Total Reboot?

[Warped9]

What was that word Kramer used once: hipster doofus?

 

[BigJake]

That's exactly right.

 

[Drone]

Perhaps those on high also have a perception that the sci-fi audience is overly finicky, prone to intensely picking show elements apart more than other genre viewers, and conflating trivial questions into major concerns far out of proportion to their true significance?

Since the sci-fi audience pretty reliably turns out no matter how much it picks things apart -- except if no marketing effort has happened or if the product is sh*t, and sometimes even then -- I can't see why that would matter in the slightest. It's the kind of complaint self-conscious fans make about other fans, like hipsters bitching about the pretentiousness of "the hipster".

Falling Skies? Or did that merit option #2 in your estimation?

 

[BigJake]

I've never (yet) watched Falling Skies; had the impression it was doing just fine in the ratings, though.

 

[Drone]

Just shows my focus (actually lack thereof) when multitasking. I meant to say Dark Skies!!!

 

[BigJake]

Ah, got you.

Given that I never heard of it and it doesn't seem to have gone down well with those who did see it... probably a bit of column A, a bit of column B?

 

[Drone]

It only lasted one season (NBC), although it seems that there was a good bit of clamor over time for a DVD release that didn't actually happen until 2011, nearly 15 years post-production. This was Jeri Ryan's television experience prior to Voyager, by the way.

 

[BigJake]

Wow, I really never heard of it! My first search sent me to an obscure 2013 movie.

About the TV series: pity, it looks like they had a good concept at the very least. I'll have to see if I can track down a few episodes sometime and check them out.

 

[Warped9]

One thing I'd love to see come back in a series: real music. I mean good recognizable music and not that soulless audio wallpaper that has been everywhere for decades now.

 

[Herkimer Jitty]

Just get Bear McCreary. Problem solved. Let's go get lunch.

 

[BigJake]

Adrian Younge and Venice Dawn doing adapted covers of the music of the Sun Ra Arkestra.

BOOM.

* drops mic and walks away *

 

[Drone]

One thing I'd love to see come back in a series: real music. I mean good recognizable music and not that soulless audio wallpaper that has been everywhere for decades now.

Is this a movement that strictly has had to do with cost savings for producers? With what little television I have watched, it seems that even if something interesting is offered, it has the length of a smidget of a cue and is not allowed to decently flow.

I don't know, maybe the simple answer is shorter title sequence, more commercial revenue available.

 

[Hober Mallow]

One thing I'd love to see come back in a series: real music. I mean good recognizable music and not that soulless audio wallpaper that has been everywhere for decades now.

I'd like more percussion and singers. It worked great for Alien Nation: The Series.

 

[BigJake]

Hm, I'd definitely like more of something...

... can't quite put my finger on it...

Ah. There it is.

Spoiler: Eureka!

 

[ngc7293]

If something were to happen, I would want single nacelles to work just fine. There would be none of this stuff about needing two nacelles to balance out the warp field.

 

[Warped9]

This is interesting. It's some guys thoughts on rebooting TOS. A lot of what he says rings true.

http://www.howardandrewjones.com/star-trek/trek-week-part-3

http://www.howardandrewjones.com/star-trek/trek-week-part-4

http://www.howardandrewjones.com/star-trek/trek-week-part-5



Here's another very interesting write-up about original Star Trek: http://www.theviewscreen.com/season-1-wrap-up/

I find this part particularly poignant:

As I mentioned in my introduction, this is more accurately a first watch for me, and I didn’t really know what to expect from the series. When Eugene invited me to play along, I was skeptical. I’m a Next Gen girl—I like diplomacy, struggles with identity, political unrest, social commentary. What has the original series got to offer me? Isn’t classic Trek cheesy and silly? Isn’t it a machismo adventure story with our sly hero constantly bedding women and killing aliens? Isn’t it, well, stupid?

Having seen the first season now, I feel cheated by its reputation.

What most surprised me is how fundamentally grown-up the show is. I find that most entertainment today fits into two categories: the juvenile or the gritty. A striking proportion of movies and television now are populated almost exclusively by twenty-somethings, trapped within puerile plot set-ups and driven by entirely superficial concerns and rivalries. Even when they star adults, the character’s struggles are ordinary; the choices are, in the great scheme of things, meaningless. All the SF franchises have gone this direction: young Superman. Young John Connor. Young, dare I say it, Kirk and Spock. The flip side of the coin is something like Battlestar Galactica or 24, where we throw idealism and optimism under the bus of “hyperrealism.” There’s no hope, because men and women are weak and vindictive and self-interested. Either there’s no goodness left in people, or life keeps grinding men and women down to their basest and most primitive natures. It’s bleak and it’s difficult and hope is something elusive, rare, and dangerous. Hope can get you killed.

