Sci Fi Bytes: Nuggets, anecdotes, trivia, and more from the worlds of sci fi and fantasy television.
In 2009, the Star Trek franchise received a reboot with the J.J. Abrams helmed feature film that set Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and the rest of the crew of the Enterprise–portrayed by new actors–off on an all-new set of adventures. But prior to that in 2004, Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski had proposed a not too dissimilar reboot to the franchise that unfortunately never took off.
Seeing the fourth Star Trek spin-off, Enterprise, struggling in the ratings and feeling like the franchise had run out of steam, Straczynski collaborated with Bryce Zabel (Dark Skies, The Crow: Stairway to Heaven) to put together a proposal for a new Trek series. In their pitch, they noted that the franchise had grown stagnate and lost its spirit of adventure:
Over the decades, Star Trek has become so insular, so strictly defined, and placed so many layers upon itself that some of the essence of what made us love it in the first place has been lost. The all-too-reasonable desire to protect the franchise may now be the cause of its stagnation.
Thus their idea, like Abrams, was to go back to the beginning and start all over again. But not by creating an alternate timeline, just reimagining the show from the start (sort of like what Ronald D. Moore did with Battlestar: Galactica at about that same time, though not as drastic of a change). They would return to the early days of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy (“warrior, the priest, the doctor” as the proposal dubs them) and find out how they got started in their careers in Starfleet, how Kirk became the youngest captain, and how he was awarded the fleet’s flagship.
Now this is where the proposal begins to diverge from the 2009 J.J. Abrams movie. Straczynski would take a page from his Babylon 5 book and build in a five-year story arc for the series. This of course fits seamlessly with the series seeing as the Enterprise was originally on a five-year mission. But he would add a specific purpose to this mission and a reason that the Federation’s flagship was off exploring deep space far from its home base. This involved the discovery of the existence of a lost race that may have had a hand in the origins of many of the intelligent species across the galaxy, including humans, Vulcans, and Klingons (explaining why so many aliens have a similar physiology). The Enterprise would be secretly tasked with uncovering more information about this lost race which would eventually lead to the entanglement with “forces of darkness who may view our activities with more than a little hostility.”
Like Bablyon 5, this new Trek would have its share of stand-alone episodes to go along with the ongoing story arc. And the proposal suggests that just like the original show, well-known science fiction authors would be brought in to pen these episodes (or adapt their own stories to the new series). In addition, the other familiar characters from the series such as Uhura, Scotty, Sulu, and Chekov would return, and all of the principal roles would be portrayed by new actors. This plan would allow the new series to blaze bold new paths and present challenging stories, just like the original did back in the sixties. But it would have broken from the canon established by the series that preceded it and would no longer have that baggage weighing it down. And the proposal does take a bit of a dig at the excessive use of the holo-deck on the sequel series TNG, DS9, and Voyager with this comment:
The original Enterprise never needed a holo-deck so that the characters could have exciting adventures because there were more than enough adventures, more than enough excitement, to be found in the real world they occupied every day. If you need a holo-deck to make an interstellar starship on the bleeding edge of the unknown interesting, something is seriously amiss.
So as you can see, this proposal took a similar approach to what Abrams would do several years later, but it would have returned the series to the small screen in an updated and revised format “re-born and re-tooled for a new millennium, applying hard lessons and building in new thoughts that shake things up creatively.” Unfortunately, nothing ever came of it and we can now only imagine what this series would have been like. Star Trek meets Babylon 5 in a new-meets-old series that brings us “The Best of Both Worlds!”
The proposal was posted on the internet previously but has since been taken down, likely for copyright reasons. But I’m sure if you search for it you can track it down, and it is definitely worth the read.
More Sci Fi Bytes at This Link
More from CancelledSciFi.com: Keep up with the ratings developments and the status of all the currently airing sci fi and fantasy shows with our Weekly Roundup posts. And be sure to follow the Cancelled Sci Fi Twitter Site for breaking news and updates.
Follow our Sci Fi TV Schedule for all the currently airing and upcoming sci fi and fantasy television shows, and keep up with what is airing/streaming each week with our Weekly Listings.
Very interesting premise for a show. Interestingly, TNG did an episode that has quite a few parallels to this idea. In Season 6, Episode 20, called “The Chase”, the four species (Klingons, Humans, Romulans, Cardassians) discover a link hidden in their DNA. They wind up having to solve a puzzle based on humanoid DNA in the Alpha and Beta quadrants. They wind up discovering that there had been a previous humanoid species that had seeded their DNA around the two quadrants, which were devoid of any humanoid species prior to their arrival. That species then became extinct, but left a map coded within the DNA of various species. It isn’t one of the better known TNG episodes, but I always remembered it, and found the idea quite interesting. Definitely worth a look.
I do not recall that episode at all. Will have to go back and give it a look.
The best part of that is when the alien ends the message with a sort of “Goodbye and good luck” comment, and the Klingon scientist says “That’s all? If she wasn’t dead for over 4 billion years, I’d kill her myself.”