Good Idea or Bad? Looking at various sci fi and fantasy television projects currently in the works and pondering whether they will fly or crash.
What Is It? A new Star Trek series is on the way from CBS All Access that will follow Captain Christopher Pike (Anson Mount), Number One (Rebecca Romijn), Mr. Spock (Ethan Peck), and the rest of the crew of the Enterprise in their exploration of the galaxy during the years prior to Captain James T. Kirk taking command of the ship.
What Is in the Works? This series will be a spin-off of sorts of Star Trek: Discovery and will carry over that show’s incarnations of the classic Trek characters to a series that will act as a direct prequel to Star Trek: The Original Series. Co-creator and executive producer Akiva Goldsman had this to say in an interview about plans for the new series:
We’re going to try to harken back to some classical Trek values, to be optimistic, and to be more episodic. Obviously, we will take advantage of the serialized nature of character and story building. But I think our plots will be more closed-ended than you’ve seen in either Discovery or Picard.
Good Idea or Bad? This idea has potential if it hearkens back to the spirit of the original series. I really liked Anson Mount as Captain Pike and Rebecca Romijn as Number One, and Ethan Peck has started to grow on me as Spock. Those three would provide good leads for the show, and there are plenty of storylines to be explored that can fill in the years before the original series started. Plus a return to episodic story-telling would be welcome as well as a more optimistic tone compared to the darkness and moral ambiguity of Discovery (Star Trek: Picard also explored the underside of the Federation, but at least its first season ended on a more hopeful note). If they bring on science fiction writers like the original series did, I believe this could turn into a good sci fi series that carries on the spirit of Star Trek.
However, Alex Kurtzman will be closely involved with this, as he is with the other Trek shows on CBS All Access, and I do not care for the direction that he has taken the franchise. Discovery and Picard have brought us too much in the way of soap opera-like relationship stories that lean heavily towards melodrama. And the CGI-overload for both shows is just mind-numbing. That’s not what Star Trek is about. Relationship stories? Fine. Special effects? Fine. But those still need to take the backseat to good sci fi tales. Star Trek never needed soap opera or special effects to tell a good story, just good writers and interesting characters. And to start out, Strange New World does have the latter at its core. If the new series can bring in some decent scribes to go along with that, it might just be the best Trek show we have seen in a while (and please go back to the retro-tech). But if Kurtzman continues to muck it up, we will have another show that we watch because it is Trek but that we wish was much better.
Notable Facts: The character of Captain Christopher Pike, played by Jeffrey Hunter, first appeared in the pilot for the original Star Trek titled “The Cage”. NBC rejected the show based on that episode (because it was “too cerebral”), but asked Gene Roddenberry to do a second pilot because they liked the concept of the series. Hunter declined to return for that because he did not want to be tied down to a series as he was looking for roles in feature films. Sadly, Hunter passed away in 1969 at the age of 42. The character of Number One (thus named because she was the first officer), was played by Roddenberry’s future wife Majel Barrett in the pilot. She would go on to play a much smaller role on the show, appearing as the recurring character Nurse Christine Chapel.
Do you think that Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is a good idea or bad? Chime in with your thoughts in the comments.
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Absolutely garbage. It will still fall under the Discovery and Picard, so called “creative team”. It’s all an exercise in deconstructing and tearing down the iconic stories that came from the past.
How would they be able to implement retrotech Enterprise following CGI-rebooted Enterprise featured on Discovery? I can’t see how they’d go that way.
It’s mostly just wishful thinking. My thought was that they could explain that deep space vessels like the Enterprise had to revert to lower tech because it is easier to repair when they are far away from a starbase. But they have probably gone too far with the higher tech to go back (and it seems like all of Starfleet can pop out of nowhere at a moment’s notice no matter where you are in the galaxy).