'Trek' Revisited

From Variety.com

Trekkies have a new leader 'Star' treatment for J.J.
By DAVE MCNARY

J.J. Abrams is becoming the next Gene Roddenberry.

Paramount is breathing life into its "Star Trek" franchise by setting "Mission: Impossible III" helmer J.J. Abrams to produce and direct the 11th "Trek" feature, aiming for a 2008 release. Damon Lindelof and Bryan Burk, Abrams' producing team from "Lost," also will produce the yet-to-be-titled feature.

Project, to be penned by Abrams and "MI3" scribes Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, will center on the early days of seminal "Trek" characters James T. Kirk and Mr. Spock, including their first meeting at Starfleet Academy and first outer space mission.

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The good news is, the Trek world is returning to me. The bad news is that it's returning the wrong way.

The series' chief problem is that it keeps trying to recapture Kirk/Spock and Co. instead of creatively expanding the Trek universe.

"Voyager" tried to give us Captain Kirk in a skirt. "Enterprise" tried to give us the whole original series crew redrawn, including the Vulcan science officer second-in-command. (Who did look much better in tight outfights than Leonard Nimoy.) Both failed.

"TNG" and "DS9" gave us something a lot more original. Although still TOS-style planet-of-the-week adventure for the most part, the complex characters which made up the crew was a refreshing change from the generally expected, up to having the brash American play second fiddle to a French captain. It worked, and extremely well.

I gave "Emterprise" points for trying to be fresh, and in its last season it actually got there, but by then it was too late.

What's fresh with the proposed movie? Little if anything.

Let's start with where everyone in the TNG/DS9 universe is right now. The TNG movies, with the notable exception of the one with the Borg and Zephram Cochrane in post-WW3 Montana, made the same mistake the TOS flicks did. No one went anywhere. Here you have a shipload of assertive, dynamic people and no one ever gets promoted or transferred. Everyone ends up waddling around covering up middle aged spread and grey touches in the hair. It's silly.

The cast should have changed. A few characters go, a few new charqcters come in, with the old characters referenced in the story for continuity's sake, and to play on the "where are they now?" angle.

Here's LaForge coming in to the scene in command of his Starfleet Engineering ship, here's Admiral Picard in charge of a major diplomatic initiative working with Captains Riker of the Enterprise and Data of some other ship. Meanwhile, former Bajoran Colonel, now Starfleet Commander Kira uncovers evidence of a plot involving renegade Romulans and Cardassians to assassinate Federation President Kathryn Janeway, and has to rely on Cardassian political security chief Elim Garak to deal with it, but Garak, it seems, has his own agenda. Bring it all together without looking back. Time, man, it marches on. Yet it rarely does in a fantasy universe where time travel adventure seems to happen to everyone almost all the time. It makes no sense.

But no, we're going to get Kirk and Spock in diapers, played by actors who certainly won't be Shatner and Nimoy, which will make it laughable as well as disappointing in terms of creative direction.

Sigh. I'd become a Battlestar Galactica freak but it's too dark for just before bedtime. I'm too old for nightmares. My saving grace is my TiVo and the pick of five hours of Star Trek's DS9 and TNG I can record from every weekday for my tuck-myself-in cup of warm milk and fantasy. While the cinema may let me down, cable, where nothing ever truly dies, still knows what I want. It's there for me.

Written in honor of TV Turnoff Week, a despicable un-Trekkie event which the Articles of Federation compel me to turn off and ignore.