Foreign Perspectives

As expected the new Star Trek movie did rather well in the opening weekend, pulling in over twice that of the previous box office record Star Trek movie way back in 1996. Of course, that’s broadly what the studio were hoping for and the reason behind the making of this movie by them in the first place.

One complication that always crops up with long running and popular series is that sooner or later the writers end up essentially writing themselves into a corner and the Star Trek franchise is now into its 40th year which leaves Dr Who as the only other science fiction that’s been around longer. In the case of trek, the original NCC 1701 was destroyed in one of the films which makes later series featuring it a non-runner and now we’ve sort-of seen its origins in the latest movie which basically uses it up and the NCC 1701D from the Next Generation series was also destroyed in another film so it’s out of the picture. At least the NX-01 from Enterprise managed to survive into retirement but that also means that a successor series based on it seems unlikely to be a runner even had that series been more successful.

The short gap from the Phoenix to the Enterprise era doesn’t seem to leave much scope for further prequels and in that the NG Enterprise timeline stretches into the origins of the Department for Temporal Investigations there’s an implication that there would be something of a discontinuity in technological development around that time and besides if the DTI are operational then that implies that explorations in time are becoming more important than explorations in space were by that time in the Star Trek universe. That leaves open the potential for a spin-off series, possibly along the lines of the proposed Gary Seven spin-off back in the days of the original series and that could be a relatively open series in that there hasn’t been an awful lot of information put out about the future time cops in any of their interactions within the various series.

So, given that there don’t seem to be any gaps to fit in a new series based on a USS Enterprise, the writers have collectively written themselves into a corner. Unless, of course, one moves to an alternate timeline and a whole new NCC 1701 as they’ve done in the new film. This potentially opens up in effect a remake of the original series and one wonders if that’s what the studio are hoping to do? Interestingly, it also moves knowledge of the potential for time travel and alternate realities into the foreground in this reality so perhaps the DTI or its alternate reality equivalent would be formed much earlier in this particular universe?