But Star Trek was about grown-ups with adult struggles and challenges who believed passionately and without reserve in an idealistic future. Their concerns weren’t trivial: they don’t fear a break-up, or an awkward date, or fitting in with the right crowd to get that promotion; they fear powerlessness, fascism, authoritarianism. In “The City on the Edge of Forever” Kirk gives up his only chance at love and happiness to prevent a pessimistic future from coming to pass. They fear losing their individuality (especially to technology, like the robot clones in “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” or the “reformation” machine in “Dagger of the Mind”), or letting down a group that needs help (like the Organians in “Errand of Mercy”). They fear letting themselves down. They do what they can to protect each other, and sometimes that means eliminating a threat that more closely resembles a victim, like the salt vampire in “The Man Trap,” or Charlie Evans, or Kirk’s friend in “Where No Man Has Gone Before.” Star Trek isn’t afraid to wrestle with conflicting values like that. The stakes are serious and real, and rarely are the ideas in play frivolous or treated superficially. Most shows today are too quick to let their heroes trade their values for security or self-preservation. But even in the most dire of circumstances—even when it seems Kirk is about to be destroyed by the Gorn, or they’re going to share the fate of the children on Miri’s planet—they never lose hope, and they never falter in their ideals.

It was an engaged show. But more than that it was an optimistic one. The characters had the courage to believe in the goodness of themselves and others, and to believe that with just a little ingenuity, they could overcome anything. There is so much passion in Trek, but it’s a bridled and mature passion. Kirk nearly bursts with the earnestness of his convictions, but his sincerity isn’t foolish or idle and his compassion doesn’t make him weak. They’re his strengths, and they make him a great leader (“The Enemy Within”). Why do we scorn these things today? We associate idealism, optimism, and sincerity with immaturity and youth, as if we must lose these things as adults—as if they’re no longer important or relevant. “Great” leaders have to shed their “naive” ideals to be respected as strong and worthy of command—it’s machismo all over again. So many shows scoff at those values as if people don’t continue to grow and learn past their adolescence.

Today, we think of shows like Star Trek as cheesy. They’re corny. Sincerity is a joke, relegated to fools and sidekicks and teenagers who don’t know what the world “is really like” yet. Can you imagine a show today that featured a mature adult so heart-breakingly earnest in his or her desire for goodwill as Kirk? I can’t. It’d be laughed off-screen. Audiences (or producers) aren’t interested in that kind of idealism anymore.

Space, the frontier, whatever you want to call it—Star Trek is about the belief that knowledge, exploration, and learning to bond with people who may not share your values (or your biology!), are the only ways to ensure a future for the human race. It argued that we cannot persist in this universe thinking only of ourselves, scorning alliances and perpetuating petty conflicts. It argued that men with strikingly divergent pasts or cultures could overcome their own barbaric histories, their trivial concerns, their fears and their worries, and together create a common future. It believed that men were more than their lowest common denominator, and that we should trust our ideals to create something positive even in the face of a difficult and sometimes terrifying world.

I don’t know that we’ll ever see another show like it.

 

[DFScott]

I'd like to go back to Bry Sinclair's original question: If the order on the table is, "Reboot TOS," how would I prefer it be done?

I can tell you what I had hoped for (as opposed to "expected") before the 2009 movie was released. The preview posters, with the blue and gold shirts and the A-Star fabric badges, led me to hope that we would be seeing the familiar characters who are at the core of the Star Trek story. At its roots, Trek is not about the Federation or Starfleet or the neutral zone or beaming up and down. It is about Kirk, Spock, McCoy, the people who work with them, and the other central character called the U.S.S. Enterprise.

There are elements of the backstory which were originally designed with the key purpose of making these central characters more interesting. Only in later offshoots of Trek did writers create backstories that were histories unto themselves, for which the central characters would serve primarily as narrators. In the original TOS, the Romulans were created to twist the character of Spock so that we see how he untwists himself; the Klingons as power-mad bureaucrats to counterpoint Kirk's position as a seemingly power-mad, but actually higher-minded and ethical individual who's resourceful and self-sacrificing. And when the writers got around to it, they devised backstory elements to focus our attention on McCoy and Scotty.

