The Season-Long City on the Edge

As I write this we're less than 24 hours away from Star Trek: Discovery's season four premiere in the United States. Discovery was the first Star Trek show to completely break away from the episodic format. Rather than tell 13 different stories every season, Discovery (and its sibling, Picard) tells one story broken up into 13 pieces.

In an online discussion, someone pointed out that Dr. McCoy once shot himself up with space heroin and erased time and they fixed that mess in 45 minutes. That got me thinking about how "The City on the Edge of Forever" would work if if were a modern Star Trek show. I imagine it might go something like this:

Episode 1 "Waves in the Sea of Time, Part 1": Weird things happen when Federation colonies are hit by "time waves". The Enterprise is sent to find their source. McCoy and Spock notice that Kirk seems upset about something.

Episode 2 "Waves in the Sea of Time, Part 2": Time waves cause more weird things to happen. Spock comes up with an algorithm to compute their exact source. "This is the power of math!" We learn that Kirk is hurting because got a "Dear James" letter from his girlfriend. End on Spock's algorithm pinpointing the source of the waves.

Episode 3 "There Be Squalls Ahead": Enterprise en route to the source of the time waves. McCoy finds out about Kirk's breakup. He shares that he's feeling dissatisfied with life in space. Wishes for a simpler existence on Earth. Time waves cause tech problems for Scotty. Episode ends with ship in danger.

Episode 4 "Typhoon" : Much action and peril as time waves threaten to tear the ship apart. Different ways to modify the shields to protect the ship are tried, but nothing works. Just in the nick of time, Scotty discovers the solution and implements it. We drop out of warp at the source of the waves: a mysterious, remote planet.

Episode 5 "Unsafe Harbor": Investigation of the planet begins. Time waves continue to buffet the ship. McCoy is being run ragged caring for all the injured. Just as the worst appears to be over, he's called to the Bridge to help a wounded Sulu. Accidentally shoots himself up with cordrazine.

Episode 6 "The Darkness That Runs Through the Soul of Man": A dangerous hide-and-seek as the characters chase a cordrazine-overdosed McCoy through the ship. We cut between their perspective and his terrifying hallucinations. McCoy knocks out the transporter chief and escapes to the planet as the episode ends.

Episode 7 "What World Lies Beyond That Stormy Sea": Notice that we're halfway through the season and the story is only just now getting started. Kirk leads a landing party to the planet to retrieve McCoy. We find the Guardian, learn what it is, and then McCoy jumps through and changes history. What took five minutes in 1967 takes 45 here.

Episode 8 "Into Time's River": Kirk and Spock hatch their plan to go through the Guardian, get McCoy, and fix history. The encounter with and flight from the police officer is much longer and more action-packed here. Episode ends just as Edith Keeler discovers them in the basement of her mission.

Episode 9 "The Light in the Heart, The Dark in the Night": Kirk and Spock acclimate to life in 1930s NYC. Fish-out-of-water moments, some dangerous and some humorous. Edith Keeler speechifies about the future, and Kirk starts to get all googly-eyed. Elsewhere in the city, McCoy appears. In his paranoid state, he kills the homeless man he encounters. Episode ends with him fleeing into the night.

Episode 10 "Stone Knives and Bearskins and Murder": Spock gets the idea to build a memory circuit. Kirk and Edith begin their romance. Meanwhile McCoy, still suffering from the effects of the cordazine, kills a couple guys who try to mug him. Kirk and Spock read about the killings in the paper and wonder.

Episode 11 "Spocky Mnemonic": Spock makes progress on his memory circuit. Kirk confides in Edith about his recent failed romance and gets dangerously close to telling her who he and Spock really are. The cops close in on McCoy.

Episode 12 "The Heart Wants What the Future Cannot Possess": Spock conducts several tests of his memory circuit as the Kirk-Edith romance continues. Spock realizes that Edith must die for history to be set right. Cops hunting for the hobo killer find an unconscious drunk in a bloodstained Starfleet uniform. Nearby, McCoy is in the drunk's clothes, shivering as he comes down from the cordrazine. Spock tells Kirk that Edith must die just as McCoy stumbles into the mission.

