A Brief Guide to Star Trek

it told the story in a very free-flowing and decidedly un-
Star Trek
-like way. This was exactly what Berman was looking for: a fresh take on the core
Star Trek
ideas, in the hope of attracting a new audience to the long-running franchise.
    Jendresen’s script had strong support from CBS Paramount studio president Donald DeLine, but fell out of favour with the studio brass when he exited the project to be replaced by Gail Berman (no relation to Rick). Jendresen blamed a ‘classic case of Hollywood regime change’ for the death of his ‘big and epic’
Star Trek
movie: ‘A project is greenlighted [sic] by one regime, and by the time it is delivered there’s a coup d’etat.’ Even before the screenplay was dropped, Rick Berman had confirmed studio reservations that the new
Star Trek
outing featured no established
Star Trek
characters.
    Even though
Star Trek: The Beginning
proved to be a false start, the name of Chase recurred as the lead character in another unseen
Star Trek
project. Believing that the cost of any new live-action TV series or movie was holding back the development of a new
Star Trek
outing, a trio of professional fans, David Rossi, Doug Mirabello and comic book artist José Muñoz, proposed a new animated
Star Trek
series. CBS Paramount declared some interest in the project and allowed the trio to develop concept artwork and write scripts for five ‘mini-episodes’. The idea, under the title
Star Trek: Final Frontier
,pushed the
Star Trek
timeline further forward into the future, post-
Star Trek Nemesis
. A new
Enterprise
was to be captained by Alexander Chase, embarking on a new mission to ‘seek out new life and new civilisations’ in an unknown region of space. An entire crew complement, complete with artwork representations, was developed for the proposed series. The idea was shelved, however, when studio head Gail Berman declared her preference for a radical new
Star Trek
movie – and this one would genuinely go back to the beginning . . .

Chapter 13

Future Imperfect:
Star Trek
(2009)

‘
Gene [Roddenberry was] asked, “What’s going to become of
Star Trek
in the future?” He said that he hoped that some day some bright young thing would come along and do it again, bigger and better than he had ever done it. And he wished them well
.’ Richard Arnold, Gene Roddenberry’s assistant

    Among the three biggest science fiction entertainment franchises of the twentieth century,
Star Trek
had the shortest time out of production, cumulatively. The four-year wait between the end of
Enterprise
and the arrival of J. J. Abrams’ 2009 movie was surprisingly short compared to those endured by fans of
Doctor Who
and
Star Wars
.
    The earliest,
Doctor Who
, began in 1963 in the UK and ran uninterrupted until 1989. A one-off TV movie followed in 1996 before a full ongoing TV series started in 2005. The gap between the original series and its continuation was sixteen years.
    Star Wars
began with a trilogy of movies between 1977 and 1983. A series of bestselling novels by Timothy Zahn in the early 1990s relaunched then-dormant
Star Wars
fandom and led to the release of CGI-upgraded special editions of the original trilogy in 1997, with a brand new prequel trilogy of movies released between 1999 and 2005. Those were followed in 2008 by a hugely successful weekly CGI-animated TV series,
The Clone Wars
.
    Star Trek
had a mere ten-year break (with the exception ofthe short-lived
The Animated Series
) between the last episode of
The Original Series
and the arrival of
The Motion Picture
in 1979. From then until 2005
Star Trek
was in continuous production, either as movies or TV series.

    In the first decade of the twenty-first century, prequels to existing film and television entertainment properties were in vogue, especially in the worlds of science fiction and fantasy. The first use of the term ‘prequel’ in movies is connected to the sections of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 film
The Godfather Part II
, which were set before the events of the previous film. The 1979 movie
Butch and Sundance: The Early Days
was a prequel, but it was the work of filmmakers George Lucas and Steven Spielberg that was to popularise the concept and cause Hollywood to indulge wholesale in the prequel process.
    Lucas and Spielberg used the term ‘prequel’ to chronologically position the second
Indiana Jones
movie,
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
(1984) before the first movie in the series,
Raiders of the Lost