Those particular backstory elements created during the 1960s are essential to the characters, and thus essential to the real story we call "Star Trek." Spock's bipartite soul leaves him with a handicap that he hides, not always successfully. It can make him a better man but it can leave him wounded when he wants to love someone but can't. Kirk's devotion to his ship as a soul unto itself, and his crew as the heart of his ship, comes from an innate understanding of family and duty, and the original stories underscored that fact.

If you take these particular backstory elements away, you are left with completely different people -- actors wearing similar looking costumes, but not really playing the same roles. And that's the opposite of what I would want from a "reboot" in that sense. The critical story components about the history of the ship, the universe, the Federation, that were created to define these people, must remain essentially intact.

That said, every other element of the backstory (such as how hangar bay doors that shape can possibly open or close) can change with my permission. The ship should be instantly identifiable by a five-year-old as the Enterprise, but it can be different on the inside, perhaps a bit on the outside. It should be only as different from the 1960s rendition of the ship as Zachary Quinto is from looking like the Spock we remember. Sure, he's different, but there's a margin within which we can accept the differences and move on.

What I hoped for from the 2009 movie was a setup where the principal backstory elements relevant to the characters remained intact, and then the writers could go to town with the rest of it. Knowing Leonard Nimoy was part of the cast, I imagined a sequence where a very old Spock was attempting to remember parts of his history, and was picturing the ship and crew from a hundred years in his past, but felt his memory contradicted the truth somehow. Then as we saw the differences in the new cast and new ship, and compared them in our minds to what we know, we could build a mystery around them -- perhaps the timeline has changed, but why, and why does Old Spock know this?

What we got instead was an alteration of the things that define our central characters. Kirk's lousy family upbringing in the wake of his father's death; Spock's unexplained lack of an emotional handicap other than a personal choice to be more stoic than most; Spock's substitution of the logic of using a time machine to correct the destruction of his home planet with a primitive desire to blow up his nemesis; and McCoy's having been de-aged to the same general Academy grade as both Kirk and Chekov, leave these people drastically different than the ones we remember. And these facts are flung in our faces every time New Kirk acts like an a-hole in front of ladies, or Spock smooches Uhura in an elevator.

It's people in Star Trek uniforms, as opposed to Star Trek. What I would want from a real reboot is a repositioning of the characters we remember with the essentially defining elements of those characters intact, in a setting that resembles having been created in the 21st century rather than the mid-20th.

I don't think television or the cinema is capable of providing this any more, but perhaps something else is.

DF "The Following Program is Brought to You in Living Color, Just Not on NBC" Scott

 

[BigJake]

If something were to happen, I would want single nacelles to work just fine.

Never got the single-nacelle or odd-number-of-nacelles thing. The dual nacelles provide a visual illustration of the matter-antimatter power that's supposed to be driving the ships; why mess with it?

This is interesting. It's some guys thoughts on rebooting TOS. A lot of what he says rings true.

A lot, but not all. He talks about how you can't change the gender of one of the characters like BSG did with Starbuck, but then about how you should add a female "security chief" of specific ethnicity; frankly I think gender-flipping Starbuck was one of the very best things BSG did, and far preferable to trying to add another character to a cast which if anything could use trimming.

Here's another very interesting write-up about original Star Trek: http://www.theviewscreen.com/season-1-wrap-up/

I find this part particularly poignant: [snip]

What he says about the puerility of co-ed soaps masquerading as genuine drama is spot-on, and he's right about the relative (and now largely-forgotten) maturity of TOS. But he's doing BSG a huge injustice: most of BSG's plots were precisely about the triumph of idealism and hope in the most adverse possible circumstances.

The way you sell idealism in our day and age is by pitting it against a pyschologically real backdrop, the dark places of the soul where Sixties television was often nervous about going. BSG's choices to portray dysfunction were, in the wake of a mass genocide and flight from destruction, the authentic choices for its setting and story. Anyone who can see TOS' maturity and the integrity at its core should also be able to see that portraying actual human dysfunction and showing people fight to rise above it is not the same thing as having "no hope."

 

[Warped9]

Writers in the '60s wanted to talk about deep issues and ideas, but the networks and advertisers (who wrote the cheques) were very hesitant about getting too controversial on television, or at least how they perceived such. They were terrified of alienating viewers. If anyone had a low opinion regarding the television audience I suspect it was more the advertising sponsors and the network suits than those who actually made the shows.

I remember the discussions when All In The Family came out. It might seem tame now, but many people were shocked over the subjects they dared to discuss on the show. I think part of the secret of doing it was the inclusion of humour. M*A*S*H was similar. They used the framework of a sitcom to make their points while some years earlier The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits and Star Trek used science fiction.

