I love Star Trek. It's one of my guilty pleasures. So when I heard that Star Trek: Discovery was going to be a thing, I was pretty excited. It's the first time in 12 years Star Trek has been on television. The other thing I was excited about was that this show was not going to be part of the Star Trek reboot series. Which, to be honest, although they are not bad movies, they don't feel like Star Trek movies. It's basically Star Trek that Hollywood executives jizzed all over. Anyway, getting back to Discovery...
As the news of this new series came out, it struck me that this show doesn't really sound that compelling. It follows the crew of the USS Discovery some ten years prior to Star Trek: The Original Series. So effectively, a prequel. This was already done before with Star Trek: Enterprise, which followed the adventures of the first Enterprise crew. The show was canceled. For good reason. Star Trek had been tapped out, the well had been dry.
I'd like to be optimistic about this new series which, full disclosure, I have not seen yet (I'm waiting for the entire season to finish it's run). However, I think the problems with Star Trek as a television series that dogged later installments like Voyager and Enterprise are still rearing its ugly head.
Star Trek turned 50 last year when the announcement that Discovery was going into production. So this really explains why they're trying to tap into something before the original series. However, there are going to be inherent obstacles that will make this a bad fit, at least in my mind.
Thank god they upgraded all those LCD displays with still images, it was getting too distracting.
First of all, the original Star Trek is, again, over 50 years old, and it has not aged well. Hell, it hadn't aged well when they started The Next Generation. That's where Star Trek prequels really start running ground. Enterprise and Discovery will always look leagues better than the original series. Yes, you'd have to be an utter lunatic to try and match the camp and look of the original series for anything more than parody. However, going back and tells stories prior to the original series just make TOS look even worse than ever. That makes watching this stuff in chronological order almost painful. Having the advantage of new technology, better props and make-up, make the entire pre-TOS Star Trek universe look way more exciting than TOS. In fact, it makes the Enterprise's mission seem incredibly banal compared to other ships. What sector of the galaxy were Kirk and his crew exploring anyway? The most boring? While his crew was fighting Space Lincolns and recreating the Battle at the O.K. Corral, other members of the Federation were actually exploring and interacting with the otherworldly.
Due to Federation budget cuts, the Enterprise crew had to rely on a slide rule for navigation.
The other issue that comes up is the fact that Star Trek was rife with cameos by former cast members. Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Scotty all appeared on TNG, the TNG crew regularly cameoed on DS9 and Voyager, Sulu also appeared on the latter. So what kind of cameos are they going to have on Discovery?
Hint
Here's the thing: Most of the cast of the original series is dead, leaving William Shatner, George Takai, Nichelle Nichols, and Walter Koenig left to make cameos. That poses a problem because the actors in question are at least twice the age they were when they first appeared on the show. Unless they do some creepy posthumous or de-aging CGI, that's just not going to cut it. Also, don't hold your breath for Shatner, if you even bring up Star Trek with the guy he'll find a way to talk about his horse ranch instead.
"Well maybe they can do a time travel episode with some of the later crews" is something you may say in retort to this, but they've tried that before. Does nobody remember the Holodeck episode of Enterprise?
Here's a reminder....
Technically, you could have the crew from TNG, DS9, or Voyager, even push the crew of Enterprise forward in time. However, you're still going to have the same problem. If you're going to do a time travel episode that features a previously seen period of Star Trek you still have the age issue. Not to mention how to explain it in continuity. Speaking of continuity....
Star Trek has a rich continuity and long time fans can be real dicks about inconsistencies. As such, whenever something goes against the established canon, fans freak out. The best example of why prequels are rife for fucking things up, you need only look so far as the Klingons.
In OTS they didn't have any features except for they kind of looked Asian in the way your grandparents picture Asians. By Star Trek: The Motion Picture they had the trademark forehead ridges that have been a staple for 30 years. An explanation in the DS9 episode "Trials and Tribble-ations" was simply "We don't like to talk about it".
Fast forward to Star Trek: Enterprise a show that takes place centuries before ridge-headed Klingons and here we have ridge-headed Klingons. The quick fix? Oh, there was a virus that wiped out their ridges for a few generations. Now Discovery comes out, and you have Klingons that look totally different than anything before. This creates yet another unnecessary explanation to get back to your starting point.
Which creates a problem. Anything that they do that is not established creates some pits in continuity that cannot be explored in the "future" because the "future" has already been defined. Take Enterprise as an example again: One season featured a new alien race known as the Xindi. What the hell happened to them after they were featured on that show? You can't really revisit those characters in anything beyond Discovery for all the reasons I mentioned above.
At the end of the day, Star Trek should have taken notes when Star Wars tried to do prequels. They aren't well liked, they create inconsistencies, and most importantly, they end up sucking to one degree or another.
When Gene Roddenberry created Star Trek: The Next Generation , he didn't go backward. He didn't try to keep Kirk and his crew. He moved forward into the future. That's what Star Trek is supposed to be, boldly going where no one has gone before. TNG showed what had changed in that universe after an entire generation. I think that they should have done the same thing with this recent revival. Move forward. New ships, new crew, new technology, new aliens, new explorations.
Again, I haven't watched Discovery yet. It might turn out to be a good show, but it still isn't presenting anything new to the mythos as a whole.