Episode 13 "Return to Tomorrow's Past Future": Edith nurses McCoy back to health. It's clear he has only vague memories of his actions under the cordrazine's influence. A few near misses as Kirk and Spock almost cross paths with him. Meanwhile, a police detective has realized who's really responsible for the murders and traced McCoy's steps to the mission. McCoy flees just as Kirk and Edith are leaving on their date. He sees Edith about to get hit by the truck and gives up his chance to escape to save her. Kirk stops him, and Spock steps out of the shadows and nerve-pinches the cop before he can arrest McCoy. The Guardian pulls them back to the 23rd century. McCoy is obviously troubled by what happened and will need much help to recover. (Naturally this will all happen offscreen and he'll be 100% fine by next season's premiere.) Kirk is sad about the end of yet another romance, but he finishes out the season with a Grey's Anatomy voiceover about how sometimes we look to the past to find our future, and in that future we find the stars, and in the stars we find hope, and in that hope we find ourselves.

And that's how you stretch a 45-minute story into 13 episodes. The trick is to add a lot of additional activity but no actual depth, lots of noise but no substance. You can have big emotional moments, but they should be like the explosions in Michael Bay movies: loud, spectacular, and impressively done from a technical perspective, but with no lasting effects on the characters. 

Hooray for 21st century television.

The Vulcan Coiffure Conundrum

 As incredible as it seems, there were other things going on in 1960s pop culture besides Star Trek. For example, these guys:

The Beatles were kind of a big deal in the '60s, in much the same way that dinosaurs are a big deal in Jurassic Park. Since Star Trek was a product of that decade, it was inevitable that someone in the cast would have a Beatle-esque hairstyle.

You see, Gene Roddenberry or whoever made the decision about what Spock's hair should look like wasn't thinking "This is the official haircut of the planet Vulcan." Leonard Nimoy had straight hair, and this was a contemporary style that looked good on him.

Fast-forward to 1977. The studio was gearing up to revive Star Trek as the cornerstone of their Paramount-branded TV network that was supposed to launch in 1978. Leonard Nimoy refused to sign on, so a new, younger Vulcan character named Xon was created and actor David Gartreaux was cast in the role. In the surviving footage of the screen tests for Xon, the character has a very 1970s look:

Of course, Xon didn't get to join the rest of the cast in their jump to the big screen. Robert Wise was insistent that you couldn't have a Star Trek movie without Mr. Spock, so Leonard Nimoy was brought back after all. And although the rest of the Star Trek cast had appropriate 1970s hairdos to go with their disco pajama costumes, Nimoy was still sporting the same look he had in the '60s. It's a little strange when you think about it. They didn't put Grace Lee Whitney in her 1960s beehive, after all. And despite also rocking a Monkees-esque 'do on the TV series, Walter Koenig appeared in the movie with a more appropriately-1970s Brick Tamland look.

But Spock wasn't the only Vulcan in the movie. In a scene at Starfleet Headquarters near the beginning of the story we meet the refitted Enterprise's original Science Officer, ill-fated Commander Sonak:

And it's here where the franchise starts down the path of the "All Vulcan Men Look Like Spock" cliche. You could argue that Sonak's assignment to the Enterprise sprang from Kirk's irrational desire for everything to be just like it was on his first 5-year mission, and having him look kind of like Spock was intended to be a subtle visual cue to Kirk's mental state.

We didn't see a lot of Vulcans in the other Original Series movies, but we did catch a glimpse of one at the very beginning of The Next Generation's premiere episode. Given that Gene Roddenberry was eager for the show to stand on its own, you'd think that he'd take the opportunity to give the first Vulcan we ever see a slightly different look. Instead, we get Spock Junior.

