Travis McClain

I've said it countless times before: what drove the franchise into the ground a decade ago is that they became entirely too focused on telling Star Trek stories. Like all great science-fiction, Trek is at its best when it tells stories about our society, using alien worlds and peoples as allegories. There are probably several great stories to be told using Khan, but I'm afraid the interest is just in telling a Khan story. And that holds absolutely no appeal for me whatsoever.

Sean O'Hara

Khan couldn't even take over the Enterprise, and you think the Klingons are going to roll over for him?

If you want to reuse a classic Trek plot, how about the Doomsday Machine. Don't even change the plot. Just redo the original episode with modern effects. Or maybe throw in the idea used in the Star Trek novels that the DM was a prototype anti-Borg weapon, and have Old Spock come back to tell Starfleet that they might want to capture it for future use.

chuckd21

Exactly. Young minds, fresh ideas. Be tolerant.

Solid Snake

Something new please.

TGM

ugh. no more old Spock.

Travis McClain

Any story ideas involving Spock 1.0 are going to be relegated to fan fiction or non-canonical books and comics because Leonard Nimoy is officially retired from acting.

The original episode was a cautionary tale about nuclear weapons. We're not really afraid on a daily basis of any of the governments that have them; now we're afraid of terrorists answerable to no one getting hold of them. The Doomsday Machine plot device could still work, but you'd have to establish who is responsible for unleashing it to connect with today's anxieties.

That could turn out to be interesting since the original episode never did that, so we could actually learn something new about the fictitious Trek universe in the process, so long as they actually take the time to invent something new and don't force some contrived story about how it was built by the Borg (yawn). But it seems like all the buzz is about basically just re-making things we've already seen before so I have little hope that this next film's story is going to really be something original.

Superman07

They actually started to go down that path - pretty well - on Star Trek Enterprsie for a seson arc, but unfortunately it fell apart. I thought it was Trek doing what Trek does so well - put modern issues in a new context to tease out the issue.

RocShemp

You forget that the Klingon armada took a huge blow from Nero in the last movie. It's the perfect window for Khan and his super men to swoop in and take over.

Travis McClain

We only know that they lost a lot of ships; we don't know how big a chunk that actually represented of the overall fleet. And in any event, "Khan and the Klingons" is the stuff of fan fiction; it falls very short of what I expect from a film.

milo bloom

[nitpick] The novel Vendetta speculated that it was created to *fight* the Borg. And that's really all the info we got on it. I realize we want something new, but the word "Borg" never needs to be mentioned onscreen, just that this device exists, and it exists for one reason only: to kick ass.

I agree that rehashing old stories is not really a good way to keep this reboot going, but then again if you're doing something new I wouldn't mind new takes on ideas only given minimal exposure in the original continuity.

Travis McClain

I actually read that book, but it's been probably 18 years. Anyway, like I said, if they were to re-use it, I think it has to stay as an allegory for nuclear weapons, but contextualized for the threat of terrorism today. The weapon itself isn't the threat; it's the idea that someone else has a weapon of mass destruction and has decided to actually use it that's the hook of the story. I still think the establishment of who is responsible for the machine is key to telling that story; that it exists only to "kick ass" is insufficient.

I agree, for the most part, so long as the story they tell isn't about Star Trek. I know how that sounds, but way too much of Trek storytelling became too concerned with discussing Klingons as though they were real instead of discussing Klingons as the Russians. I enjoy the insights into fictitious culture as much as the next geek, but it seems too often stories rested on name-checking previous Trek stories instead of telling relevant stories about our society.

gmanca

I think Star Trek is multi-faceted and it works in more ways that just being a temporal allegory. But if they must go in that direction, I'd love to see something about Section 31/Shadow government work, perhaps blended with the alien parasite take-over idea that was pretty strong in the TNG episode Conspiracy.

Travis McClain

To be sure, just being allegorical isn't sufficient. That's where Insurrection fell short; it had an interesting premise, but it didn't surround that premise with enough interesting Star Trek elements to justify it being a Star Trek feature. The Abrams re-boot may have been a tad vapid, but when I saw Spock beaming down to Vulcan with his phaser drawn, I knew I was watching Star Trek and not a story that could easily have been told without using that universe. (And that upwards-looking zoom shot of Quinto was great.)

milo bloom

I kinda agree, in fact, that's not the first time I've heard that argument used. It started making the online community rounds during the VOY/ENT years. The basic idea was that for TOS, you had people that had fought in Korea, and were watching the news about Vietnam and other things on the nightly news, and they were taking those stories and putting them into the Trek POV. For the later series (even TNG to a degree), the writers were more concerned with writing "Trek stories" instead of "telling stories using Trek".


That said, and I think we agree on this (esp regarding the Doomsday Machine), if there was something that was touching on an idea in the original timeline, that's both a good Trek story and a good story about "something", they shouldn't refuse to re-use it just because it was already touched upon.

Chew

Aye, and if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a wagon!

Travis McClain

It's a perspective that's been around longer than that, really. I can't point you in the direction of anything offhand, but I remember having those conversations at conventions long before Voyager debuted.

I think the remastered original series episodes are sufficient for getting a more up-to-date look at that era. I've seen the hokey Doomsday Machine, and I've seen the truly menacing Doomsday Machine. If they want to recycle it for a feature film, I'm open to the idea but they better come up with a really solid story to justify showing me something I've already seen. That's my stance on any other element already established in the Trek canon.

And I have absolutely NO interest in seeing any conflation of 24th Century elements with the new 23rd Century characters. It's a big galaxy; there's plenty of opportunity for entirely new stories with new characters. That's the thing I appreciated most about the original series when I rewatched it on DVD a couple of years ago: aside from the Romulans, Klingons and Harry Mudd, there were no repeat visits by species or characters. (Yes, we saw two green skinned chicks, but only one was actually an Orion; the other was a human appearing as an Orion.) Each time out, we saw something new.

By the end of The Next Generation it felt like there was nothing left to explore because we were seeing familiar faces on a semi-regular basis. It worked on Deep Space Nine to have recurring characters because of the nature of the show, and among my long list of complaints about Voyager is that it took them two seasons to traverse Kazon space and then five seasons to get through Borg territory. I realize the Borg had a pretty good grip on things, but the fact that an episode exclusively dealing with them would be followed by an episode dealing with a society that didn't seem to be under any duress living within Borg territory dispelled the whole thing for me. Either they're absolute conquerors or they're not, and Voyager made clear that they aren't.

Anyway, what I'm saying is that repetition of species and characters is something that I think contributed greatly to the decline in fan interest. Maybe it's because we didn't feel like we were seeing anything new, maybe it's because the writers became complacent or lazy or developed tunnel vision for the Star Trek elements and forgot to look outside to the world in which they lived for inspiration. I don't know; I wasn't in the writers's room. I just know that when I contrast the original series with its spin-offs, I see a much clearer sense of exploration--of the fictitious as well as the issues of our world--in the original. If they are serious about reinvigorating the franchise, they have to resurrect that energy, and they can't do it by recycling things we've already seen.