The details of the petition are as follows:
Dear CBS:
How dare you?
Don’t you realize that the most stress-inducing, anxiety-provoking, cruel thing that you can do to a Star Trek fan is to announce that you are going to give us a new Star Trek series?
I speak for all Star Trek fans (as will the next guy who comes along, albeit with totally different views) when I say that we know exactly what we want in a Star Trek series. We want it to be socially relevant, action-packed, and set during Captain Kirk’s original five-year mission. Except that we also want it to be not-too-preachy, not-too-much-action, and set one hundred years after the Dominion War.
There is one thing that we all know, with 100% certainty, and that is this:
You are going to fuck it up.
For this reason, we demand that you cancel the new series now, 14 months before we will ever see what it might have looked like.
In the few short days since you announced the new series, you have thrown small pockets of the internet into total chaos. See for yourself! (We apologize in advance for ultra-nerdy made-up terms like “nuTrek,” “Abramsverse,” and “JJTrek.” Try to sift through that shit as best you can.) Fans have rushed to their keyboards to correct other fans as to what is or is not “real” Trek. And whatever it is, you don’t get it.
We now have more than enough information to know that this series is going to be shit.
CBS. January 2017. Alex Kurtzman.
The evidence is damning. The utter disrespect of the fan base is staggering. We know everything we need to know to make our decision now. As one true fan on a Star Trek website put it -- one day after CBS made the announcement -- “I'd rather reject it now, and hope many fans agree that this is likely a decline in quality for trek, and not a sign of improvement.” And he is exactly right.
Start Trek preached IDIC, or Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations (actually, that was just a slogan that Roddenberry made up to sell some shitty jewelry to the fan base, but that’s not the point).
I’m here to tell you that what Star Trek fans really want for the new series is ND;MC (No Diversity; My Combination). In other words, each fan knows exactly what he or she wants, and we will accept no compromises. How can you tell what a Star Trek fans wants? You won’t even have to ask, because they won’t shut up about it. But the psychology behind it is this:
Remember when you were younger and awkward and you didn’t have a lot of friends and you first discovered Star Trek? THAT is the best Star Trek ever, and the only hope for the franchise is to duplicate it, indefinitely. Short of the passage of time, you, CBS, are responsible for our inability to recapture our youth and happiness.
Also, we demand quality. Star Trek has a long history of impeccable drama and story-telling. We will accept nothing less than stories about things like: the captain’s dog pissing on a tree, a crew member’s brain being removed to manage an entire planet while his body walks around by remote control, the annoying alien cook accidentally jamming up the warp engines with cheese, intergalactic hopscotch, falling into the bushes and being sentenced to death by half-naked people, going faster than Warp 10 and turning into lizards, etc. The bar has been set very high, and we are not going to let you fuck it up.
And what’s up with charging us 6 bucks a month?
We Star Trek fans are not used to being gouged for money by corporate money-grubbers, by selling us the same DVD ten times over, for example, or an Enterprise shaped cheese-cutting board, or the aforementioned shitty jewelry. We won’t stand for it.
In summation, and let me be clear:
We want it for free.
But first, we want you to cancel it.
If you don’t think we can make your life miserable, please see the many, many signatures below this petition. Can you imagine if all of us, at the same time, refused to watch the new series? That will hit you where it hurts.
Technically, you are getting off easy with this petition. If you fail to respond to it, our next move will be to begin to certify a class of people for a class action lawsuit against CBS. The intentional infliction of emotional distress that you have already caused since your announcement on Sunday is inexcusable.
Stop the bleeding.
Cancel the show.
