Josh-da-man

has been posted online at Bryce Zabel's website.

Kind of surprised that's a complete re-imagining of the original series much like the new Battlestar Galactica and Marvel's "Ultimate" line (which is name-checked in the pitch.)

And -- probably unsurprisingly -- it sounds a lot like Babylon 5. Kirk and Spock chasing Vorlons.

I'm somewhat ambivalent toward the concept:

One one hand, I think that the Star Trek mythos is already so established (with ten films, and 28 seasons of television programs) that tossing it all out and restarting from scratch seems like a waste. Star Trek is fairly unique in the world of film and television in that it all takes place within its own universe, and to go back and recast and reimagine the concept cheapens it to the level of something like The Dukes of Hazzard or The Mod Squad.

On the other hand, most of the recent Trek material has been abysmal (Voyager, Enterprise, Insurrection, and Nemesis: I'm looking at you!). So I'm kind of thinking that maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea to free the series up from its established continuity.

(Or we could just compromise, and pretend that DS9 was the last series, and "First Contact" was the last movie.)

das Monkey

When I saw your thread, I thought I was in a time machine, since JMS talked about this a lot back in '04. Now that I see they're just releasing the proposal, that's pretty cool. I'm glad it failed, though. When I first heard of the "re-boot" concept, my initial reaction was "fuck that." I feel about the same today. Fuck that. If you want to make a great new show, do it. Stop trying to shoehorn everything into the Star Trek name. Paramount killed it, dug up the corpse, defiled it, and discarded the remains in a dumpster. Just let it rest in peace for once.

Recasting Kirk, Spock, and McCoy? Fuck that. I wonder what Joe would think about recasting Londo and G'Kar. I hear Ashton Kutcher and Sean William Scott are available.

das

JasonF

I hear so many wonderful things about Babylon 5 (which I've never seen), but I have to tell you -- having seen Jeremiah and read some of JMS's comic books (chiefly Supreme Power, but also some of his Spider-Man stuff), I have to say that the man just does not impress me.

Oh well. One of these days I'll get around to B5. Meanwhile, I'm glad they didn't let JMS reboot Star Trek. On the other hand, they may be letting J.J. Abrams do that, so who knows.

Josh-da-man

JMS has said that G'Kar died when Andreas passed away, and that nobody would ever play the character again.

I also seem to recall that there was quite a controversy about recasting for the aborted The Memory of Shadows theatrical movie, but it was never, to my knowledge, outright confirmed by anyone in the know.

I wouldn't object to recasting old crew if it was something like "The Academy Years." (I actually quite liked the description of what was posted, and with a few tweaks, it could probably be a decent entry in the Star Trek film canon. It seemed to capture the "feel" of the original series in a way that Enterprise mostly failed to do.

cornflakeguy

I'm glad this didn't take off, either. While I love the Battlestar Galactica re-do, Star Trek just had canon written a few years ago, versus BG which had been over 25 years.

Don't let this or anything else JMS has done keep you from checking out Babylon 5. If you want to have a good time, put all five seasons of Babylon 5 in your Netflix queue and let the greatness wash over you in either 1 month or 12 months, go at your own pace.

I echo something that Das said a year back or so, when a member of DVD Talk was starting B5, when Das said, "I envy the fact that you are embarking on watching this for the first time." Paraphrasing, of course, but you can only watch it the first time once, and I wish I could get that feeling back again. Perhaps in a few more years of Lost and 24 I'll whip out my B5 sets and let it wash over me again.

I think it's worth noting that while we are dubious of the JMS reimagining of Star Trek, isn't that the same bull that JJ is pulling with his Star Trek announcment?

Tracer Bullet

Eh.

Sounds like it could be a good show. So why not make it without Star Trek?

Money.

Oh well.

Kirk, Spock, et. al. will be recast one day. Might as well be by someone with some talent.

I have to say, though... all the fondness for the original series' characters seems misplaced. I've never seen much in the original series to be so insanely protective of. If anything, I think the expansion of their personalities in the movies has done more to create this mythos than anything else. It's certainly not there in the 1966-69 program.

