Total Reboot?

[mendelin]

Finally, I got the point of reboot.
To stay recognizable, Star Trek needs Kirk&Co., because of the major audience.
Yes, James Bond, Spiderman, Batman, Mr. Roarke, Robocop, Kirk&Co... That's sad.

I thought, that Star Trek was unique becouse of it's ability be recognizable, smart and exciting without strong connections with particular characters. Picard, Sisko, Janeway, Archer... They made their voyages, they told their stories, they were important to some fans. And it was amazing!

 

[BillJ]

Finally, I got the point of reboot.
To stay recognizable, Star Trek needs Kirk&Co., because of the major audience.
Yes, James Bond, Spiderman, Batman, Mr. Roarke, Robocop, Kirk&Co... That's sad.

I thought, that Star Trek was unique becouse of it's ability be recognizable, smart and exciting without strong connections with particular characters. Picard, Sisko, Janeway, Archer... They made their voyages, they told their stories, they were important to some fans. And it was amazing!

And rebooting doesn't make those adventures any less amazing. I don't understand why new adventures with Kirk and Spock would make the stuff you love any less amazing?

The strong connections to particular characters is non-sense. For twenty-one years, Star Trek was Kirk and Spock.

 

[Timewalker]

And rebooting doesn't make those adventures any less amazing. I don't understand why new adventures with Kirk and Spock would make the stuff you love any less amazing?

Because you can't just tell us those characters are Kirk and Spock if they don't act like Kirk and Spock should act. TOS wouldn't have allowed a glorified smirking frat boy to serve on the ship at all, let alone be the captain. And the first time any crewmember started a whiny argument to/about her boyfriend on duty - telling her captain to shut up while she continued the argument - she would at the very least have been reprimanded, if not relieved of duty.

 

[BillJ]

And rebooting doesn't make those adventures any less amazing. I don't understand why new adventures with Kirk and Spock would make the stuff you love any less amazing?

Because you can't just tell us those characters are Kirk and Spock if they don't act like Kirk and Spock should act. TOS wouldn't have allowed a glorified smirking frat boy to serve on the ship at all, let alone be the captain. And the first time any crewmember started a whiny argument to/about her boyfriend on duty - telling her captain to shut up while she continued the argument - she would at the very least have been reprimanded, if not relieved of duty.

We get it, you don't like the Abramsverse. That is definitely your right. But the realities of film and TV storytelling are very different. A TV show will have the time to flesh out the story in a way a two-hour movie can't.

I've been watching Star Trek since 1975 and I found Abramsverse Kirk and Spock to be very much like their TOS counterparts. Just younger and less restrained.

 

[BigJake]

Said it before, but it bears restating:

1. There is less live-action material featuring those characters outside of Enterprise. There is six-hundred plus hours of "Other Trek" compared to less than a hundred featuring Kirk and Spock.

2. Kirk and Spock are still "Star Trek" to general audiences and those audiences continue to show an interest in those characters.

These two statements are not compatible. There is indeed many more hours of non-TOS Trek than there are of TOS Trek. Much of that (pre VOY and ENT) was on shows that had bigger audiences -- vastly bigger, in TNG's case -- than TOS Trek. It is therefore not possible that it's any longer just Kirk and Spock who are "still Star Trek" to general audiences. That does not make sense.

(No, I'm not saying "reboot TNG." I'm just saying that it is not plausible for the Trek brand to be just Kirk and Spock any more, no matter how fondly many fans of Kirk and Spock wish that to be the case. Kirk and Spock matter to fandom. The general audience is not that attached to them.)

 

[mendelin]

For twenty-one years, Star Trek was Kirk and Spock.

And for 18 years Star Trek was Picard, Sisko, Janeway, Archer

And rebooting doesn't make those adventures any less amazing. I don't understand why new adventures with Kirk and Spock would make the stuff you love any less amazing?

The key word is "new". I can't imagine any new adventures with Kirk and Spock. We already know them. We know, that Kirk was an admiral, he was killed in the fight with Soran. We know, that Spock became an ambassador. His mission is connected with Vulcan-Romulan reunification.