Aside from Suzie Plakson's Dr. Selar in the second season, we didn't see another new Vulcan character until the third-season episode "Sarek". Sure enough, he was also rocking the Spock look:

Which is kind of funny, inasmuch as the writers had to fight tooth and nail to be allowed to even mention the name "Spock" in the episode. The Star Trek universe had received a complete visual overhaul since the days of the Original Series, so why was it still clinging to this one very dated piece of the 1960s?

Even worse were the Romulans. It was bad enough that the costume designer decided that their singular fashion motif would be "cartoonishly big shoulderpads". But (no doubt to save money and time on makeup) every Romulan we ever saw on the TNG-era shows--male or female, military or civilian, young or old--had the exact same Moe-from-the-Three-Stooges hairstyle:

And the few times we saw Vulcans on Deep Space Nine the makeup people just slapped a leftover Romulan wig on them:

Of course, 1990s Star Trek was made on very tight schedules with TV budgets. And since Executive Producer Rick Berman was aggressively uncreative, he was very strict about never stepping outside established franchise tropes. But after Berman's time with the franchise was over the studio tapped big-name creator J.J. Abrams to reimagine Star Trek as a big-budget blockbuster movie.

Suddenly, nothing was sacred. Matt Jeffries' classic USS Enterprise design was sleekified and amped-up. The interiors were redesigned to look like a futuristic Apple Store (except for the Engineering section, which now looked like the inside of a brewery). And for the first time in decades, our favorite starship's command crew wouldn't be played by a group of aging TV actors. Much like David Gartreaux thirty years earlier, the actor cast as the Vulcan science officer had a good head of hair:

Since the rest of the cast wasn't being forced to adopt the 1960s hairstyles of their TV counterparts, there's no reason to think that J.J. Abrams and his team would saddle Quinto with an embarrassing bowl cut, right? Right?

Of course they did! Because how would the audience know it's Spock without his 1960s hairstyle? I mean, we somehow recognized Anton Yelchin as Chekov even though he wasn't wearing a Monkees wig but Spock just HAD to look like Moe from the Three Stooges or we wouldn't know who it was! It's almost as bad as that scene in Star Trek: Nemesis when Picard is looking at a picture of himself as a young cadet and it's Tom Hardy with a shaved head. You can almost hear the clueless executive saying "He has to be bald in the picture or the audience won't know it's Picard, because Picard is the bald Captain."

Fast forward to the present day. Star Trek has again been reimagined (this time with the J.J. Abrams-adjacent Alex Kurtzman at the helm) and once again has angered a lot of old-school fans with its frequent disregard for some of the long-standing Star Trek tropes. They even recast Ethan Peck--another young actor with Hollywood-quality hair--as Spock.

But did they resist the temptation to put a ridiculous Moe wig on him this time? Did the new powers-that-be finally bow to the logic that Vulcan society just might be a more follically-diverse place than North Korea? Maybe, just maybe, did they let this guy keep his perfect hair, put a pair of pointed ears on him, and call it a day?

Are we even surprised?

You said it, Doctor.

The Discovery-Orville Transposition

From the beginning, Star Trek: Discovery alienated a small but very loud segment of the Star Trek fanbase: middle-aged men who obsess over "canon" with a near-religious fervor. Now, I'm not knocking anyone for disliking a TV show; if Discovery's not your thing that's perfectly okay and there are definitely fans of previous Treks who have decided to sit Discovery out. But there's a lunatic fringe that's angry at Disco for even existing, and you can usually find them online proclaiming that Seth MacFarlane's The Orville is the real Star Trek that "the fans" want.

The Orville is a good-enough show. It's so reminiscent of Next Generation-era Trek that I'm surprised CBS hasn't sued. But it's a Seth MacFarlane production, so of course there's plenty of toilet humor and modern pop culture references. Nevertheless, the "Orville-is-the-real-Trek" crowd seem happy to overlook that, presumably because it gives them their fix of episodic space exploration by a happy family of characters. (I'm sure their preference for The Orville over Discovery has nothing to do with the fact that the series lead is a white male.) And like I said, I'm not here to knock anyone's honest preferences.

