I haven’t seen a thread about this yet, but the news should be of general interest to all Star Trek fans.
CBS All Access announced on Friday that it will air a spin-off of Star Trek: Discovery, to be called Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. It will feature the characters of Pike, Spock, and Number One, and be set on the USS Enterprise just before Kirk’s Era, as based on the original series pilot episode The Cage, and the later TOS episode The Menagerie.
No word on other casting, but presumably the series will also feature other characters from The Cage, such as Dr. Boyce, Lt. Tyler, and Yeoman Colt.
When I first read this story I thought it weird to have Rebecca Romijn in it, when she’s in The Orville. But then I realised I was confusing her with Adrianne Palicki.
Are they going to have an emotionless Number One, and an emotional but mild mannered Spock? Or maybe they will both be emotionless. Either way, I don’t think this is going to work.
Strange New Worlds? It seems like they were always populated by humanoid aliens who somehow spoke English and had civilizations that were thinly-veiled analogues to 20th century era human societies with the same social problems, which the crew of the Enterprise would involve themselves in fixing, despite the Prime Directive that they routinely defied.
If you made a show set in the Leave It to Beaver universe designed to appeal to the fans of such? Then, yes. And the fact that they keep ignoring what has gone on before is the problem.
It’s not really looking to the past, just superficially setting things in the past to get views. They do not want to work within the restraints of the continuity. And they seem to want to have a more pessimistic future because they’re not good enough to write conflict in a more optimistic setting.
I would love it if they’d actually look to the past, because I believe that is what we need in this more pessimistic time. I don’t like seeing that both TOS and TNG were false fronts hiding a darker underbelly. DS9 remains as dark as I wanted Star Trek to go, and it only ever worked due to the contrast and respect for its concurrent shows. They made it work within the same universe. I have trouble seeing how they can do a reverse DS9 to get me interested.
The setting the show in the past again here does not make me optimistic they aren’t going to do more of the same.
Star Trek has never really been “about the future”; the elevator pitch for the original series was “Wagon Train in space” and while the first series of Star Trek: The Next Generation made some vague attempts of trying to demonstrate that they lived in a post-scarcity civilization, that pretty quickly boiled down to finding reasons why the replicator couldn’t just make anything somebody wanted and finding the occasional alien species that they couldn’t communicate with via the “universal translator”. A true show about a possible future in space exploration like The Expanse is very challenging to both write and shoot, and rarely accrues the kind of broad fanbase of space opera like Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica.
Don’t be silly; all sitcoms are either modeled after The Honeymooners, I Love Lucy, The Andy Griffith Show, or The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis.
I think the Enterprise from Discovery looks gorgeous!
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This seems like pure fan service. I mean, it’s good to make viewers happy and occasionally nostalgic, but the problem with prequels of any kind is often that they risk just being sort of a filler without any real purpose or distiction (see *Solo: A Star Wars Story*) and the producing studio is often unwilling to take risks that take it out of that comfort zone, so much of the effort is in trying to manufacture some real conflict while staying within or rationalizing continuity.
I thought Discovery was abysmal, but I have a little bit of hope for this because the title suggests an approach more consistent with Star Trek’s better series - episodic and optimistic. Discovery’s nonsensical plotting was in part because it wasn’t truly an episodic show, but just a long extended movie that failed to keep all the story straight or logical. Unfortunately…
… they have the same guys in charge, so I fully expect the story will be essentially a soap opera; melodramatic, non-episodic, and full of gaping plot holes.
Because they are changing the nature of the show. Make a new show and call it something else. If it iOS good, people;le will watch it. Stop shitting on the legacy of good shows.
You want to launch a new Leave it to Beaver, supposedly set in the same 50s universe, but Beaver acts like a droog and always goes for the ultra-violence. Why?
You want to make new Star Trek, except that Starfleet is more like the Klingons, and every ST show that exists is retconned to be propaganda for the masses? That none of it was true? If you hate Star Trek that much, just make something else. Hell, make a show featuring TOS-era Klingons.
I know I’m not the only one watching these new Treks. The old stuff is still there.