From the other side, I recognize only Shatner Kirk and Nimoy Spock. Not because they are perfect actors. They were first, who brought to life those characters. And these characters already lived their lives.

To keep things simple: I don't like "Groundhog Day" concept.

 

[F. King Daniel]

And the first time any crewmember started a whiny argument to/about her boyfriend on duty - telling her captain to shut up while she continued the argument - she would at the very least have been reprimanded, if not relieved of duty.

Talking while waiting to arrive at their destination breaks no rules in any incarnation of Star Trek.

These characters are friends first and officers second. It's what the TOS cast became in STIII onwards (and in Kirk and Spock, and Spock and Pike's cases, much earlier)

The key word is "new". I can't imagine any new adventures with Kirk and Spock. We already know them. We know, that Kirk was an admiral, he was killed in the fight with Soran. We know, that Spock became an ambassador. His mission is connected with Vulcan-Romulan reunification.

"Whatever our lives may have been, if the time continuum was disrupted, our destinies have changed." - Spock in Star Trek.

We already saw a very different encounter with Khan. Anything can happen.

 

[Warped9]

Just because JJ did it one way doesn't mean anyone else will do it that way.

 

[BillJ]

These two statements are not compatible. There is indeed many more hours of non-TOS Trek than there are of TOS Trek. Much of that (pre VOY and ENT) was on shows that had bigger audiences -- vastly bigger, in TNG's case -- than TOS Trek. It is therefore not possible that it's any longer just Kirk and Spock who are "still Star Trek" to general audiences. That does not make sense.

It is absolutely compatible. When people think of "Star Trek" they think of Kirk and Spock, not Picard and Data. TNG had seven years of unquestionable success, but it was fleeting. Once it went off the air audiences went and latched onto the next flavor of the month (and it wasn't Deep Space Nine or Voyager).

TNG was a great show for most of its run, but TOS simply had and has more resonance with the viewing public. It's why TOS has been in syndication non-stop since 1970.

 

[BillJ]

And these characters already lived their lives.

That's a pretty sad way to look at things. I've been watching and reading Star Trek for close to forty-years. It would be a sad day for me if it was ever retired.

 

[Warped9]

TNG, DS9, VOY and ENT each have their fans who prefer them over all others, but the reality is when the broader audience thinks Star Trek they think TOS.

 

[Ryan8bit]

the reality is when the broader audience thinks Star Trek they think TOS.

I'd imagine this is especially true after the latest movies (well, at least the Kirk & Spock part, not TOS), but I have no data to back that up. The problem is that none of us really do when it comes to a general audience.

I would think that it's going to be whatever is popular, and whatever is recent. If you ask a lot of people what show Frasier Crane was on, they'd probably tell you "Frasier," depending on their age. Not as many young people would be inclined to say Cheers. Some people might do the same with TNG. It's really hard to speak for everybody though as if it's some sort of universally agreed upon thing.

Likewise, with the Frasier analogy, if someone was asked to describe Cheers, it's probably not likely that Frasier would come up in their description. That doesn't mean that Frasier isn't in the public consciousness as a great show of its own.

 

[BigJake]

The "broader audience" reached by AbramsTrek films is probably most familiar with TNG and NuTrek as the face of Trek.

Okay, I was trying to avoid answering the question in the OP because I knew I'd wind up writing a freaking novella. But well, here we are:

Would you want just a new cast and altered storylines, or would you want them to do a full overhaul by drastically changing characters and whatnot, or something in between?

I would want a Total Reboot to go back to first principles, basically go back to Roddenberry's original ideas and build something fresh out of them. (Warped9 has probably already said this part, so I'll beg forgiveness for the repetition.)

For my money, the most basic commitment of Star Trek: Total Reboot should be to (as it were) Level Up. Seek to raise the level of the film and television SF genre for our era just as (or to a greater extent than) TOS Trek did for its time.