But I do despise double standards. And it occurs to me that some of the same people who extol The Orville as the spiritual successor to Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek are happy to overlook the ways that show falls short of the Trek ideal, even as they continue to hate-watch Discovery just to pick it to pieces. So let's have a little thought experiment: imagine an alternate universe where it's September 2017, and sci-fi fans are eagerly anticipating the premiere of two new TV shows: Star Trek: Orville on CBS All Access, and Discovery on Fox.

Now, a halfway decent blog written by a person with the Photoshop skills of your average ring-tailed lemur would spice up this article with some cleverly doctored promo posters from this alternate reality. But this blog is not halfway decent, so I've got nothing.

Anyway, Star Trek: Orville is the result of CBS's decision to give Seth MacFarlane the keys to the Star Trek franchise. The USS Orville is a Federation starship in the late 24th century, after the events of the TNG-era shows and movies. In the usual Star Trek vein, it sticks to mostly-episodic tales of space exploration told in the familiar A-plot/B-plot format. But in an effort to give this new Trek a lighter, more relatable tone it features all the toilet humor and pop-culture references you expect from a Seth MacFarlane production.

Meanwhile, Fox is going in a darker, more serious direction with Discovery, the lavishly-produced brainchild of producer Bryan Fuller. It's rumored that Fuller originally pitched the idea to CBS as a Star Trek revival but they passed, opting instead to go with Seth MacFarlane's proposal that had more in common with the Star Trek shows that had come before. Discovery is the redemption tale of Commander Michael Burnham, stripped of rank after her mutiny against Captain Georgiou of the USS Shenzhou plunges the Planetary Union into interstellar war against the alien Krill.

In this scenario, isn't it easy to imagine longtime Star Trek fans angrily complaining that Orville is just a tired retread of stuff we've seen before, and that Seth MacFarlane's lowbrow humor and anachronistic pop culture references are an insult to Gene Roddenberry's vision? Isn't it easy to imagine them gravitating to Discovery instead, with its lavish production values and more serious tone, proclaiming it to be the "real" Star Trek? Might they overlook its imperfections due to creator Bryan Fuller's Star Trek pedigree and their dissatisfaction with the Seth MacFarlane-helmed "official" Trek?

We'll never know, of course. But it's fascinating to contemplate.

The Star Trek: Discovery Halftime Summation Part 2: Everything Else

Star Trek: Discovery is the fifth new Star Trek show since The Next Generation in 1987. We longtime fans therefore have a pretty good idea of how these things are supposed to go. The two-hour premiere introduces all the characters and sets up the new show's status quo. And then the subsequent episodes give each character some time in the spotlight while exploring different themes in a very episodic way. There's the episode where Wesley Crusher learns about drug abuse, the one where Major Kira confronts a Cardassian war criminal, and the one where Scott Bakula farts around and does nothing of consequence because Rick Berman and friends were totally out of gas by the time they did Enterprise.

Discovery does none of that. Well, almost none of it. The two-hour premiere actually starts out a lot like the other Star Treks. We meet Michael Burnham, Captain Georgiou, and the crew of the USS Shenzhou as they set off on a mission to investigate a Federation communications buoy that's gone silent. Now, since this is a modern TV show we expect a few more "extreme" moments that earlier Treks would never have attempted. So it's not altogether shocking when the personable young Ensign who mans the Navigator's station on the bridge gets blown into space during a battle with the Klingons. And while Burnham's attempted mutiny at the end of the first hour is a major turning point, things take a predictable turn when, with ten minutes left in Part Two, she comes up with an idea to capture the Klingon leader and avert a full-scale war. We've seen this kind of thing before on Star Trek, so we think we know what comes next: the plan will succeed, the only consequence of Burnham's attempted mutiny will be a stern talking-to from the Captain, and the Shenzhou will warp off into the end credits.

