A Brief Guide to Star Trek

and new civilisations, free of all the baggage that
Star Trek
had built up over almost forty years. ‘It is time to go boldly back to the original’, the authors wrote, ‘reborn and retooled for a new millennium’.
    Straczynski and Zabel firmly believed that audiences would be happy to accept new actors playing the much-loved classic characters of Kirk, Spock and McCoy in new television adventures, characterising the trio as ‘the warrior, the priest, the doctor’. The plan was also to reinvent the second-tier characters from
The Original Series
, with new takes on Scotty, Sulu, Uhura and Chekov.
    The ‘creative plan’ for the series proposed an opening two-hour pilot TV movie depicting the meeting of the central trio (no strip clubs here), their discovery of a lost city on an uncharted world and their encounter with the ancient advanced race who had built it (shades of Philip Kaufman’s
Planet of the Titans
movie project). The pilot would end with Kirk (the youngest starship captain in the Federation), Spock and McCoy aboard the
Enterprise
, poised at the edge of known space and ready for exploration.
    A revamp of
Star Trek
’s technology, such as the communicators and tricorders, was proposed, although the classic silhouette of the
Enterprise
would be retained. More complex and adult relationships would drive the drama on a more human level, while action-oriented plots would form the core of the series.
    Straczynski and Zabel’s proposed series would have an on -going narrative arc at its core: throughout the series, Kirk and crew would be seeking the ancient race encountered in the pilot. They would not be the only ones searching for the aliens’ ancient knowledge, though, with ‘forces of darkness’ also on the hunt. Buried deep within the DNA of all species is a mathematicalcode, an ‘artist’s signature’ that could not have occurred by chance. The series’ new Prime Directive would be ‘to do whatever is necessary to find this long-lost race and discover the truth about the common origin of life’. These – and other mysteries – would be woven into the story of the week episodes of the proposed series. Although individual episodes of the proposed show would stand alone, ‘these explorations do not exist in a vacuum, there’s a reason and a mystery behind it all’.
    The document criticised the existence of the holodeck in modern
Star Trek
, stating that
The Original Series
’ characters had no need of such artificial distractions as there were more than enough adventures and more than enough excitement in their real world. The series was planned to run for exactly five seasons, with the overall story having a beginning, a middle and an end (just like Straczynski’s
Babylon 5
). At the end of the five-year story arc, the
Enterprise
and her remaining crew would return to Earth, allowing any follow-up series to ‘move the franchise into new territory’. The writers proposed returning to one of
Star Trek
’s earliest habits – buying in short stories from top science fiction authors to adapt to the
Star Trek
format. The modern equivalents to Richard Matheson, Robert Bloch and Norman Spinrad were (according to Straczynski and Zabel), Neil Gaiman, Dean Koontz and Stephen King.
    Straczynski and Zabel’s document proposed that all preexisting
Star Trek
material should be relegated to ‘Universe A’, permitting their rebooted
Star Trek
to be free of previous con -tinuity ties and dubbed ‘Universe B’. This would allow for ‘the unshackling of all the pent-up talent and ideas that are precluded from expression by virtue of what has gone on before’.
    The series would simply be called
Star Trek
and would be a ‘bold new interpretation . . . a fresh start’. Symptomatic of this fresh start was the suggestion that in this version, Scotty should be a woman (a similar tactic had been used by Ron Moore in 2003’s
Battlestar Galactica
, recasting the role of Starbuck as female).
    The document included a sparse breakdown of a proposedfirst season, mainly a structure with rough story points promising a mix of stories adapted from
The Original Series
, tales from well-known writers and stand-alone original stories, all serving the larger mystery arc of the long-lost ancient race. The writers promised this series would spark an all-new wave of
Star Trek
excitement, something they dubbed ‘the coming buzz’. The search for actors to fill the iconic roles of Kirk, Spock and McCoy would be