I'm gleaning all of this from this document.
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I think the JMS/Bryce Zabel proposal (and really, it was a proposal from BOTH of them; we shouldn't keep calling it "the JMS proposal"; It was Zabel's baby, too) is very oriented towards their propensity for arc style storytelling, evident on JMS' Babylon 5, JMS' sadly cut short Crusade and Zabel's own swiftly canceled Dark Skies. (Zabel & Brent Friedman's original pitch document for Dark Skies is a staggering 63 PAGES, BTW.) Heck, Zabel even tried to introduce some arc elements into Lois & Clark when he wrote for that series, in the form of connecting Clark's rocket ship to UFO mythology like the Majestic 12.
And it could've been really interesting to see Kirk, Spock, and McCoy involved in a gigantic storyline spread over several seasons. It's an ambitious idea, if nothing else. And honestly, doing a big arc with a popular, recognizable brand like Star Trek might even make more sense than doing with a brand new show with a set of characters that nobody has ever heard of before. Audiences might be inclined to give their old friends Kirk, Spock, and McCoy some more leeway when it came to seeing where this big storyline might be going. Heck, it worked with Battlestar Galactica.
I doubt that they would've succeeding in recruiting all the big names they mention as possible writers for the show, like
Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, Dean Koontz, Michael Crichton, Anne Rice, Kurt Vonnegut, and Anne McCaffrey, but again, I certainly can't fault them for a lack of ambition. On Babylon 5 Straczynski did manage to get Gaiman to write an episode, but OTOH he never got Harlan Ellison to do that sequel to The Outer Limits episode "Demon with a Glass Hand" that JMS kept talking up in interviews when B5 first premiered.
So, it's certainly interesting to imagine. I wonder if any of the actors who ended up in the 2009 movie might have auditioned for this proposed series?
And it could've been really interesting to see Kirk, Spock, and McCoy involved in a gigantic storyline spread over several seasons. It's an ambitious idea, if nothing else. And honestly, doing a big arc with a popular, recognizable brand like Star Trek might even make more sense than doing with a brand new show with a set of characters that nobody has ever heard of before. Audiences might be inclined to give their old friends Kirk, Spock, and McCoy some more leeway when it came to seeing where this big storyline might be going. Heck, it worked with Battlestar Galactica.
I doubt that they would've succeeding in recruiting all the big names they mention as possible writers for the show, like
Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, Dean Koontz, Michael Crichton, Anne Rice, Kurt Vonnegut, and Anne McCaffrey, but again, I certainly can't fault them for a lack of ambition. On Babylon 5 Straczynski did manage to get Gaiman to write an episode, but OTOH he never got Harlan Ellison to do that sequel to The Outer Limits episode "Demon with a Glass Hand" that JMS kept talking up in interviews when B5 first premiered.
So, it's certainly interesting to imagine. I wonder if any of the actors who ended up in the 2009 movie might have auditioned for this proposed series?
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