But instead, everything goes sideways. The plan fails in the worst way. Captain Georgiou gets killed. The crew abandons the lifeless hulk of the Shenzhou, and Burnham gets sentenced to life imprisonment for her mutiny. Roll credits.

If you went into Discovery totally blind, it's a huge gut punch. But nobody went into Discovery totally blind, did they? Even if you studiously avoided Internet spoilers, the pre-release publicity (which is usually spoiler-free) was full of photos like this:

Notice how only one of these characters is in the premiere

And it was hard to escape the promotional artwork that proudly showed off a ship that definitely wasn't the Shenzhou.

Thanks to the pre-release publicity, the fate of Captain Georgiou and the Shenzhou was only surprising to people who would also be surprised to learn that Guy Fieri dyes his hair. So we sat through the show's first two hours knowing they were only a prequel and the real show wouldn't start for another week. This really frustrated some folks.

And then when the show got started in earnest with episode three, it completely turned its back on the "normal" Star Trek storytelling format. Discovery isn't broken up into tasty episodic chunks that allow you to watch just one episode to get your Star Trek fix. It's an ongoing serialized tale, more like Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones than anything else. And unlike previous Star Treks, where our main characters were always what they appeared to be and even major revelations about them (like the secret of Odo's origin or Bashir being genetically engineered) didn't change who they were as people, there is some strange, dark stuff going on with our Discovery crew. Captain Lorca is shady, manipulative, and seems to have some kind of secret agenda. He may even be from a parallel universe. And the likable Lt. Ash Tyler is almost certainly some kind of Klingon sleeper agent. Overall, the Discovery crew is not the happy family of characters that every other Star Trek has given us. And that's a dealbreaker for some people.

There's a small-but-vocal group of fans who proclaim that Seth McFarlane's The Orville is the "real" Star Trek. After all, it has a likable family of characters on an open-ended mission to explore the galaxy one episode at a time. It's done stories on on gender identity, social media, and facing your fears. More than one episode has commented on religion in very Roddenberrian way.  Now, I'm not going to bash one show and praise another.  The Internet likes to reduce everything to an either/or proposition. Either Discovery is the Real Star Trek and The Orville is a bland copy, or The Orville is the True Heir to Roddenberry's Vision and Discovery is raping his memory. It seems almost heretical to say you enjoy both shows for different reasons.

When the box-office failure of Nemesis and the cancellation of Enterprise ended Rick Berman's tenure atop the Star Trek franchise, most of the fans were glad to see him go. We all thought it was time for a different creative team to take over and do something new with Star Trek, rather than just recycle the same old stuff over and over. Well, that's what the folks behind Discovery are doing. Whether you like the show or not, you've got to admit that there's never been a Star Trek like it.

While some older fans are upset that Discovery is gleefully slaying their sacred Star Trek cows, a lot of younger fans are really into it. They even got the show renewed for a second season. (Yes, The Orville got picked up for a second season as well, which just proves that there's merit in both shows' approaches.) The whole reason Star Trek survived its cancellation in 1969 was because of the enthusiasm of its mostly-young fanbase. Now it's time for a new generation of Star Trek fans to have "their" Star Trek, the way us older fans had the Original Series or TNG.

Let's not begrudge them that.

The Star Trek: Discovery Halftime Summation Part I: CBS All Access

Since Star Trek: Discovery premiered back in September, lots of people have been recapping and analyzing each episode as it comes out. (I highly recommend the recaps Andi from the Women at Warp podcast has been doing--you can find them here) I really admire people who can turn out thoughtful and funny material on a weekly schedule. I wish I was one of them, but I'm not. So rather than analyze every single episode, I thought I'd use the midseason break to look back at the show so far and discuss a few different aspects of it.

When I was a kid, some of my favorite toys were Lego sets like this one:

It can be fun to follow the instructions and build the thing pictured on the front of the box, but maybe the best thing about Legos is putting the pieces together in new and interesting ways. Now, imagine you had a friend who yelled at you whenever you used the pieces of your Lego set to build anything other than the picture on the box. That's what a noisy minority of Star Trek fans are like.