Patman

BTW, I'll be at Heroes Con (about 11 days away), and JMS will be in attendance as a guest there. Anything y'all want me to ask him while I'm there?

das Monkey

Ask him to come to Dragon*Con already.

das

Michael Corvin

Who? Who? and Who?

superdeluxe

agreed. Make it a show without star trek.

Fielding Mellish

Thank God this never came to pass.

JMS has already completely defiled the character of Spider-Man. I'd hate to imagine what he'd do to Jimmy Kirk.

flagstone

I thought it was funny that in their list of Universe A content, they left Star Trek: Insurrection out of the list of movies. Not that I find it hard to believe anyone would forget that movie even happened...

JasonF

I think this proposal predates Insurrection.

By the way, I've now had a chance to read the proposal and it's clear that JMS and Zabel don't understand Kirk or McCoy. And their version of the Prime Directive would have had Rodenberry rolling in his grave (or orbit, as the case may be).

Tracer Bullet

It has Nemesis on its list, so I think not.

milo bloom

I had a huge thing typed up, but thru the wonders of modern technology, IE closed itself because I was looking at something in the options.

In summary, I can see both sides of the argument, using BSG as an example. New canon: you can change whatever you need to fit modern sensibilities, or correct limitations of the previous incarnation.
Keeping old canon: you have so much already established to draw from and expand upon.

I've seen both sides of that argument WRT to the new BSG and I have to admit there are good points for each.

As for Star Trek, I'm just not sure. It certainly sounds interesting, but as some have said, it is a little outside the accepted baseline for Trek. (One thing that stood out to me was the "make Scotty a female" comment. As a BSG fan I'm well aware of how changing a gender can stir things up, though I still have to wonder if they actually gained more than they lost with the Starbuck issue, ie, fans that otherwise would have given a re-imagining a chance if the Starbuck thing hadn't been the straw to break the camel's back.

If something like this did happen, I would want to see a lot more females in Command branch uniforms, that's for sure, not to mention giving Uhura the bridge once in a while. She was supposed to be an experienced officer, but she was relegated to a glorified phone operator.)

And if we're throwing our own ideas in, if they want to go back to the original TOS era, do a show like in the proposal, just a different ship in the fleet and make it secretly run by Section 31 or something.

And it still burns me that Enterprise only had like one more year to go till the Romulan Wars were supposed to happen. If the sets and uniforms are still around, they could probably still do something to redeem the show by giving us what we really wanted to see. Even make it a different ship and crew.

I do agree with JMS and Zabel that it's not just burnout that's made Trek lose popularity, but also that the behind the scenes staff seem to have become a good old boy's network. I think fresh blood could pull off something even now so soon after Enterprise.

JasonF

You're right -- I mixed up Nemesis and Insurrection. In my defense, both sucked.

milo bloom

One other thing I meant to add: There's been a secondary continuity for years, the novels and comic books.

madcougar

I've thought for years they should recast the thing and start over. I think Billy Zane as Spoke and Gary Sinise as Bones would work. Don't know who would play Kirk.

Rocketdog2000

I never read his Spider-man stuff, and the only issue I had with Supreme Power was that it moved way too slow - but for a truly great JMS comics story, find and read Midnight Nation (it's available in trade paperback). Fantastic story that would make a good movie, or better yet, TV series - but still worked extrememly well as a limited series comic.

Jeremiah I also found to be a bit of a wash, but Babylon 5 is some of the best sci-fi TV you'll EVER watch.

lordwow

I'm not sure what to think about Star Trek anymore. I think Enterprise had the right idea going through seasons... great story-arcs... but they also were damned by one fact: Everyone wants to see TNG-stuff. The Borg, the damn final episode. In other words, who gave a damn about the Enterprise crew? Not I.

If I were to "re-boot" ST, I'd head right for the TNG timeline, but keep off the Enterprise. There are so many possibilities in the time leading up to the Dominion War, Borg Attacks, and even the events of some of the Star Trek pictures, and it's all dark stuff. Yet TNG always seems to be a bright/warm (happy) series. Not until Season 7 do we really start to get the feeling something is amiss in the Federation. DS9 capitalized on this, and it's what draws most of its fans. It's not the happy-go-lucky Federation of TNG.