This means:

Spoiler: On Levelling Up

- Aim high for standards of Excitement, Spectacle, Dramatic Power, Intelligence, and Believability.

- Make no excuses that appeal to mistakes committed by Trek in the past. If an idea is good, use it; if it's bad, reject it. It doesn't matter if older Trek shows or movies used the bad idea you're rejecting, TR is about producing high-quality and believable entertainment for the present day. (This goes also for "cute" intentional mistakes or self-referential cheese.)

- Beware "continuity porn..." The urge to tie in everything in the fictional universe to recognized characters or stories has the effect of 'shrinking' the fictional universe, reducing its power, often introducing unwitting contradictions, and making the whole mess look forbidding and inside-baseball to potential casual audiences.

- ...but don't scorn consistency! On the other hand, consistency is an important resource. Trek established early on a cavalier attitude to consistency about its setting and rules that later writers, producers and directors reproduced with almost mulish insistence and that isn't necessary -- or desirable -- for Total Reboot. Getting the details right is a seemingly small thing, but the effects add up over time just as the effects of "little mistakes" accrue over time.

- Use continuity as a resource with intelligence and restraint. The basic guideline is that any Total Reboot story should be accessible to a mainstream audience who doesn't know the characters or settings, but within these guidelines there is nothing wrong with the occasional recurring character, or picking up the threads of potential stories alluded to at one time in order to build a separate story later. As long as it's done sparingly and with attention to consistency.

- Avoid sentimentality at all costs. Sentimentality was the most fatal disease that afflicted Trek in all its forms after TOS went off the air. It was understandable, in a way, but it invariably undermined believability and Total Reboot needs to be ruthless in keeping it away from stories. Ship crews are not "friends" or "families" first and officers second, for instance; institutions should behave believably; Our Heroes should not be the galaxy's sole people of importance, and the rules should not apply to everyone else except them.

- Draw on contemporary stories outside SF... Trek believability was based on telling stories that could be more than just SF stories, and this is a worthy tradition that could be continued and strengthened.

- ... and draw on literary SF. Many of TOS Trek's most memorable episodes were penned by published SF writers. A lot of the show's narrative daring was owed to those kinds of writers, and TR Trek should likewise draw on the strongest SF writers of our generation.

What's worth keeping (or reinstating) from prior incarnations of Trek:

Spoiler: Keepers

- The core Star Trek format:
A Captain, a First Officer and a group of Regulars (with Guest Stars as needed) on a giant starship, on patrol of a section of our galaxy.

- Believability is basic to the Star Trek format above all else.
Believability of characters and their reactions was, as Roddenberry put it, the "angle factor" that distinguished Trek from previous televised SF. It's also the ingredient that has gradually bled away from the franchise by degrees over the years, until many have forgotten its importance.

- These basic rules:
1. Make sure your stories are person- and character-driven.
2. Make sure your stories are well put-together as you would expect stories in other genres to be (science fiction doesn't work by a separate set of rules and standards).
3. Building on that foundation, have something interesting to say about humanity, society and our collective future, but say it entertainingly.
4. Remember always that Star Trek is never fantasy. Whatever happens must have some basis in fact or theory and stay true to that premise.

- The Elements: Action! Drama! Suspense! Adventure!
TOS Trek preferred an action-adventure format; subsequent shows broadened their mandate to include more drama- and suspense- driven tales as well. This was good, in that sense they were levelling up, and Total Reboot would move forward from that broader mandate. The general guideline should be that any good TR Trek story should include at least two of the four above elements.

- Stay away from Earth.
Keeping the details of Earth vague and off-screen as much as possible was a good idea of TOS Trek, because it forced the show to keep its focus on the voyaging which was the basic heart of its format.

- Keep the vision optimistic.
Optimism was mostly a dramatic consideration in TOS, to keep the heroes sympathetic to the audience. It became even more important to TNG, which produced an "idealized" Federation. By now this optimism, the vision of humanity (and non-humanity) working together is a core part of the Trek brand and deservedly so.