In 1987 they were furious at Gene Roddenberry for rebooting the franchise with a new cast and a different tone. They didn't want a new series with 1980s sensibilities; they wanted a continuation of the Original Series with the old familiar cast. And in 2017 they're furious with the producers of Star Trek: Discovery for rebooting the franchise with a new cast and a different tone. They don't want a new series tailored to 21st century audiences, they want a continuation of the Next Generation-era Star Trek that Rick Berman produced until it became so boring and repetitive that everybody stopped watching it.

Right now somebody's saying "But I never stopped watching it!" Yeah, and a few people bought M.C. Hammer albums after 1991, too. Just not enough to matter. Having your preferences ignored by a huge multimedia conglomerate might hurt your feelings, but there it is.

Many of these angry fans have focused their ire on CBS's decision to put Discovery on the CBS All Access streaming platform. I've read many of their arguments on the subject, and they all boil down to this:

Perhaps you think I'm being unfair. So I've prepared a Q&A based on actual statements I've seen online since the day we learned that Discovery would be exclusive to CBS All Access.

Q: Star Trek has never been behind a paywall before. It's not fair. 

A: From 1979 - 1986 the only new Star Trek productions were movies. Movie theaters charge admission. There was a literal wall between you and Star Trek that you had to pay money to get past.

Q: No, you idiot! I mean televised Star Trek has never been behind a paywall before! 

A: That's because the last Star Trek show went off the air in 2005. Streaming services weren't a thing then. 

Q: Premium cable channels were, but Paramount didn't put Enterprise on Showtime. 

A: That's because their business plan at the time was to use Star Trek to prop up UPN. (I didn't say it was a good plan.) 

Q: But fans in Europe get to watch Discovery on Netflix! And in Canada it's airing on a cable channel! 

A: How very perceptive of you to notice that things are different in other countries.

Q: But CBS is extorting the fans by charging them to watch Star Trek! 

A: Charging a market-comparable price for a product people want isn't extortion. It's capitalism. 

Q: It's a matter of principle! I'm philosophically opposed to paying for Star Trek!

A: What's that I see on your Facebook wall? It's a picture of your huge collection of Star Trek merchandise worth thousands of dollars! If you're willing to drop $5,000 on a replica phaser rifle, is a $5.99 subscription really the hill you want to die on?

I could go on, but you get the idea. The people who are still mad about CBS All Access are the same folks who believe that the right to free Star Trek was why George Washington fought Nazi T-Rexes in the Civil War. Streaming services are a big deal now. CBS saw how Netflix, Hulu, and HBO used original programming to lure subscribers, and they wanted a piece of that. The promise of new Star Trek was the best way to get it. As my high school economics teacher used to say, nobody is in business because they love you.

I believe All Access is the best place for Discovery. Network TV is very much a quantity-over-quality business. We'd get a longer season if the show was on broadcast TV (26 episodes instead of 15) but given the more hectic schedule and tighter budget, not all of those episodes would be good. And there's no way the show would be as lavishly-produced. The last genre show to air on CBS was the first season of Supergirl, and by the seventh episode they were pulling out the old "superhero loses their powers" trope to save money. And because CBS is mainly the network that senior citizens watch NCIS on, Supergirl's ratings weren't high enough to justify its cost and it got moved to the CW.

Now take a show like Star Trek that has more special effects than a superhero show, and everything you see on screen has to be built from scratch. It wouldn't have done any better in the ratings than Supergirl, and it wouldn't work on the CW because too much of the cast is over 30. So it would've been deemed an expensive failure by the CBS suits, cancelled, and we'd go another decade or so with no new Star Trek.  But on All Access, it can be the most popular show on the platform. And we can get 15 really good episodes per season produced at near-feature-film quality.

Ah, but what about those episodes? Are they really good? I'll start to tackle that question in my next post.

