Geek Alert

Star Trek never really found itself. Trek floundered as much as it soared. Watch the first 2 years of TNG and you’ll see floundering galore, epitomized by the annoy Wesley Crusher going “We’re in Starfleet. We don’t lie”, in a moment even Wil Wheaton regrets. It wasn’t until the show was on the verge of cancellation that they finally said “Screw it! If we’re going out, we’re going out with a bang!” which produced The Best of Both Worlds (pt 1), some of the finest Trek out there. Instead of going with dopey plots they let the actors run the show (literally) and, suddenly, you have Patrick Stewart allowed to shine his talents. I think DS9 did the same until they realized that they needed to let Avery Brooks shine more. Voyager never got itself up because it had no strong lead (how it survived 7 seasons is beyond me). Enterprise had Scott Bakula but never got into better plots. It didn’t help that the show’s pilot featured a 90210 moment involving “Hey, you need to strip nearly naked in this dimly lit steamy room and rub this stuff all over your bodies. SLOWLY”. Insert eye roll here.

When you add in the cumulative effect of the (good) non-Trek sci-fi (B5, Firefly, BSG, Star Wars to some extent) you quickly find that the whole ST franchise simply got outclassed and Berman ran out of material. I felt the same way about Nemesis in that they squandered what could have been superb Trek and managed to make it suck as much as Phantom Menace did. The best Trek movie still remains The Undiscovered Country and I think a large part of that was not just better writing but better casting as well (major props to whomever got Christopher Plummer to do that role). Add in some old school “cowboy diplomacy” and you had a major winner. Stinks that TNG never got anything even close to that good since the cast was still solid.

But D-One has a good point. BSG is supposedly going to restart in January with the end of the series. Season 4 was weird but it found itself and left on a massive cliffhanger. If they end it well, the Trek movie is going to have a very harsh audience and if it is “Dawson’s Trek” it will go down in flames. It will do well at the box office for the aforementioned but the all-but-certain sequel will fail. If BSG ends poorly (given Season 3′s wackiness, this remains to be seen) then Trek will fare much better.

All I have to say is, J. Michael Straczynski, wherefore art thou?

It’s important to distinguish between “reimagined” (i.e. BSG) and merely “reset”. In a reset you revere the original but start over at square one and retrace your steps, but with a new spin on it. Reimagined means you take the parts you like and make up the rest. Better than BSG would be Sci-Fi’s “Tin Man” movie, which has some of the Wizard of Oz in it but works nothing like it (and I’m not sure that it worked all that well in the end). Star Trek needed a reset because it breaks one of the cardinal rules of sci-fi: continuity.

This one looks to be something of the reset variety, although, with Nimoy’s little time twist, it may just be more rehashing of the original rather than a true reset. We’ll find out when this new era reaches a point where it intersects the old.