 

[Warped9]

On another forum some discussions have been going on about how TOS could be rebooted for television. And, no, it's not about perpetuating the Abramsverse.

The idea is to cut the umbilical cord in terms of continuity from any previous one. My idea would be to have many familiar things in place, but thoroughly updated for today. That means trying to recapture an element that TOS exuded: take some familiar ideas as well as speculative ones outside of science fiction and repackage them in a new way that seems unlike anything so before.

There would still be an Enterprise, a 5-year mission significantly involving deepspace exploration, a Starfleet and Federation, some familiar aliens and perhaps a few other things, but it would all be updated and some shifted around a bit.

To that end I've dug up a concept I had many years ago for a futuristic version of an Enterprise and decided to model it as the Enterprise NCC-1701 as if we were starting from scratch. Even then I wanted to evoke the original Matt Jefferies' design even as I pushed it forward to a 26th or 29th century setting. Suffice to say much of the prehistory could be familiar even as it's fleshed out or shifted.

A reboot can take two basic approaches.

When TNG premiered we had something of an arms length reboot, at least in the beginning. Essentially the idea was to supposedly be set within the same continuity as what came before, but avoiding a lot of overt references to what came before. Any references to the past were usually tangental and vague. Note in TNG's "The Naked Now" the crew of the E-D discover that the TOS Enterprise crew dealt with a similar situation. But they refer to the previous event and who is associated with it as if it could have been just anybody. There's no, "OMG, the great Kirk dealt with this, too?" kind of thing. It was just another ship in another time. Of course, this would change as the series progressed (in fits-and-starts) and throughout the other spin-off series. It happens again in DS9 during their first Mirror Universe encounter where Bashir has heard of Kirk but Kira hasn't.

This actually would be one way to approach a future series reboot set in a post TNG period or even one concurrent with TOS, TMP or TNG (and DS9 and VOY are essentially TNG era). If you're not doing the familiar characters then set your stories off somewhere else and keep the references few and vague.

The other option is to cut the umbilical cord. Keep some core familiar elements and fashion everything else from a clean sheet. This would work whether you want to reboot the original characters and setting or if you want to do something completely unrelated. From this point one could have the Enterprise, Kirk and company, and everything else could be completely different and the period set in the 23rd, 26th or 30th century. You could do it as if you were building Star Trek from scratch. And you wouldn't be burdened by anachronisms of the past.

I love TOS and the current Star Trek Continues project, but even in enjoying those you have to shrug off some things that you simply wouldn't do today. This is one area where JJ missed the an opportunity because he wanted to keep a lot that was familiar and just move it around a bit.

I can easily envision rebooting TOS where you could recognize familiar elemnts and yet so much else would be different. The Enterprise could still be essentially a saucer with a support hull and nacelles, but the tech and hardware would be far in advance of anything seen in any Trek series or film or most anything else in SF in the visual medium. Communicators wouldn't be handheld or badges, but implants. Datapads would be even more multipupose than what current smartphones and tablets can do. A datapad could actually be merged with the tricorder. While I wouldn't copy the TMP uniforms to me they do indicate a general idea of looking more futuristic.

There are nuggets of ideas within all of Trek that were never really explored properly. Of course, there's also a lot outside of Trek that could be mined and adapted into a new Trek. TOS took a lot of already existing ideas and repackaged them into a new form that was daring and exciting for its time. Since TOS it has largely been mildly redressing those ideas. A new Star Trek could really push it forward. Depending how it's done I could see myself having my original Star Trek to cherish while still interested and excited about a new take on it. The beauty of this is it could draw existing fans as well as new ones and all the while not seem threatening to existing fans.

This is actually part of the issue some fans have with the current reboot. Instead of doing a complete clean restart they sought to tie it to what came before. Some fans are okay with that while others can feel it's disrespectful to the original materiel. In Abrams' version the original continuity has been wiped away and its not hard to see how that could piss off some people. But with a completely new restart that doesn't happen. It's like doing Star Trek set in a parallel universe not at all connected to the original even though some of it is familiar.

Think about this if you're willing to really let your imagination wander. Imagine, for a moment, what could have been done with ENT if it had been a complete reboot. You have a Kirk and Spock (and the rest) instead of Archer and T'Pol (and the rest) and the Enterprise (looking somewhat more advanced than what we can do today) being one of the very first to really head out there. It's the mid 22nd century and other than Vulcans no one familar at all has been encountered yet. You can completely rewrite everything. Or maybe the Enterprise is a fast reletavistic ship with a voyage that will last hundreds of years even as it will only be a few years to the crew (and the human lifespan can be 150 years). And again you can completely rewrite everything going forward. There really are a lot of possibilities.

