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Star Trek's 50th anniversary is NOW
11 years ago
If you have a fondness for the original Star Trek TV series you may remember 1966 as the year it premiered. Gene Roddenberry showed it at the World Science Fiction Convention shortly before it aired on television. Star Trek's anniversaries have always been marked from that year onward.
But the spring of '64 was fifty years ago, when Roddenberry began pitching his series concept to the networks. Through the summer into early fall, the pilot episode script was developed from outline to teleplay, by which time a cast, crew and shooting sets were being assembled. The pilot episode was shot in two and one-half weeks following Thanksgiving that year, and the special effects models of the Enterprise were built and delivered in December.
The network rejected the pilot but not the series, and a new pilot episode was shot in 1965 starring William Shatner. The rest is history.
In its current state, the "new" Star Trek has told two very adversarial stories - there's a powerful bad guy our heroes have to defeat. I challenge the current franchise to do something truly daring and retell a story like The Cage, if they have it in them.
But the spring of '64 was fifty years ago, when Roddenberry began pitching his series concept to the networks. Through the summer into early fall, the pilot episode script was developed from outline to teleplay, by which time a cast, crew and shooting sets were being assembled. The pilot episode was shot in two and one-half weeks following Thanksgiving that year, and the special effects models of the Enterprise were built and delivered in December.
The network rejected the pilot but not the series, and a new pilot episode was shot in 1965 starring William Shatner. The rest is history.
In its current state, the "new" Star Trek has told two very adversarial stories - there's a powerful bad guy our heroes have to defeat. I challenge the current franchise to do something truly daring and retell a story like The Cage, if they have it in them.
When I encounter ageist attitudes I comment, "This is going to happen to you too unless something kills you first."
And sadly they don't. Hollyyweird will not take risks.
-Have them discover a species more advanced than the Federation and have them being on the other end of the Prime Directive for once. A bit of intrigue as some factions think about taking Federation over for it's own protection. Have some action scenes where assassins try to kill the command staff of the Enterprise as well as a ship with no ID attacking them with no markings and stuff like that.
Or have the Federation find the Doomsday Machine that was somehow enhanced by the change in the timeline (so it can't be destroyed as it had been) and have them work to set the timeline back as it was as (old) Spock knows that they had defeated it in the original timeline. Action? Planets and Ships get blown up by the Doomsday Machine. They need the Guardian of Forever to find out how to fix the timeline. And then do it, some of the crew sacrificing themselves to do it.
End it with showing that they did restore the timeline and a Glimpse of a new ship and crew for the next TV series.
Not going to happen, I know.
Yes, one of the most important stories Star Trek could tell would be one where our characters believe they're doing the right thing, for good reasons, but turn out to be very wrong in the end. (M*A*S*H actually did a show like that once.) Star Trek Enterprise did in fact come close to telling that story. In an era before the Federation and the Prime Directive, a well-meaning crew member tries to interfere with another culture and instead of helping only made matters worse.
Imagine them remaking The City On the Edge of Forever with their current cast and timeline, and sticking closer to Ellison's original, with a villainous drug-dealing crew member to be adversarial with (Gene nixed that, in his Star Trek people like that would never be on board in the first place.) They get to go bang, zap, sock, pow every so often - and throw into the mix the possible opportunity for Kirk and Spock to restore their own history where Nero never destroys the starship Kelvin or the planet Vulcan.
Knowing these guys, though, they'd ruin it by changing things to, "Edith Keeler must live!"
And by the way, I suspect that as soon as the movies don't make enough money anymore? Someone will have the bright idea to repair the timeline anyway.