A Brief Guide to Star Trek

series, while also being a back to basics, ‘starship facing the unknown’ show. It would have one clear connection to
The Original Series
, the
Star Trek
founding myth. The sole survivor of the USS
Sojourner
(a victim of the mysterious ‘scourge’) would have been Lt Commander Alexander Kirk, co-opted onto the crew of an allnew
Enterprise
(the first in 300 years), sent out in search of the unknown malevolent enemy. Other crewmembers would have included The 76th Distillation of Blue, a gaseous alien who uses a ‘motion suit’ to interact with humans and goes by the name Diz, and M.A.J.E.L., the ship’s sentient computer (named after Roddenberry’s wife – and voice of the
Enterprise
computer – Majel Barrett).
    A proposal document for the series was drawn up after a lengthy dinner conversation between Singer, writer Christopher McQuarrie (
The Usual Suspects
, which Singer had also directed) and Robert Meyer Burnett (director of
Free Enterprise
). The document recognised that television storytelling had changed since
Star Trek
had originally been created, promising ‘more complex, serialized stories . . . compelling stories about our world today. Let
Star Trek
breathe. Let’s grapple again with the issues of the day – diversity, government power, gender frictions, a controversial war on foreign soil’. The proposal sets out to ‘acknowledge what’s come before, [but] turn the
Star Trek
universe upside down’.
    Burnett claimed the first draft outline was never submitted to Paramount as the J. J. Abrams movie was announced instead. ‘It was meant to be a jumping off point for further discussion’, he told website i09, ‘not to ever be sent anywhere, certainly not to any network. There are things in the pitch I still quite like. I wanted to see more “hard” sci-fi concepts addressed directly in
Trek
.’
    There was another big-name, more fully developed
Star Trek
pitch dating from 2004.
Babylon 5
creator J. MichaelStraczynski and UFO-conspiracy series
Dark Skies
creator Bryce Zabel co-authored an unsolicited TV series pitch en -titled ‘
Star Trek
: Re-boot the Universe’. The fourteen-page document was sub-headed ‘A Proposal For Re-Imagining the First Five-Year Mission’.
    The pair had met when sharing a flight between Los Angeles and Vancouver (where many American TV shows are shot). Later, when working together on an ultimately unmade TV mini-series called
Cult
, their conversation turned to the current state of
Star Trek
, as
Enterprise
was reaching its final stages. ‘We wanted to start over, use Kirk, Spock and McCoy and others in a powerful new origin story about what it was that bonded them in such strong friendship, and show them off as you’d never seen them before. It was, admittedly, pretty audacious’, Zabel later wrote on his website.
    In their resulting document – after singing the praises of
Star Trek
as a concept – the authors then lamented the state of the franchise in 2004. ‘There’s trouble in the
Star Trek
universe. Ratings have declined, demographics have stagnated . . . Can
Star Trek
be saved?’ The difficulty of telling new stories within the overgrown, complicated, established
Star Trek
universe was summed up with the following responses to proposed story ideas: ‘It’s been done, it’s being done or it would never be done’. The most recent
Star Trek
spin-off shows were characterised as ‘a copy of a copy of a copy’, and the blame for
Star Trek
’s decline lay with the fact that ‘the all-too-reasonable desire to protect the franchise may now be the cause of its stagnation’.
    The answer proposed by Straczynski and Zabel? ‘The best solution is to go back to the original and start again. It’s time to re-boot the
Star Trek
universe.’ Their concept for twenty-first-century
Star Trek
was a return to the 1960s setting and characters but combined with ‘the kind of storytelling that audiences of 2004 are used to seeing in modern prime-time television. Hard-hitting. Exciting. Character-driven. Innovative.’ Straczynski had demonstrated his undoubted ability to achieve all of that with the groundbreaking
Babylon 5
during the latter half of the 1990s. Now he wanted to apply those storytelling techniques to
Star Trek
.
    His starting point would have been ‘the three best things in the
Star Trek
universe: Kirk. Spock. McCoy’. These three characters would be reimagined and sent off on a brand new five-year mission to explore strange new worlds