Finally catching up on SNW and I just got to the puppet episode. After seeing it, I really hope there’s no more Star Trek for another 10 years or so. Just, no.
There's too much potential money at stake and too little originality in Hollywood for me to believe that there will not be another Star Trek film or TV series in the next 20 years. Whether that Star Trek is going to be in the spirit of the original and most of the rest of the franchise (optimistic, secular-humanistic, progressive politically, moralistic, featuring an ensemble cast aboard a Starfleet facility, etc.) remains to be seen. It's just as likely that the revival of Star Trek will be more along the lines of Project Hail Mary and focused around a single person, or that it will focus on the pew-pew space combat rather than morality plays, or throw red meat to conservatives like David Ellison.
Section 31 was kind of dipping their toes into that territory. And it flopped miserably. I don't imagine cranking up the MAGA dial to having the captain telling a J'naii "I don't acknowledge your make-believe identity! Your whole species isn't real! " would rake in more bucks. Maybe for awhile, but it would be like the martyr-hood of Charlie Kirk; a big spike, and then an implosion.
I don't see Section 31 as an attempt to appease MAGA types. If it were, a few things would be changed: 1. The counterbalance to Michelle Yeoh's character for sure would be a white male. or at least, there would be at least one white male that the viewing audience would be able to get behind. 2. The threat to the Federation would have been more closely parallel to a conservative boogeyman (i.e. aliens trying to infiltrate/weaken/replace good members of Starfleet, weak-willed Starfleet appeasers who aren't standing up to the Klingons and the Romulans, believers in some pie-in-the-sky energy source rather than good ol' dilithium crystals, bureaucrats who were focused on obeying the letter of the Prime Directive or other regulations rather than doing what's right and saving lives, etc.). Honestly, Section 31 would have been way better if they had done it with such a bent rather than the mishmash it was. I could easily see Paramount attempting to ape successful sci-fi like the Matrix, Terminator, Aliens, the Martian, Predator: Badlands, or Project: Hail Mary "but Star Trek."
I've still to see the last two episodes, now El Wifey is back we'll probably get to them before weekend, however I think I can comfortably say this season has been less than the sum of its parts. The only episode I genuinely couldn't stand was the soap opera one, maybe if they'd got Joan Collins in too that would have redeemed it, but they didn't, so it wasn't. None of the other episodes I found bad, not even the Muppet one, but such a density of over-gimmicked episodes made them grate more than they would otherwise.
Point of order - TOS did sometimes challenge some ideas that progressives have held, both in eugenics and population control. The Fabians cheerfully dove into eugenics in the late 19th and early 20th, and it hung over well in the middle of the 20th as a solution to the Malthusian Trap. Also needs to be a recognition that left/right conservative/progressive positions can switch over in time - look at the UK as part of the EU/EEC, in the 1970s it was promoted by the conservative-right, and mostly opposed by the progressive-left. Show a picture of Thatcher promoting joining the EEC to a modern young progressive, and you're likely to watch their molten brains flow out of their ears. I don't even need to go into how cultural appropriation went from unacceptable to practically an entrance exam.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. S31 was a just a poor attempt at action/humour, and Yeoh wouldn't have been a passive actor given the whole thing was meant to be promoting a Trek movie with an Oscar winner, and I doubt at any point she'd have gone along with any MAGAness being turned up to 11. Trek has always had problems in how it attempts to get new viewers whilst maintaining the old ones. From thinking Wesley would be a good hook for younger viewers, to marketing SFA like 90201, S31 was just another cack-handed attempt at getting a new audience. It probably would have worked when Limp Bizkit were unaccountably popular, but not in the here and now.
The irony being all those had some Trek DNA in them already. I think trying to replicate other heavily sci-fi would mostly be a bad move, looking at other successful shows and seeing if they could fit a Trek template would be better. Take Tracker, that would work in any Trek era. Reacher too. A Law and Order type series? Those are already successful tropes that could easily be transferred, and likely at lower costs than an out-and-out sci-fi series. And that's the thing, sci-fi is expensive, and comes with higher risks, and Skydance is looking to cut costs. A few comparatively cheap limited shows with the options to expand past one season if successful is probably the best future for Trek.
Oh for sure, just as Trek had episodes that fell into the exception to all this. The fact that there's a chapel on board the Enterprise as shown in Balance of Terror and Kirk saying that mankind has no need for gods and that it finds the one sufficient, are exceptions to the secular-humanist approach, and the show fully swallowed the Kool-Aid about the Cold War proxy war approach being good.
Agreed 100%. In fact I've been carrying around a show pitch for a L&O/CSI Trek series for a few years, but getting an audience for that pitch has become exponentially harder right now. It's my "hail mary" dream.
Most of what I was mentioning was focusing on possibilities for big screen Trek, so that's why the focus would be on adapting big screen movies and movie properties. I think hybrids of Trek and popular TV series would be workable too. I think some of the best episodes on Trek have been courtroom drama ones, so it's surprising to me that they haven't had regular characters on any of the series that are JAGs or lawyers, and think a series based around such a concept would be very interesting. Good luck making that pitch, Crosis!
I had the opposite reaction - these season felt to me like more than the sum of it's parts because the good ones were so very good I was able to live with middling ones like "Human Best Friend". The muppet show episode was the only one that I'm utterly turned off by (and I'll repeat, if it was a deliberate send up - like Lower Decks - if it was a ST spoof in an episode of the muppet show, I'd have found it to be a lot of fun. If it was "Q/Trelane fucks with our heroes" I'd have been cool with it. The revelation that it was a dream was a redeeming moment for me (the dare not ask me to believe this shit actually happened) but it's not what I want in Star Trek. The other gimmicks were admittedly too frequent but not nonsensical. Well, maybe the fairy tale.
