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June 24, 2006
JMS Trek Unveiled
Ain't It Cool News links to a PDF file that shows the 2004 proposal by J. Michael Straczynski to reboot the Star Trek universe:
Every writer who’s been asked to pitch for one of the Star Trek series or features knows that so many stories have been developed in the Star Trek universe that it has become increasingly difficult to move something through the system. The three most common responses are: it’s been done, it’s being done, or it would never be done.
Yep, that's about right. After that premise, though, his treatment turns up some amazingly familiar stuff for it to be something that hasn't been done before:
We will start with a two-hour pilot that tells the story no one has ever seen: the circumstances that lead Kirk and McCoy (friends before this) to meet Spock for the first time. It will involve their discovery of a lost city on an uncharted world, nearly a million years old, and their encounter with the race that built it, a race long sought after by every civilized world for the tremendous advantages they could provide.
Hmmmm, Shadows, anyone? No, that's been done before....
There will be a beginning, middle and end to this series. It will be exactly five seasons, with each season equaling one year of their five year mission. The crew of the Enterprise will leave in our pilot episode, and they will return five years later from their scientific and security mission.
Wow, once again I'm sensing something familiar here from another JMS series. But there's more. Some familiar overtones from Trek too:
One thing we will discover is that buried deep within the DNA of humans, Vulcans (even Klingons) and other intelligent bi-pedal races is a mathematical code, something buried so deep and of such complexity that it could not possibly have occurred by chance.
Well, let's see, I think there was a TNG episode called "The Chase...
Now, to be fair, there's a lot of missing pieces here. I don't think there's many other people who could pull of a revitalization of Star Trek besides JMS. However, I'd really worry if Spock turned out to be a woman in this series and then showed up in a cocoon some time. I like the overall concept, though. No more further expansion of the Trek universe, just start over with the characters people know. People have lived through multiple incarnations of James Bond and Superman. I think the world could survive without William Shatner as James T. Kirk.
What I would not want to see, though, is a "Battlestar Galactica"-like treatment that takes Trek so far from its origins that it becomes unrecognizable except for the names of the characters.
Paramount ultimately passed on JMS' proposal. AICN points out that since Enterprise was on the air at the time, it probably didn't get very far, which is unfortunate. I wonder what kind of hearing he would get now.
Right now (from the same AICN article), the focus is on a Trek movie that goes back to pre-TOS days. Matt Damon is being floated as Kirk. I have no problem with the casting, but I really wonder why Paramount is going the big-screen route. The last few movies have been disasters, and I really think it's because there's too much Trek readily available out there. After so many series all available on DVD and on so many cable networks each night, there's not a lot of reason to go shell out $10 to see a Trek movie. A TV mini-series would make more sense if they really want to re-launch a franchise.
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