control, shift, cheeseburger

Over the weekend I was asked to participate on a panel at the Loscon 32 SF convention about the future of Star Trek. Where is the franchise headed? We had on the panel with me, Lee Whiteside, who manages the wonderful SFTV pages , Jill Sherwin who wrote Quotable Star Trek, Margaret Wander Bonnano the novelist who has written some fantastic ST novels, most notably to me Strangers From the Sky, her version of first contact with the aliens who would make up the Federation, and Heather Stern who is the XO or Captain (I don’t racall; Heather, if you’re reading, leave a comment or email me and I will post it here) of the Starfleet International ship in San Francisco.

We had a lively discussion, but eventually, we left many things unanswered. In the REAL world of Paramount, Viacom and how Trek fits into all that, there are apparently no executives working in a position of power who like the show sufficiently to have a roadmap or plan on its resurrection. Most of the fans who attended the panel did decide on two things; there should be a 5–10 year hiatus before there is another Trek, second, the next Star Trek should be handled by a Ron Moore (Battlestar: Galactica) or Russel T. Davies (Doctor Who); someone who is passionite about the project who will do a loving treament of it in its next iteration.

What surprised me was no one on the panel was a fan of Enterprise, hence they didn’t have a clue how good it was in its fourth and final season or as I call it, the “too much too late” season. Manny Coto, the show’s line producer corrected the problems in the show’s Vulcan continuity by having a Vulcan civil war, he explained the evolution of Klingon foreheads, and pushed forward the Eugenics wars into a more reasonable time frame. If anyone is to be involved with Trek it should be him, as far as I am concerned.

Also, a Galactica type reboot was discussed. This would be wrong and I think against Gene Roddenberry’s original vision. Of course, this was discussed because the mandate on Voyager and Enterprise was to make the alien characters iinteresting and the human ones kind of generic. Oh no, make the humans as interesting as you can, that is the only way people will care about them. Also, you cannot throw out all of Trek’s canon in one swell foop. This was discussed in line with Doctor Who’s recent return, which no one on the panel had seen sufficiently. They all thought it was a revamp, but it’s not, Chris Eccleston IS the NINTH Doctor and previous continuity is not eschewed but embraced. I don’t think canon is as limiting as the panel thought it was. I think it can free writers from having to constantly make stuff up (technobabble) and instead get on with the story at hand.

Anyway, I don’t claim to have a crystal ball on all of this. Any Trek they make in the future should be good. Really good. If you do that, people will come in droves.

Filed under: Star Trek