Gene Roddenberry Is Not Here

A while back we were treated to an anecdote from the set of Star Trek: Discovery. It seems they were filming a tense space battle scene, and actor Jason Isaacs ad-libbed "For God's sake!" at the end of a line. When the take was over, writer Kristen Beyer told him that he couldn't say "for God's sake" because in Gene Roddenberry's vision of the 23rd century everyone is an atheist. A few days after the story broke one of the executive producers, Gretchen Berg, contradicted her and cast doubt on whether the initial incident even happened.

Whether or not the story is true, it got me thinking about Gene Roddenberry and the very long shadow he continues to cast over Star Trek. Every time a new iteration of Star Trek comes out, the people behind it make the traditional statement that they're trying to Honor Gene's Vision. They have to say this; if they didn't, angry Trekkies would attack them with plastic bat'leths. But, 26 years after his death, what does honoring Gene Roddenberry's vision even mean?

I'm thinking of a story I heard about one of The Next Generation's most critically-beloved episodes, "Family". It's the second episode of the fourth season, and it comes right after the epic two-parter in which Captain Picard is captured and assimilated by the Borg. Rather than having Picard and the crew of the Enterprise jump right back into action like nothing ever happened, the writers wanted to take some time to show Picard recovering from his ordeal. The result was a wonderful character-driven story that was a nice change of pace after the high-stakes sci-fi action that dominated the season opener. Most people agree that "Family" is one of The Next Generation's finest episodes. But Roddenberry hated it. When the script was in development, he complained that it lacked any physical peril for the ship or characters, and he objected to Captain Picard and his brother not getting along. (Because in Roddenberry's 24th century, humans never disagree with each other, only with hostile aliens, and even then the disagreements are always the hostile aliens' fault and never the perfect enlightened humans'.)

Twenty-three years after the series finale, much of The Next Generation's storytelling seems very dated; episodic A-plot/B-plot scripting that takes very few chances and is always careful to maintain the show's status quo no matter how many outrageous plot gymnastics it takes to do so. "Family" is one of the few scripts they did that could totally work as an episode of 21st-century television. And it's precisely the things that make it work as modern TV that Gene Roddenberry objected to.

"But Dave," you say, "surely if Roddenberry had lived his opinions would've mellowed."

But we can't know that. Because he didn't live. The business of TV production has changed dramatically since Gene passed away in 1991. It's fruitless to try to read the mind of a guy who's been dead 26 years and decide which aspects of a modern TV show he might approve or disapprove of. Gene Roddenberry's ideas about what constituted good Star Trek changed and shifted almost constantly during his lifetime. The one thing that stayed consistent was his belief that the Starfleet characters always viewed violence as a last resort, and would never whip out a phaser and zap an alien creature just because it seemed threatening or gross-looking.

So, if Discovery gives us violent "hero" characters who want to wipe out the Klingons because they look funny, and presents that in a way that makes it clear that the audience is supposed to like and root for these people, then I'll be the first one to say "this is not Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek". But I won't pick through every episode with a proverbial pair of tweezers just to hold things up and say "Gene Roddenberry would never approve of this tricorder sound effect, or that spaceship design, or this line of dialogue that I'm taking out of context so I can get angry on the Internet about it."

It's impossible to know exactly how Gene would react to Discovery. Because Gene Roddenberry is not here anymore.

As of this writing, the show premieres in six days.Watch it if you want. If you don't like it, fine. But let your reasons be your own; don't try to give your personal opinions some greater legitimacy by projecting them onto a dead guy you probably never even met.

My Discovery Dilemma

From the moment Star Trek: Discovery was announced, a small (but very loud) group of fundamentalist Star Trek fans have making angry noises about it, mainly because they fear it'll disrupt their cherished Star Trek "canon". For these people, it doesn't matter if a Star Trek production tells a fun and interesting story with compelling characters unless it strictly adheres to all the picky details of the Star Trek universe that have been established over 50 years of TV episodes and movies. Typically, I've been somewhat dismissive of these people.