It should be part of TR Trek too, though with the caveat that characters should still be believable to today's audiences, and that projection should not be idealized or optimistic to the point of foreclosing story opportunities. Also remember that we have a much changed and broadened understanding of what can be "sympathetic" in heroes today than Sixties television did, and TR Trek should use that. There is no reason Earth and the Federation cannot have believable political squabbles -- even if the issues of the future are very different in detail from our own -- or that Starfleet's men and women can't have real flaws, insecurities and conflicts within the parameters of being functional professionals.

- Keep the heroes as Earth's champions first and foremost.
The old Trek shows had Earth leading a multi-species Federation, and originally the heroes were working specifically for Earth. Subsequent generations of Trek fans have wanted to see more aliens aboard Federation ships, but dramatically and thematically, I think it remains a good idea to keep the focus on human characters and humanity's shared exploration among the stars. It's a theme that can resonate powerfully with audiences, especially if it's presented in a genuinely inclusive and international way.

- Keep the Prime Directive.
With all its problems and contradictions, it evolved into a constraint in the shows that was both surprisingly believable and very rich in serious moral dilemmas.

- Use some basic ingredients of Trek's core visual design.
There are core identifiers that make Trek visually distinctive as a brand: the basic template of ships harking back to the work of Matt Jefferies, the iconic Starfleet sigil, the primary-colour uniforms of the heroes. These should be part of TR Trek as well.

What's worth changing:

Spoiler: The changes

- There would need to be new characters.
The characters from the old Trek shows all had their virtues, and the TNG and TOS crews are now iconic parts of popular culture in ways that make it tempting to reuse one or the other of them.

But they also now carry baggage. Not only is there the question of the inevitable comparisons to the original articles which would arise, there's the question of the character concepts and popular expectations. Captain Kirk has massive name recognition, for example: but also a massive, persistent and largely fallacious pop culture image as a swaggering avatar of cockiness, crass sexuality and White Male Privilege. Spock as the representative of logic was a ground-breaking creation in his day: but the whole idea of Vulcan emotional suppression and having someone on board to represent Team Logic has not aged well and has proven difficult for subsequent writers and actors and producers to really comprehend or deliver (without making it seem like outsized prudery or dickishness). Picard, Worf and Data on TNG are some of television's most beloved characters and would have name recognition in their own right... but they're also specific to their time and a certain vision of the franchise. TR Trek needs to be free of that kind of baggage.

So, how do we get the audience to care about new characters? The same way Trek got them to care about the original crews. Conceive them vividly, write them believably and get good actors to portray them. Faran Tahir won an unexpected following for his Captain Robau character with nothing more than five minutes of screen time.

- A more international flavour... and a new ship.
TOS Trek was the adventures, essentially, of the American Navy in space. Its viewpoint vessel was named after a famous American warship. Both of these factors have inhibited the franchise's attempts to get an international audience. The TR crew should represent all of Earth and all of humanity as much as is possible, should champion international values, and should be aboard a ship whose name does not evoke the United States in World War Two.

- A new timeframe.
There's no particular reason for Trek to be set in the 23rd or 24th or 25th century, and plenty of good reasons for it not to be, as the more time we have to work with means more openings for "future history" and the building of colonies on a thousand worlds and the evolution of a Federation that can mount expeditions over dozens or hundreds of light-years. But the "Trek century" should still be set close enough to our time for humans to be a recognizable part of the setting.

I would nominate the 31st century, a neat millennium in our future and well-placed to be both imaginable and futuristic.

- Discard the budget-dictated conventions of original Trek.
A lot of Trek's technology and other conventions were dictated by budget constraints. Kirk's crew was limited to landing on Earth-like planets because there wasn't money for anything else. They kept running into Earth-like planets of such-and-such era to save money on costumes. They used the transporter because they didn't have money to show shuttle landings. They rarely used spacesuits and were never seen in null gravity because both were too expensive.

