Thursday, May 3, 2012
Why we need another “Star Trek” on TV
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| The U.S.S. Enterprise: Boldly optimist going where no TV show had gone before. |
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| Mr. Spock, Yeoman Rand and Capt. Kirk: Unabashedly heroic even if they were only armed with colored flashlights. |
With times the way they are, I have been thinking how badly
we need another “Star Trek” on TV.
And no, I’m not talking about yet another “reboot” of the
classic 1960s space opera, although I did enjoy the 2009 J.J. Abrams movie.
And I’m not taking about another “Next Generation/Deep Space
9/Voyager/Enterprise” –type spinoff either. In fact, I’m not even talking about
a show set in the same universe Gene Roddenberry created.
What I am talking about is a return
to a good old-fashioned, rollicking, space adventure-show set in an optimistic
future where humanity has overcome its often self-destructive ways.
So what got me thinking about this?
Well for starters, there is a complete lack of any space
opera shows on TV. During the late '90s and early '00s it seemed you couldn’t
switch a channel without finding one. We had several “Trek” spin-offs, “Babylon5,” “Farscape,” “Stargate SG1” and its spinoff “Stargate: Atlantis,” “Andromeda,”
“Earth: Final Conflict,” and to a lesser
extent the short lived “Space: Above and Beyond,” “Earth 2” and my favorite,
“Firefly.” However most, if not all of these shows, went off the air ages ago.
There have been some newer attempts, such as ABC’s “DefyingGravity” and SyFy’s “Stargate: Universe,” but they’ve either been cancelled or never
found an audience beyond their pilot. There were even a few proposed shows that
never made it to the pilot stage.
In fact, the last attempt at a space opera TV show that
actually ran for any length of time was SyFy’s updated “Battlestar Galactica”
series, and that ended three years ago. And that “Battlestar Galactica” was hardly what I’d call
optimistic.
It was dark and gritty and held up a mirror showing us our
society at its absolute worse.
I don’t know about you, but in these days of bad economic
times, terror alerts, wars in the Mid-East and what seems like a complete lack
of civility not only among our politicians but between anyone who dares
to have a different opinion, the last thing I think we need is another “dark
and gritty” science fiction TV show. If
I want to watch society self-destructing, I’ll watch the news on my 60-inch
wall hung flat screen TV or read the latest e-edition of my newspaper on my
iPad.
What I want is some escapism – pure and simple – and reassurance that the world isn’t going to
hell in a handbasket. And in the late 1960s this is exactly what “Star Trek”
provided the nation.
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| Late 1960 TV ad promoting "Star Trek" |
During the height of the Cold War, the emerging Civil Rights
movement, the Vietnam War and the generation gap, “Star Trek” showed us a
future where everything worked out for the best. We didn’t manage to nuke
ourselves into oblivion, there was equality among the sexes and the races,
there was no more war, hunger or poverty and we were out doing what mankind always does
best—exploring.
Why can’t we have another TV show like this?
I’m tired of dystopias
and morally ambiguous protagonists who are hard to root for. I want my heroes
to be truly heroic, who fight for the greater good, and make me cheer “hell
yeah!” when they finally succeed when all the odds have been stacked against
them.
Now as an aspiring writer myself, I know having characters
who are paragons of virtue who live in some utopic society makes for some
pretty boring stories. But I’m not asking for perfect characters. Let them have
flaws, show them making mistakes and occasionally being selfish, but when push
comes to shove, they should always do the right thing.
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| Kirk: He wasn't always perfect but always knew the right thing to do. |
Captain Kirk was a good example of this. He was by
no means perfect. He was shown to be fallible – the episode “Obsession” comes
to mind. In it, Kirk becomes so focused on killing a creature from his past, that
he puts his current crew in danger and jeopardizes his career. He’s also shown
to be such a womanizer that it even becomes the butt of at least two jokes in
the final original series “Star Trek” movie, “The Undiscovered Country.” The first time is after he's kissed by the sexy shape-shifter Martia, and McCoy asks him, “What is it with you, anyway?”
and the second time when he’s fighting Martia, who now
looks like him. “I can’t believe I kissed you,” the good captain exclaims, to
which Martia retorts: Must have been your lifelong ambition.”
I am also not asking for my new show to be quite as preachy
as the original “Star Trek” or to solve all of today’s hot-button issues in an
hour episode. If our problems were really that simple to solve, we could’ve
solved them already. But our new show could show the heroes struggling to find
the right
thing to do and then doing it, even knowing that their solution may not be
perfect. You could then show the cast having to live with consequences of those
decisions.
This new show wouldn’t even have to follow the “wagon train
to the stars” format “Star Trek” used. It could be a police procedural with our
heroes space detectives or travelling from planet to planet solving crimes
(CSI: Space), or a medical drama with the heroes doctors in a space station
that deals with mysterious and deadly new illnesses (Babylon House) or even be
a political thriller about what it takes to govern a vast space empire (West
Wing World). Or it could be a
combination of all these things.
Or none of these things.
I wouldn’t care.
Really.
As long as the show leaves me feeling optimistic that the
human race has a bright future ahead of it, I’d be happy.
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Amen, brother. Although, I would like to see a DS9 movie showing the return of the Emissary. I think it was cruel for Brannon Braga and Ron Moore to leave us hanging like that.
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