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Shatner May Return to Star Trek (Briefly?)
mfh writes "Apparently, William Shatner may return to Star Trek, after talks with studio executives for a cameo on the fourth season of Star Trek: Enterprise. Rick Berman did not disclose which role wants Shatner play, although I'm sure we'd all love to see Captain James Tiberius Kirk again, right?"
If anything, he should play Kirk's great (great?) grandfather or however it works out...
I've recently been getting into the original series (thank you DVD!) and I've got to say, as a person who doesn't really get into sci-fi too much, the series is great TV. The adventures are entertaining and well written and it is a great way to just kick back and spend a lazy afternoon. There's just a certain feel that special effects and amazing make up just can't capture.
So why do we need to be reminded of the 1960's? Because that's when Star Trek was good.
-Dizzle
"I most likely AM so interested in myself."
If I had points, I would mod you insightful. I personally started to lose interest with Deep Space Nine, and then my interest went six feet under with Voyager. Seeing what I have of Enterprise, they have deviated far from the continuity of the Star Trek franchise that was established in the original series and Next Generation years (Romulan cloaking devices a century before Kirk? First contact with the Klingons before the Federation even existed? Xindi? Come on!)
The only thing that would save this show would be to cancel the show and have a final episode where an Ensign Daniels walked out of a holodeck on Enterprise-D, to be railed on about historical inconsistencies by Data.
I don't recognize any of the movies after First Contact either, so forget about B-4.
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...but not on Star Trek. He's one of the regulars on next season's "Fleet Street" on ABC, a spinoff of "The Practice." I was never much for courtroom dramas, but I tuned in to see Shatner's guest role toward the end of the just-concluded season -- and kept tuning in week after week until the end. His role on that show must have been written with him in mind; it fits his acting style absolutely perfectly, and it's funny as hell. (James Spader and Rebecca de Mornay aren't bad either.) If "Fleet Street" can maintain anywhere near the goofiness and energy level of the last several "Practice" episodes, it'll be a must-see, and a few years from now it'll be what anyone under 20 thinks of when the name William Shatner comes up.
Get Leonard Nimoy to direct the episode.
Shatner can play Kirk's great-grandfather...
He doesnt have to be the young sex symbol anymore, he can be an old space dog.
No. In Generations (before he died) he was trapped in the ribbon. In the ribbon time did not exist and if you had the will to, you could exit at any point in time. So could could come out with Whoopi Goldberg, kick some ass then go back in the ribbon to come out in generations.
Personally, I just want a Q plot line.
I looked long and hard for Shatner, but i got nuthin'! Cheap skate.
You can see other Star Trek cast members political donations on this page (half-way down on the left).
"First contact with the Klingons before the Federation even existed? Xindi? Come on!"
The Enterprise time line starts after the Enterprise-E visited Earth in First Contact. That little bit of info can be used to correct a lot of 'inconsistencies' in Enterprise, including when exactly they meet a lot of races such as the Klingons. Things are further complicated by the whole temporal cold war thing.
As for cloaking devices etc, well I dunno. Never watched much of ToS. I'm not defending that bit.
"Derp de derp."
They could probably get away with holding on to some of the of the cast, but they need to change the characters quite a bit. The crew of the ship is supposed to be like a Navy ship, that's what the heirarchy is supposed to mirror. These characters are so unprofessional that they would all be kicked out of the Navy in a moment. Now, I know it's the future and everything is all roses but c'mon..
Think of them as more like the the army air force test pilots. Ever seen "the right stuff"? Those guys were a little loose. They did things like stealing planes without clearance, just to prove they had balls. The "marines" stationed onboard seem a little more lashed down.
At least, I can give them that bit of leeway. I think the show is still pushing suckage.
funny munging
He can play the great-great-great-grand father of Kirk...
:-)
Of course, in theory, nobody will care who he is or who his children will become... but with all those time traveling weirdos, they can think of some story line of where he has to save himself (and the enterprise), so that his grand children father Kirk... or something.
oh... and KHAAAAAN!!! could also be part of the story...
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
"Couldn't they just jump over sharks on waterskis instead?"
Would it really be 'jumping the shark' if Shatner played Kirk's dad/granddad?
"Derp de derp."
I haven't really ever watched a Voyager episode that I enjoyed. I quickly gave up on it. I've yet to watch an Enterprise episode. Just kind of lost interest due to Voyager. It was kind of a touchy-feely politically correct show rather than the frequent examination of philosophical problems that came up in the earlier Treks.
I did generally like TNG and DS9, though. Never watched much of The Original Trek.
I don't really understand why people get so rabid about Star Trek in general, though. It's reasonably fun to watch, yes. It elevates the status of science (well, at least pseudoscience, but one can generally put a plausible interpretation on things) and engineering, which is not very common in the media. There was some good acting -- I really do like Patrick Stewart. The makeup is *very* good. It's interesting to see positive predictions about the future -- a *lot* of movies seem to go in for futuristic dystopias. Finally, for such a long-running set of series, things didn't get too formulaic -- there was definitely good writing.
May we never see th
I had nothing but high hopes for Enterprise when it came on the air. Maybe I expected too much, but how about storylines leading in the direction of the founding of the Federation? I think they could do some very interested stories about meeting new alien races, overcoming cultural differences, and moving on towards a confederacy of planets.