There's no reason for TR Trek to ape the kinds of conventions those constraints imposed. The transporter as we know it can appear in a new form (anything that really involves teleporting disintegrated matter would be most useful as a weapon, for instance). We should be free to re-conceive the phaser, the warp drive (there's now real scientific speculation to model this on), and so on. We should be free to have our crew visit -- and be forced to find ways to adapt to -- a much wider range of environments.

- A new approach to aliens.
Human-looking "aliens" should be some form of engineered human, and such engineered sub-cultures could and should be used regularly in storylines that comment on human society or that present competing states and governments for the Federation. (Thanks to our new timeframe, there has been time for settlers to migrate to other stars and built colonies that could compete with or even eclipse the power of Earth and its allied worlds.)

Anything that did not have its origin here on Earth should be genuinely alien: obviously non-human and preferably non-humanoid, encountered when storylines require the inscrutable, the mysterious, the bizarre, the terrifying, the inexplicably wonderful.

- Try to get the science right.
The storylines don't have to be obsessed with technical details to get the science right. Devices shouldn't be explained on-screen, but should be explicable (with explanations that involve no more than one piece of hand-waving); terms from astronomy should be used consistently and correctly; attention should be paid to where things are happening and how large space is (none of this "our ships travel at the speed of drama" crap, due respect to Joss Whedon); species from different planets for whom it should be scientifically impossible to interbreed should not do so; and so on.

Think of this as public service: in an age where 1 in 4 American adults doesn't know the earth orbits the sun, a little extra effort to ensure scientific accuracy can only be a good thing.

That's all... for now...

 

[Warped9]

When we are talking about the broader audience we are obviously including all those who are not Star Trek fans or at best just casual fans. They might not even distinguiash between the different films and series. To a lot of them Trek is "that fellow with the pointed ears" or perhaps "that bald fellow with the robot guy."

These are the crowd you have to appeal to make a film or television series work in the hopes that you'll convert some of them into fans who'll reccommend the film or show and want to see more.

When TNG came along it was something of a gamble as to whether audiences (fans and non fans alike) would accept the new characters. If it had tanked any future Trek project under consideration would have been loathe to do it with new characters. They'd recast the originals. However, it worked out the new crew was accepted. It certainly helped that although the beginning was rocky there was still just enough in it to hold on to an audience and then grow an audience. It also helped that TNG was syndicated from the get-go as opposed to being set only on a single network. If TNG had aired on only a single regular network it might not have made it past the first season.

But something else was happening in the '90s as we begin to see other sci-fi programs make it to television. Back in the '60s there was really nothing else like TOS to compete with. Yes, there was other sci-fi, but not in the manner TOS was doing. It, too, was growing a following and it exploded when it went into syndication. Note, too, the television landscape was smaller than it would become decades later. But the circumstances allowed TOS to get widely familiar and assimilated into the greater public consciousness. TNG and the subsequent Treks came along in a different set of circumstances. Other shows, also learning from TOS' appeal, began to offer an alternative to watching Star Trek. Not long after TNG ceased production the focus started coming off TNG and the spin-offs. Not with those fans, of course, but with the broader casual audience.

Why wasn't TNG rebooted in 2009? It was much closer to collective memory. There are a lot of TNG fans out there. You would think it would resonate more with younger viewers. But twenty years can be a long time in television history and particularly to an audience that seems to leap from one hottest thing to the next.

Maybe they felt it was too soon? Or maybe they felt TNG didn't have the cache they wanted? Who knows? So they went with TOS. Maybe they also felt it would be easier to play on the accepted cliches of the original? Who knows? Suffice to say, whether you like the films or not, they gambled correctly.

The payoff does tell us three things: TOS still has broad appeal, you can recast the original characters and you can reset in terms of continuity.

Now if I were a producer going forward, hired by suits who generally don't like to take risks, what is more likely? Cast a new and unfamiliar group of characters in a new Trek project or recast a familiar and accepted group of characters in a new Trek project? The film and television landscape today isn't what it was in 1987. There's a lot more competition out there. Which choice do you think would be the gamble with the least risk?

