A Brief Guide to Star Trek (40 page)

Straczynski and Zabel firmly believed that audiences would be happy to accept new actors playing the much-loved classic characters of Kirk, Spock and McCoy in new television adventures, characterising the trio as ‘the warrior, the priest, the doctor’. The plan was also to reinvent the second-tier characters from
The Original Series
, with new takes on Scotty, Sulu, Uhura and Chekov.

The ‘creative plan’ for the series proposed an opening two-hour pilot TV movie depicting the meeting of the central trio (no strip clubs here), their discovery of a lost city on an uncharted world and their encounter with the ancient advanced race who had built it (shades of Philip Kaufman’s
Planet of the Titans
movie project). The pilot would end with Kirk (the youngest starship captain in the Federation), Spock and McCoy aboard the
Enterprise
, poised at the edge of known space and ready for exploration.

A revamp of
Star Trek
’s technology, such as the communicators and tricorders, was proposed, although the classic silhouette of the
Enterprise
would be retained. More complex and adult relationships would drive the drama on a more human level, while action-oriented plots would form the core of the series.

Straczynski and Zabel’s proposed series would have an on -going narrative arc at its core: throughout the series, Kirk and crew would be seeking the ancient race encountered in the pilot. They would not be the only ones searching for the aliens’ ancient knowledge, though, with ‘forces of darkness’ also on the hunt. Buried deep within the DNA of all species is a mathematical
code, an ‘artist’s signature’ that could not have occurred by chance. The series’ new Prime Directive would be ‘to do whatever is necessary to find this long-lost race and discover the truth about the common origin of life’. These – and other mysteries – would be woven into the story of the week episodes of the proposed series. Although individual episodes of the proposed show would stand alone, ‘these explorations do not exist in a vacuum, there’s a reason and a mystery behind it all’.

The document criticised the existence of the holodeck in modern
Star Trek
, stating that
The Original Series
’ characters had no need of such artificial distractions as there were more than enough adventures and more than enough excitement in their real world. The series was planned to run for exactly five seasons, with the overall story having a beginning, a middle and an end (just like Straczynski’s
Babylon 5
). At the end of the five-year story arc, the
Enterprise
and her remaining crew would return to Earth, allowing any follow-up series to ‘move the franchise into new territory’. The writers proposed returning to one of
Star Trek
’s earliest habits – buying in short stories from top science fiction authors to adapt to the
Star Trek
format. The modern equivalents to Richard Matheson, Robert Bloch and Norman Spinrad were (according to Straczynski and Zabel), Neil Gaiman, Dean Koontz and Stephen King.

Straczynski and Zabel’s document proposed that all preexisting
Star Trek
material should be relegated to ‘Universe A’, permitting their rebooted
Star Trek
to be free of previous con -tinuity ties and dubbed ‘Universe B’. This would allow for ‘the unshackling of all the pent-up talent and ideas that are precluded from expression by virtue of what has gone on before’.

The series would simply be called
Star Trek
and would be a ‘bold new interpretation . . . a fresh start’. Symptomatic of this fresh start was the suggestion that in this version, Scotty should be a woman (a similar tactic had been used by Ron Moore in 2003’s
Battlestar Galactica
, recasting the role of Starbuck as female).

The document included a sparse breakdown of a proposed
first season, mainly a structure with rough story points promising a mix of stories adapted from
The Original Series
, tales from well-known writers and stand-alone original stories, all serving the larger mystery arc of the long-lost ancient race. The writers promised this series would spark an all-new wave of
Star Trek
excitement, something they dubbed ‘the coming buzz’. The search for actors to fill the iconic roles of Kirk, Spock and McCoy would be a major showbusiness story in itself, while the prospect of an all-new five-year mission for those classic characters would generate broad audience re-engagement with the legend of
Star Trek
.

‘No one can ever compete with Gene Roddenberry’s original series’, the writers concluded. ‘We can, however, stand on his shoulders and see things from a different perspective.’

While developed with good creative intentions, the
Star Trek
reboot proposed by J. Michael Straczynski and Bryce Zabel went nowhere. ‘We held back from putting everything we were thinking into [the document] because, if we did, what would be the point of hiring us? So we suggested and prodded and explained and held some of the point-by-point work back for a meeting or an opportunity that never came’, Zabel wrote.

When the team of writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman and director J. J. Abrams were faced with the same challenge of reinventing
Star Trek
in 2007, their lengthy considerations led them to very similar story solutions to those proposed by Straczynski and Zabel almost three years earlier.

The challenge after
Enterprise
was how to return
Star Trek
to big screen popularity without either the cast of
The Original Series
or that of
The Next Generation
. There was no appetite (even among fans) for
Deep Space Nine
,
Voyager
or
Enterprise
to become movies, but studio executives at CBS Paramount believed there was still life in
Star Trek
, despite the relative failures of
Voyager
and
Enterprise
on television. Indeed, there was still much fondness among the wider general cinema-going public for
Star Trek
, especially the simpler, less complicated
days of Kirk, Spock and McCoy. It was also true that those original
Star Trek
characters continued to be the most impactful, with the widest recognition factor globally, even after the success of
The Next Generation
.

The
Star Trek
movie franchise appeared to have died with the amazingly poor box office performance of
Nemesis
, while on television the franchise had also ground to an ignominious halt. Was
Star Trek
over by 2005? Rick Berman didn’t believe so, and in the wake of the failure of
Enterprise
he began exploring new possibilities for a
Star Trek
movie unconnected to either
The Original Series
or
The Next Generation
.