While I didn't like the ongoing story line this past season, they could turn it around (noticed a little of that the past couple of weeks). If they bring the Xindi in as allies of the humans against the sphere builders, that could start things in the right direction for the Federation (gotta get the Vulcans involved first, though).
I did like some of the stories this season too, especially the one about Trip's clone and the one with Archer's quantum brain injury. Very creative.
Enterprise jumped the shark already. Bringing in Shatner for a guest shot is nothing more than a cheap attempt by Rick Ahab to drop some chum in the water... bring the shark back around for another game of chicken. It won't work.
If anything, this will only hasten the demise of a franchise that's been circling the drain for years.
Berman, flush twice on your way out -- it's a long way to the writer's department.
In both cases I'd say that's better than the "new and improved version". The "Enterprise" crew is completely lacking in personality, and the Space Shuttle (when it actually flies) costs more than building a ramp to orbit out of $100 bills.
Rupert Murdoch
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Siegfried Fischbacher
Roy Horn
Greg Norman
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Alanis Morissette
How could it happen? The timeline is all wrong. It would have to be like, Kirk's granfather or something. That would be kind of silly too. I think Shatner would be a lot better as a bug Xindi, or some other Evil Alien race where his long spaces between words, sentances and paragraphs might... Actually... come... in... Useful...
This signature has Super Cow Powers
Oh my god -- you're complaining about Voyager being too politically correct, and in the same breath you praise TNG? Give me a break.
TNG was the most politically correct drivel ever seen in Star Trek. Just a couple off the top of my head: they started calling all superiors "sir", regardless of gender, instead of using ma'am for the women. Also, any admiral you saw in Starfleet was usually a woman and/or an ethnic minority. *Unless* that admiral was a bad guy, in which case he was a white male.
I could probably come up with a laundry list of other instances of PC-ness in TNG if I could stomach watching some reruns.
we're almost due for the Romulan Wars. maybe Kirk will play a Romulan that helps start the war?
or maybe he plays a human that brings about the Romulan Wars?
("Star Trek Chronology" 2nd ed. places the Romulan Wars in 2156. Enterprise 3rd season ends in 2154.)
grey wolf
LET FORTRAN DIE!
about those ratings....
i live in Idaho. as such, the only access i would have to the series is by satellite TV - which isn't all that cheap. digital cable is much preferred here. so, everyone in town that i know (which is most of the town, btw) has either never seen the show because they don't get it on TV or isn't a trekkie at all.
if Enterprise hadn't been handed to UPN, it would most definitely have more viewership. as it is, though, you have to know someone with satellite TV that carries UPN or you have to know someone who works at a TV station. (i knew someone - but he got fired, probably for using the station's satellite feed for recording Enterprise and DS9.)
limiting your audience is never good for a TV show. now i have to download it one episode at a time. (though i have to wait for someone to actually get around to making an encode.)
grey wolf
LET FORTRAN DIE!
It's true. But of all the series, I've grown to like DS9 more than the others. For one, at the start of the series they were in this clapped out station, and certainly weren't in the same position of power the previous series had seen the central characters in. The later series had story arcs - imagine that! A story that was really carried from episode to episode. No other series has had that (well, Voyager had a goal that encapsulated the entire series, and TNG toyed with the Maquis (sp?) at one point and finished off where they started with Q, but none have really done what DS9 did).
That said, I pretty much stopped watching toward the end of DS9/mid Voyager. Not really sure why, it was probably that I was busy and just didn't want to sit in and watch TV in my free moments. I wouldn't mind going back and watching the DS9 episodes at all; I watched TNG when it was repeated ad finitum on BBC2, Voyager and Enterprise I'd only watch if I happened to catch it and I didn't have anything else to do. Same could probably be said about some ToS episodes.
/me wonders just how a DS9 film could come about. A deep, dark, star trek film is what they need. They need them vulnerable, stuck on that damned station with no weapons, food, power or toilets, and with the Cardassians attacking them. Screw the watered down philosophical crap they've been trying to throw at us for quite some time now, if they want to save Star Trek, they need guns and more women. Find some way to get Seven of Nine into a DS9 film, wearing a low-cut top and hot pants rather than getting William Shatner into Enterprise. Then they'd be onto a winner.
When TNG was first started, the people producing it were thinking of it as just
another TOS clone, and a take-off at that. They only expected it to run for a
season or two. It was after it became really popular that they realised they
actually had something and started working to give it its own identity and some
quality. Right about the middle of the second season, you can see the changes
start, as they started transitioning it from a TOS knock-off to a real show.
About this time they killed off Yarr (not because Yarr was bad but because they
wanted to make room for Warf on the bridge, clearly a good move in retrospect),
traded out Polaski for Crusher (this one I'm not so sure was as good a decision,
but it ended up working out okay), got rid of the clown they had as chief
engineer and promoted Geordi, started doing a lot more to build up the
repertoire of alien races so it wouldn't be the same enemies every episode,
started handling the holodeck a little differently (using it as a plot device
instead of just a cool new gadget to show off), did some work on costuming
and prop quality, and so on and so forth. By the third season, it was a
very different program.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.