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Feric -> RE: Star Wars, Star Trek news (2/15/2008 12:13:55 PM)
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Paramount has milked the Star Trek cow to death. There is no actual continuity to the stories, and the Trek universe revolves around the concept of Utopia--everyone is perfect, technology solves all problems, and every alien you meet is a bipedal humanoid with funny-looking forheads or strange ears.
I gave up on Star Trek in 1992 and have never looked back. Now and then I'd risk a glance, but was always disappointed. With the late Rick Berman and Michael Piller (known in Science Fiction circles as "Burn & Pillage") in charge, the starship Enterprise journeyed into realms of Political Correctness where no one wanted to go! Of course, as long as the Treadmill Trekkies kept gobbling up the formulaic offal that Burn and Pillage kept shoveling, UPN certainly wasn't going to care. It was amusing, though, to see that network steadily sinking as each new Trek clone was Xeroxed and foisted off onto the hapless viewers.
What's really tragic is that Star Trek's vileness is a product of tight control. The Old Series (OS) used real writers: Ted Sturgeon, Robert Bloch, Harlan Ellison, etc. Next Gen and all of its clones were scripted by a tightly bound writing circle wholly under contract by UPN, and their efforts were tightly edited. I've seen a few of the original scripts, and there was good material there--but most of it was rejected in the spirit of Hollywood as "too controversial", or, "might offend the sponsor", etc. Hence, their stories blur together and sound the same.
By 1994, however, serious sci-fi people didn't care. Babylon 5 had proven that hard science fiction still existed, and that quality SF drama could still be done. Ronald D. Moore's revamp of Battlestar Galactica has reinforced that ideal. Star Trek, meanwhile, continued to sink into a well-deserved oblivion, and it has remained there ever since.
As a final note, it's worth observing that B5's creator, J. Michael Straczynski, approached Paramount with a plan to "re-boot" the Star Trek universe and get the series off to a fresh start. His proposal can be seen at http://bztv.typepad.com/newsviews/files/ST2004Reboot.pdf Although he was officially rebuffed, I can't help but notice that the new series' basic concept is suspiciously similar. The legacy of Burn and Pillage lives on!
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