Could Fuller Take Trek Back To TV?

bowman9991 writes "Bryan Fuller, creator of the TV show Pushing Daisies and a former Star Trek writer and producer, is geared up to make it happen. The new Star Trek TV show would be based on "old style" Star Trek, rather than the more recent incarnations and variations: Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Enterprise and Star Trek: The Next Generation. There hasn't been a Star Trek TV series since Enterprise was canceled after four seasons in 2005. Fuller wrote twenty one Star Trek episodes over four years, two in Deep Space Nine's final season, and the rest for Voyager. He also produced Voyager's last season. If J.J. Abrams' reboot is successful (and the latest trailer suggests it will be!) perhaps we'll see him involved with a new Star Trek TV show with the style and impact of Fringe or Lost. The new Star Trek movie featuring a young Kirk and Spock is in cinemas May 2009." Besides his work on many episodes of Trek, Fuller's work includes Dead Like Me and some of the best of Heroes. (He's one of the names I actively seek in the writing slot.) Between him and JJ Abrams, the era of Rick Berman looks to finally be at an end. Cross your fingers.

Comments

Hmmm...

[Kokuyo]

Rather than another series that will result in overpriced DVDs, I'd have loved to get a DS9 or Voyager Movie or two...

Re:Hmmm...

[Fractal Dice]

No other Trek has been as dark and gritty as DS9 was, actually showing a real, unsanitized war with it's attendant ugliness, while portraying a federation that was, for a change, flawed and multifaceted.

Strange ... you say that like it was a good thing. Some of us actually watched Trek *because* it was a vision of a cleaner, sanitized world, a better humanity where the ideals we strive for are seen in action actually solving problems. The darker, more flawed vision of the Trek universe in DS9, where the ends justify the means and everyone's a broken hypocrite underneath, undermined what seemed to me to be the whole point of the Trek universe.

Also, the Dominion War had a tendency to have ships blowing up all over the place as eye candy, destroying the sense that each ship mattered, that each ship represented a huge investment of resources, a rich and meaningful history and a crew with stories of their own. In attempting to be a bigger, louder Babylon 5 (all while struggling to find a message beyond "life sucks" after it's writers failed to make the initial high-concept post-insurgency-peace theme compelling), DS9 ceased to be recognizable as Trek to me.

Oh dear, I've become a person who argues Trek.

Re:Hmmm...

[Abcd1234]

Yes, if by "truly great" you mean bailed out with a plot device (wormhole aliens) and don't stop to question why Captain Sisko seemed to be single-handily running the Federation's war-effort, ranging from commanding a fleet of some 600 ships on his own to commanding a ground battle that could have been ended in two minutes if any of the Trek powers had the equivalent of machine guns or artillery. Are there really no infantry weapons bigger than rifles in the 24th century?

Meh, I never said the show was flawless. But it was, in those seasons, as good as the best TNG, IMHO, and far better than anything Voyager or Enterprise have ever offered.

I agree, the wormhole aliens solution was a bit contrived (although, it makes sense in the context of the show... the aliens are supposedly a) all-powerful, and b) the custodians of Bajor... going to them for help isn't unreasonable). Then again, was Data's solution to the Borg problem in "Best of Both Worlds" any less contrived? And as for Sisko's role, well... you could just as easily level the same criticism against Picard in TNG leading the charge in any number of engagements.

Garek had the best character in the series (IMHO) and Eddington's critique of the Federation particularly damning:

I couldn't agree more. I also think the episode in which there was an attempted military coup on Earth was brilliantly executed.

It's funny, though. You say that "portraying a federation that was, for a change, flawed and multifaceted" "was actually one of the redeeming things about it." To me, that's what makes the series brilliant.

I mean, the goal of science fiction shouldn't be to present funny aliens, or to give nerds neat technology to drool over. It should be to use the setting as an environment in which one can then explore the human condition in a way that would otherwise be impossible. DS9 attempted to do that, exploring the decisions and compromises one must make during a time of war, and it did so better than, I think, any other other Trek, save for TNG.

Re:Hmmm...

[Anonymous Monkey]

I was thinking that Data needs to become more artificial and less human. He is a completely new form of life, and no one has scratched the surface of what that means. So, in a bid to keep Data, and still get rid of old Brent I think that he should 'outgorw' his body, and need to be transferred to something bigger. He starts as a shuttle, becomes a star ship, and then changes 'bodies' when he gets a new job. One season he is a deep space probe, next year he is a war ship, later he is a holodeck program. Maybe he could copy him self into a probe and then reintegrate himself when he returns. I think I'm just tired of machines that try to be human, we need a machine try to be a machine.

Re:Hmmm...

[nine-times]

It got to me to thinking. What is the Federation really?

One thing that no Star Trek series has gotten much into is the interaction between military and civilian life. It's really strange if you think much about it. You have this huge fascist/communist state with a seemingly pervasive military presence. They have tons of military vessels just patrolling around the galaxy in seemingly random ways, under the excuse of scientific research and exploration, but constantly poking their noses in everyone's business. They're using their military might to cause outcomes favorable to themselves on a regular basis.

And then when you see civilian life, everyone seems to just be hanging around in restaurants and bars or running vineyards. It's a very pastoral but irrelevant civilian life.

And for some reason, no one is disturbed by it.