A lot of fans can yearn for part of what came before to be revived, but in all honesty I don't think you can really do that anymore, at least not for anything beyond a web based fan production. If you want this to work for a primetime audience you have to push it forward. If you don't then you risk a lot of potential viewers possibly shrugging it off as same-old-same-old...again.


The setting is the 26th century. The Federation is recovering from a protracted war with the Romulan Empire ending forty years ago, a war that dragged for twenty-five years. The Federation had been a burgeoning alliance prior to the conflict encompassing many worlds and are now seeking to regroup its alliance. The war ended in a draw and both sides are intent on solidifying their status with current, former and new allies.

The Klingons - once leaders of a great empire who are rumoured to reside somewhere in the Sagittarius Arm.
The Andorians - allies of the Federation
The Gorn - allies of the Romulans


If I were tasked with rebooting Star Trek I think I'd play with the characters a bit.

Captain James Kirk - transferring from command of a smaller and more combat oriented vessel. He's replacing former ship's Captain, Christopher Pike, who commanded the Enterprise for its first six years.
Commander Nyota Uhura - she is the ship's Executive Officer and dubious of Pike's replacement. She is an experienced Contact Officer in dealing with alien races.
Lieutenant ILyik Spock - a young Vulcan/Romulan hybrid and ship's Science Officer.
Lieutenant Commander Lenora McCoy - recently assigned as ship's Chief Medical Officer.
Lieutenant Commander Montgomery Scott - a veteran spacer of many years and deeply involved in designing and building the Enterprise. He has been ship's Chief Engineer since launch and worked closely with Commodore Robert April who directed the new starship program.
Lieutenant S'ulu - a Medusan who must always wear a contact suit. He is the ship's exceptional HelmNav.
Lieutenant Olesya Chekov - ship's Chief of Security.

The Enterprise is among the vanguards, dispatched into the Sagittarius Arm to re-establish contact with former allies and resume exploration of unknown regions.

You know this past week I've been reading a blog of a couple of souls who re watched TOS, TAS, the films and TNG. All this while I'm waiting for my copy of Volume 2 of These Are The Voyages to arrive. Anyway as I've started to read rewatch reviews of TNG I started thinking about possible implications for this Star Trek reboot idea.

Consider if this idea did sell as a series. Imagine a 13 episode season wherein each season as one year of the 5-year mission and the thirteen episodes are high points of that year. That's equivalent to a major event happening about every four weeks on average. This alone gives things a bit more sense of realism rather than accepting something exciting happening about every two weeks. Now you can only hope and work hard to make your show last at least five years.

Another thought could be to plan your 5-year mission to play out over three seasons, which makes things seem even more realistic and allows even more time for these pesky mundane routines between high points to deal with not-so-interesting operations. Anyway, assuming you get renewed to can plot another 5-year mission to run over the next two or three seasons.

Now, let's assume we've managed to keep things going for 5-6 years. Consider if we tweak the show particularly character wise. You promote and/or reassign characters and bring in a new crew for a third 5-year mission. Enter Picard and company, also slightly reinterpreted as was done with the TOS characters. You're able to segue seamlessly into your "next generation" without losing the general feel of your show, and you're saving money by bringing in a new cast rather than having to pay more for the original. You give the show a creative boost as well as establish new and different character dynamics. You're also saving money because you already have standing sets and such which you might only tweak a bit. Another consideration could be to update the writing staff to help evolve the show.

Having Picard commanding this Enterprise after Kirk could be more like Picard commanding the Stargazer rather than the E-D because there would be no families aboard. Another option would be for Uhura (as First Officer) promoted to Captain after Kirk leaves and Picard comes in as the new First Officer along with some other new crew changes. In this new scenario some of TNG characters mightn't make the transition. Unless the Klingons have been at least allied with the a Federation then you couldn't really reintroduce Work as part of the a Enterprise crew. You could have Worf as someone they encounter. Riker, Laforge, Crusher and Yar could be reintroduced as new crew. Wesley and Troi are two characters I would never care to see again.

So the ship's command history over the course of the series (assuming you could keep it running long enough) would be: Pike, Kirk, Uhura, Picard.


Well, it's just a thought. We are allowed to daydream.