So IMHO, if Star Trek comes back, they should go back towards the 7-season arc (if you can call it that) of the Enterprise-D, but start following story arcs based on crews of other ships that are a bit darker, and show us more insight into the collision course between the Dominion/Federation Borg/Federation growing and the effects of it.

And for the love of god, make it a serial series, not episodic.

I doubt we'll ever see that though.

Jimmy James

I like this idea of a TNG-era show. I don't think it needs to be dark, though. I disagree that it brings the ratings. In fact, I do believe that DS9 never had the ratings TNG had.

I'd suggest a more balanced approach. Try to show the bad *and* the good. Put us on a smaller ship that's maybe 20 years old already. Give us a captain a little more like Kirk, and show him butting heads with captains of bigger ships as well as SF leadership because he'd be more at home a couple of generations earlier in time. This would allow for a fairly green crew, which is good on three fronts:

1) Casting unknowns
2) Killing off folks at will
3) Drawing the younger viewers

One trick would be keeping this ship intact past Wolf 359. Another would be exploring the ideas we would want to explore without this ship running across most (almost all) of the cast of the prior shows set in this time.

lordwow

Ya, DS9 never had the ratings TNG did. TNG was a monster in Syndication.

I think you're absolutely right about having a crew that's very different than the one's we've seen before. The TOS and TNG crews were on the Flagships, they were the best of the best. DS9 was a merging of strong crews from Bajor and the Federation, and Voyager was supposed to be a ragtag crew... but was never really convincing.

I'd love to see a show with a large crew. Think LOST-style, 30-40 crew members from the Top down. And absolutely, killing off crewmembers is a must. You look at all the other ships that the TNG crew ran into that were having issues, nearly everytime they'd have lost a major member of their crew in an explosion/fight/disease/who knows what. Having a crew of unknown actors with the ideal that any one of them could die is something that is really missing in Trek. Ya, we've seen some good stories with ensigns dying and the effect it's had on the crew, but it'd give the show a certain edge if it had a sense of realism like that.

Great call.

I agree with nearly all your comments. I could see a cameo apperance by the Enterprise-D, but I wouldn't want the crew to show up. You know, passing in the stardock/etc. I think it would be much more effective to have the crew responding to the after-effects of some of the Enterprise's missions. Worf 359 is a perfect example as you stated. That'd be an amazing season finale. We've seen the aftermath in both DS9 and TNG, but not the prelude from the Federation side. At the same time, I could see something like a major event occuring on DS9, or even Voyager disappearing allowing us to see character development. I mean, wouldn't you be a little freaked out if a ship dissapeared into nowhere and your ship was stationed by the Badlands? Character development is another big thing. I'd probably be more interested in seeing that than alien of the week episodes.

That's the one thing I really could trust to JMS, is that the characters and story arcs would develop with huge payoffs. But I just think they're in the wrong time era with this idea.

Chew

When I first heard about JMS coming up with an idea, I was pretty excited. Since that time, I've read what he's done to Spider-Man and starting to do to other comic characters. Now having read this treatment, I'm pretty glad this didn't come to pass.

Hopefully, Abrams finds a way to bring back the interest.

calhoun07

I get bored these days with any Star Trek proposal that wants to continue the established continuity or wants to go back to restart the series with new Kirk and Spock. I say scrap all the crap that has gone on recently, and forget about it. Let's fast forward into the future and look at Rodenberry's universe in another generation or so. Or maybe in a few more centuries. They just want to rehash the same stuff we've seen countless times already. TRY SOMETHING DIFFERENT!

Mattrk

If I were in charge of creating a new Trek show, I'd go back to its roots - not Classic Trek, but one of the ways that Roddenberry sold it - Horatio Hornblower.

Have a just-out-of-the-academy ensign assiged to a ship in the ass-end of space that suddenly becomes the front line against an alien race that's armed with Iconian technology (not that they know just how to work it either, which is even scarier). This guy will stay on one ship for a year or two and then get transferred, get brevetted up to Lt. JG, show his mettle, fail on his butt a few times. We get to see the growing process from green ensign to someone capable of holding his own in a fight, get involved with more than one ship's crew, have a combination of action plus personal drama.

If you want to know what I have in mind, check out A&E's Hornblower series. I'd wager that naval life for a career officer hasn't changed all that much, just less sodomy, rum and the lash.