Re:Hmmm...

[Wraithlyn]

That's why Cavil in Battlestar is so great. He's like the anti-Data.

"I DON'T WANT TO BE HUMAN!!!"

Hmmmm.

[khasim]

Fuller wrote twenty one Star Trek episodes over four years, two in Deep Space Nine's final season, and the rest for Voyager.

And Voyager was such a great series. Sarcasm intended.

Re:Star Trek is in "The Future"

[TheRaven64]

Federation Civil War?
Fall of the Federation?

Andromeda was, apparently, originally meant to be the sequel to ST:TNG. The Federation would be betrayed by one of its allies and collapse into a civil war and the story would follow an attempt to rebuild it.

The folks at Paramount didn't want it. They felt it would be too dark for Star Trek and not have the hopeful feel that the rest of the series had.

Re:All I know

[Ucklak]

Rick Berman is the reason Star Trek became Star Twrecked. Let's get positions casted, put putty on someone's nose, rinse and repeat.
TNG and DS9 didn't have a token vulcan so Voyager got a black vulcan and Enterprise had a female vulcan. The guy doesn't know how to put a character together.
All his movies with the exception of First Contact sucked and got progressively worse.

Part of the charm of TOS was the banter of Kirk, McCoy and Spock. It was 3 guys diametrically opposed at work in different situations. That was the formula that none of the other series had. Enterprise was the closest but didn't know what it had and failed to deliver.

I vote for Kirk and Spock

[tjstork]

Frankly the whole charm of the TOS was that it wasn't -that- far into the future, and the basic characters just worked.

By creating Kirk and Spock and the rest of the crew of the Enterprise, Roddenberry gave us the modern equivalent of a Hercules myth. We can milk Kirk and Spock for two thousands years, and, if we are as good as the Greeks, we should.

And frankly, I'm sick of all the darkness in present science fiction. Science is advancing more all the time and if there was ever a time for optimism based on a scientific society, NOW is it. Humanity can improve, and will improve, and having a series that reminds us of what our future could be, if we chose to do it, and reminds us of our ongoing moral obligations, is a damned fine thing.

Sick of all these moral halfwits running around in sci-fi these days. Poor Adam's crying again on Galactica. Big woosy. Poor Col Tigh's drinking again, and he's a fricking Cylon. That show had all sorts of promise and then they made Adam cry all the time and Tigh into a Cylon. What the frak is that. I'm sick of complexity in characters. I want -Gods-.

Re:How do you reinvent Trek?

[Jim Hall]

You'd have to change the animal so much that it wouldn't seem recognizable. The old formula has become such a cliche that there's absolutely nothing you can reuse from it. Reset button at the end of the episode, lame. Space anomalies, lame. Gritty scifi future with lots of angst, made lame by overexposure on Galactica. Aliens who look exactly like us save for bumpy foreheads? I could buy it when I was younger but it's just ridiculous these days. (I'll probably be in the minority on this one.) Time-travel plots, squishy techno-babble science plots, holodeck plots, everything that makes Trek Trek is what's been killing it. It's like asking "Can we make a healthy Big Mac?" Yeah, and by the time you're done removing everything that's bad about that burger, you're left with nothing but lettuce and sesame seeds.

As a fan, what I'd like to see is the Star Trek experience from another point of view. Don't keep giving us the "good guys", the Federation, with their Prime Directive.

Give us a series based on, say, the Klingons (TNG era .. please skip the whole "TOS to TNG" evolution thing - TOS Klingons looked that way because of budget, that's it.) A story similar to Star Trek: Klingon would make a great pilot for a Klingon-based series - a young Klingon goes through the Rite of Ascension to become a true Warrior, joins a ship. Let the series experience the Star Trek universe through the lens of a young Klingon - not some goody Federation captain, which we've now seen more times than we need.

As he experiences the universe as a Klingon warrior, so do we. Let a mentor show him the true path of a Klingon warrior. Show the audience the code of honor from the Klingons. Throw in some Klingon language (swearing in Klingon!)

In this series, there's no Prime Directive. Very little diplomacy, no helping other cultures to better themselves. And it should go without saying: no journey of self-discovery, except for the central character as he learns what it means to be a true Klingon warrior.

Hey, I'd watch that every week!

Re:Lost interest

[porcupine8]

I disagree. In the past couple of years, my husband and I have been Netflixing all of TNG, as well as BSG (though we're caught up now) and, for a couple weeks, Babylon 5. We agree that while TNG was a very good show once it hit its stride in season 3, a bit more continuity would have made it really great. In fact, we're noticing the bits of continuity that we never noticed when it was on and we were in jr high (like Worf's several-season dealing-with-the-empire arc), and that alone is making the series even better for us. We love BSG for its serialness, and Babylon 5 we appreciated the serial nature but couldn't get past how bad each individual episode was.

And there is definitely a happy medium to be found between "cliffhanger at the end of every episode" and "everything tied up with a neat little bow." To leave sci-fi, Scrubs strikes this balance very nicely. There are a lot of multi-episode arcs (often found in the subplots), and continuity in general is something that happens consistently rather than once a season, but the actual main plot line of each episode is almost always resolved at the end. You get actual character development over time, unlike many traditional sitcoms, but you can also watch a single episode and be satisfied at the end.