The new #StarTrekDiscovery trailer has me even more excited for it. Bite me, canon Nazis.

— David Landon (@futureprobe1982) July 22, 2017

But I have to say I agree with one point that some of them are making: that Star Trek is supposed to be about optimistic space exploration, but the only show on the fall schedule that seems to be doing that is Seth McFarlane's The Orville. Judging from the new trailer and cast interviews from ComicCon, Discovery seems mainly to be about war with the Klingons. So why can't Star Trek be about space exploration again? There's actually a good reason.

The Star Trek universe is too crowded.

Maybe you're saying: "Wait a minute, Dave. The Milky Way galaxy is astonishingly big! There's no way it could ever be 'too crowded'!" And you're right. The real Milky Way is almost incomprehensibly huge, with billions upon billions of stars separated by staggeringly vast distances. But Star Trek isn't set in the real Milky Way galaxy. Star Trek's version of our galaxy is surrounded by an "energy barrier" the color of Pepto-Bismol, and in the center there's not a supermassive black hole, but a planet housing the giant disembodied head of George Murdock cosplaying as the Cowardly Lion:

Star Trek's galaxy is also about as densely-populated as Mumbai. At some point during The Next Generation era they decided that the Federation and most of the familiar Star Trek alien races and empires were in the "Alpha Quadrant" of the galaxy .(Yes, I know that technically the Klingon and Romulan empires are supposed to be in the Beta Quadrant, but judging by nothing but the dialogue we hear on the shows, they're in the Alpha Quadrant with everyone else) Deep Space Nine's wormhole went to the "Gamma Quadrant", which is mostly taken up by the two-millennia-old Dominion, and when Voyager was thrown into the "Delta Quadrant" they met up with Kazon and Vidiians and Hirogen but mostly the Borg, who have been around for untold centuries and are sure to have conquered/wiped out most of that quadrant. It's hard to do any real exploring in Star Trek prequel series like Enterprise or Discovery, because they're just going places we've already seen in other shows. And if you try to do a sequel series about the adventures of the Enterprise-H in the 25th century, then fans will just complain if you don't spend a whole bunch of time checking up on the current goings-on of the Klingons and the Borg and the Cardassians, and you can't go into "unexplored" space without brushing up against the outer fringes of the Borg or Dominion empires.

And anyway, what would be the point? In one episode of Voyager, we meet up with a 29th century version of Starfleet that's flying around in timeships. Timeships! So what's the point of any of this when we know that half a millennium after Captain Picard, Starfleet and the Federation still exist and can apparently move back and forth through time as easily as you and I can walk to the fridge to get a Coke? Is it any wonder that fans of a TV show about a group of space explorers in the future are more excited about The Orville? It's set in a wide-open, unexplored galaxy that isn't bogged down by five decades of continuity and questionable writing.

If you want a really good sense of what Star Trek used to be once upon a time, check out the first 8 or 10 episodes of The Original Series. The "rules" of the Star Trek universe hadn't been set in stone yet. There's no mention of Starfleet or the Federation, no Klingons, and not even a glimpse of Earth. Our people are way out on the edge of a very lonely frontier. The planets we visit are mostly desolate, windswept places, home only to small groups of miners, scientists, or archaeologists sifting through the ruins of a long-dead civilization. There's no zipping back and forth to Earth like future productions would do; we're too far out in space for that. The Star Trek universe is new and pregnant with possibility.

So, how do we return to that? I can only think of one way: give Star Trek the Battlestar Galactica treatment--a hard reboot. Make a clean break with the past, and reimagine Trek from top to bottom. Yes, the hardcore fundamentalist fans will throw a gigantic baby tantrum, but there honestly aren't enough of them to matter.

I'm not saying Discovery is a total loss here, or that it's going to be bad. I haven't seen it yet. But at some pont, it'll end. The J.J. Abrams film series will end, too, (or maybe it already has), and eventually Star Trek will lay fallow for a few years. When it comes back, I hope the people in charge have the guts to start clean.