 

[BigJake]

The payoff does tell us three things: TOS still has broad appeal, you can recast the original characters and you can reset in terms of continuity.

That "payoff" has however landed the franchise in an awkward place.

Spoiler: The Awkward Place

The characters have not been just recast, but re-conceived, to the benefit of exploiting both nostalgia -- appealing to popular memory about what the characters were -- and simultaneously playing up their youth. An impressive trick, it has to be admitted, but in terms of straight-ahead storytelling it's happened to the detriment of their believability. That has divided fans, but much more important it makes the characters -- the core vehicles of the franchise -- less compelling in the long run... and a franchise like Trek has to be about the long game just as much as it is about short-term profitability, or it's not worth doing them as Trek movies / shows at all.

Notice that with STID, the narrative of the fans turning against AbramsTrek is largely untrue. The fans have mostly (with the exception of certain of us curmudgeons) striven to embrace NuTrek, to the point where many of them have trouble coping with criticism of it. Nevertheless, had STID been relying upon domestic box office to the extent ST09 did, the simple truth is it would have tanked. If you look at the large number of "most disappointing film" lists STID wound up on, most of them weren't written by hardcore Trekkies. What that hints to me is that it's the general audience, not the Trekkie fanbase, that has already begun to lose interest in this version of these characters... and that in the space of just four years.

STID made up for that with the international audience... this time. But most of that is owed to actually deciding to distribute in China (a market they rather shockingly ignored with ST09), and it's a hell of a gamble whether these versions of the characters will have any more long-term traction internationally than they did domestically. The whole question of another reboot only interests me because in another outing, two at the most, I think we'll see the answer to that. And I don't think it's going to be an affirmation. In point of fact, with these characters having been sold to international markets in a fairly frivolous incarnation, I think that incarnation is likely to stick to them.

EDIT: I didn't quite finish the thought I was developing there, did I? What makes this an awkward place now is that there's a bifurcation between the domestic and international markets. The domestic market is losing interest, the international is trending upward, you can't afford to lose either... what changes do you make? Probably, if you believe it was the cartoonish aspects that sold the international market (as they seem to believe) you try to amp up the cartoonish aspects, because that's easier and it seems anathema to studios to admit even a possibility that audiences could actually want something more intelligent from their movies.

So given that? And given that in this day and age and competitive marketplace you need the international market?

Which choice do you think would be the gamble with the least risk?

I think the choice that leverages the brand while attaching the least baggage to it is the least risk. New characters and a new ship is how you get there.

 

[BigJake]

It is absolutely compatible. When people think of "Star Trek" they think of Kirk and Spock, not Picard and Data.

You keep just asserting this. That's not very convincing.

 

[Hartzilla2007]

It is absolutely compatible. When people think of "Star Trek" they think of Kirk and Spock, not Picard and Data.

You keep just asserting this. That's not very convincing.

And yet growing up in the 1990s it seems every time another TV show did a Star Trek reference the majority of them seemed to be to TOS.

 

[BigJake]

It is absolutely compatible. When people think of "Star Trek" they think of Kirk and Spock, not Picard and Data.

You keep just asserting this. That's not very convincing.

And yet growing up in the 1990s it seems every time another TV show did a Star Trek reference the majority of them seemed to be to TOS.

Until TNG fans got old enough to make TV shows.

 

[Skywalker]

As someone born in '83 I can safely say that Star Trek, to me, is Picard and his Enterprise, not Kirk and his. I think you'd find quite a bit of people born and raised around the same timeframe who would agree with me. Take away the Abrams movies and I think you'd have even more people who saw it that way; but now Kirk and Spock are back in the mainstream, being the most recent faces of Star Trek again, so naturally their popularity has risen. But ST09 wasn't a success just because it had Kirk and Spock in it--sure, that was part of the appeal, but the most important factor was just that it was a damn entertaining movie.

 

[Warped9]

So why didn't they go back to the TNG crew in 2009?