‘And We Have Those Sets’: Showrunner Shares Worst Rationale for Star Trek Series Ever
“Strange New Worlds” showrunners tease awful potential reboot of the original series
Okay, this is definitely a “good news/bad news” situation.
Amid the recent revelations that the truncated fifth season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds will be its last, the series showrunners are talking about what could come next.
In a world where the active franchise has contracted severely over the last year or so, folks in charge of Star Trek are actively thinking about launching a new series to follow on.
That’s the good news — and pretty much the only good news.
The rest was pretty bad — really, really bad.
Strange New Worlds showrunners Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers were quoted from a panel discussion at the series’ Season 3 premiere event at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York.
It was there that the pair actually suggested following the end of Strange New Worlds with a reboot of the original series from the 1960s.
What’s worse is that their stated rationale for such a remake was the perhaps the most Hollywood-lame, least imaginative reason possible.
We know that any new Star Trek series — well, any new series, period — needs a strong concept if it’s going to be successful and endure for any lasting period of time.
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It wasn’t really my cup of tea, but Ronald D Moore had a strong, well-thought-out concept for his Battlestar Galactica reboot.
He wasn’t just trying to copy the original, but rather he made sure that his version had a unique voice and point-of-view.
Even Strange New Worlds itself began with a concept fans found extremely compelling. It took characters who were only briefly introduced during the original series, including Captain Christopher Pike and Number One — and subsequently reintroduced during the course of Star Trek: Discovery — and tell the story of the five-year mission aboard the starship Enterprise that occurred before Jim Kirk takes command.
So what would the rationale be for a reboot of the original series? Just to get yet another remake of “The Naked Time”?
Co-showrunner Akiva Goldsman was referring to how producers plan to wrap up Strange New Worlds when he said, “And then we run into TOS.”
He shifted to a conspiratorial tone when he teased the idea of the original series reboot noting that the characters “aren’t dying,” and “And we have those sets…”
That’s the reason for an original series remake? A new use for the existing sets?
Reusing sets?
How much more of a studio bean-counting and creatively bankrupt reason could he offer?
JJ Abrams’ Kelvin timeline movies already gave us an original series reboot, and —even as frankly uneven as those were — at least they seemed to have a little more reason behind them than reusing existing sets.
Frankly, Star Trek’s been reusing sets for decades.
The Enterprise bridge set from the original series movies became the Battle Bridge of the Enterprise-D in Star Trek: The Next Generation, the Enterprise-D’s engine room, transporter room, and conference room were also repurposed for Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, and Enterprise refit interiors from the original series movies — like the sickbay, transporter room, and engineering set — were reused on the Enterprise-D as well.
And those are just a few of the examples.
So if Akiva Goldsman really wants to reuse sets and save Paramount a few bucks, fine.
Hire a top-notch production designer like Dave Blass or Liz Kloczkowski — both of whom worked on Star Trek: Picard — and let their imaginations run wild coming up with ways to repurpose the Strange New Worlds sets to finally give us Star Trek: Legacy.
At least that’s a series we already know fans want.
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