With the support of CBS Paramount’s new studio executives, Berman developed a movie to take place in the one unexplored area of the
Star Trek
timeline, between the end of
Enterprise
and the period of
The Original Series
. He saw the film as both a sequel to the most recent TV series and a prequel to everything else that would come after.

Writer Erik Jendresen, riding high on the success of the Steven Spielberg-produced
Band of Brothers
TV mini-series, was brought in to write the new
Star Trek
screenplay. The result was a 121-page script delivered with the working title
Star Trek: The Beginning
, echoing the successful 2005 Christopher Nolan-directed blockbuster reboot
Batman Begins
.

Jendresen set his story in 2159, chronicling the origins of Starfleet and the launching of the first warp-eight-capable star-ship, the
NX-Omega
(the previous
Enterprise
managed just warp five). Essentially a space war movie, the story sees an antagonistic Romulan fleet heading for Earth with only rookie pilot Tiberius Chase and his untested crew standing in their way. An added twist sees Chase come from a long-standing Earth isolationist family, fearful of alien contamination. Extending this theme, the Romulans are demanding that the Earth give up its population of Vulcans, who they regard as an illegitimate offshoot of the Romulan race. Chase steals a ship – the USS
Spartan
– and he and his space cadet friends confront the approaching threat.

‘The notion was to do a prequel to
The Original Series
’, explained Jendresen. ‘[We would] fill that void with a trilogy which would all deal with Kirk’s progenitor. We wanted to reveal the actual cause of the [Earth–Romulan war], which was sur -prising to all involved at the time. We simply wanted to reveal the truth behind that startling incident.’

The inspiration for the tone and approach of this new
Star Trek
were the movies
Top Gun
and
Starship Troopers
, making it more of a military adventure in space than ever before, something Gene Roddenberry had never been keen on. While the screenplay hit many of the
Star Trek
touchstones (the name Tiberius, the Romulans, Vulcans, Andorian Commander Shran from
Enterprise
and so on), it told the story in a very free-flowing and decidedly un-
Star Trek
-like way. This was exactly what Berman was looking for: a fresh take on the core
Star Trek
ideas, in the hope of attracting a new audience to the long-running franchise.

Jendresen’s script had strong support from CBS Paramount studio president Donald DeLine, but fell out of favour with the studio brass when he exited the project to be replaced by Gail Berman (no relation to Rick). Jendresen blamed a ‘classic case of Hollywood regime change’ for the death of his ‘big and epic’
Star Trek
movie: ‘A project is greenlighted [sic] by one regime, and by the time it is delivered there’s a coup d’etat.’ Even before the screenplay was dropped, Rick Berman had confirmed studio reservations that the new
Star Trek
outing featured no established
Star Trek
characters.

Even though
Star Trek: The Beginning
proved to be a false start, the name of Chase recurred as the lead character in another unseen
Star Trek
project. Believing that the cost of any new live-action TV series or movie was holding back the development of a new
Star Trek
outing, a trio of professional fans, David Rossi, Doug Mirabello and comic book artist José Muñoz, proposed a new animated
Star Trek
series. CBS Paramount declared some interest in the project and allowed the trio to develop concept artwork and write scripts for five ‘mini-episodes’. The idea, under the title
Star Trek: Final Frontier
,
pushed the
Star Trek
timeline further forward into the future, post-
Star Trek Nemesis
. A new
Enterprise
was to be captained by Alexander Chase, embarking on a new mission to ‘seek out new life and new civilisations’ in an unknown region of space. An entire crew complement, complete with artwork representations, was developed for the proposed series. The idea was shelved, however, when studio head Gail Berman declared her preference for a radical new
Star Trek
movie – and this one would genuinely go back to the beginning . . .

‘
Gene [Roddenberry was] asked, “What’s going to become of
Star Trek
in the future?” He said that he hoped that some day some bright young thing would come along and do it again, bigger and better than he had ever done it. And he wished them well
.’ Richard Arnold, Gene Roddenberry’s assistant

Among the three biggest science fiction entertainment franchises of the twentieth century,
Star Trek
had the shortest time out of production, cumulatively. The four-year wait between the end of
Enterprise
and the arrival of J. J. Abrams’ 2009 movie was surprisingly short compared to those endured by fans of
Doctor Who
and
Star Wars
.

The earliest,
Doctor Who
, began in 1963 in the UK and ran uninterrupted until 1989. A one-off TV movie followed in 1996 before a full ongoing TV series started in 2005. The gap between the original series and its continuation was sixteen years.

Star Wars
began with a trilogy of movies between 1977 and 1983. A series of bestselling novels by Timothy Zahn in the early 1990s relaunched then-dormant
Star Wars
fandom and led to the release of CGI-upgraded special editions of the original trilogy in 1997, with a brand new prequel trilogy of movies released between 1999 and 2005. Those were followed in 2008 by a hugely successful weekly CGI-animated TV series,
The Clone Wars
.

Star Trek
had a mere ten-year break (with the exception of
the short-lived
The Animated Series
) between the last episode of
The Original Series
and the arrival of
The Motion Picture
in 1979. From then until 2005
Star Trek
was in continuous production, either as movies or TV series.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, prequels to existing film and television entertainment properties were in vogue, especially in the worlds of science fiction and fantasy. The first use of the term ‘prequel’ in movies is connected to the sections of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 film
The Godfather Part II
, which were set before the events of the previous film. The 1979 movie
Butch and Sundance: The Early Days
was a prequel, but it was the work of filmmakers George Lucas and Steven Spielberg that was to popularise the concept and cause Hollywood to indulge wholesale in the prequel process.