Foreign Perspectives

Once the original Star Trek series started to do really well in syndication after it had been canceled it was obvious that “something” would be produced to follow it up although it was probably not so obvious that so many “somethings” would be done over the decades which followed it.

Clearly the easy thing to do is to produce a follow-on of some sort but for a successful series that becomes more and more difficult to do both in terms of the writing and indeed of the fees demanded by the actors to reappear. In the case of Star Trek this meant that the follow-on series were spin-offs with very little real connection with the original series. Certainly the Next Generation and Deep Space Nine made little attempt to truly place themselves within the confines of the original series. Funnily enough, although Voyager was effectively in an entirely different universe, it was the one that seemed to me to be closest to the concept of the original series in exploring new worlds, new civilisations and boldly going.

Once the sequels had largely been exhausted it was time to consider prequels. In a science-fiction series these can get away with being set so many years before the original that there’s no problem with actors needing to appear younger and so Enterprise got away with an entirely different cast. The problem with that series seemed to be that it’s quite difficult to develop a plausible set of technologies that whilst more advanced than what we have now, are less advanced than what’s to come. Unfortunately in the case of Enterprise this was particularly difficult as a lot of the technologies from the original series are already available in the shops in some form eg the communicator, electronic notepad, etc. which meant that those remaining seemed to be confined to limiting the capability of what was shown on the original series eg the less perfect transporter, the slower warp drive, and, of course, the much grimmer decor of the ship (I suspect that this last one is what felled the series ultimately: it didn’t look science fiction enough).

Which brings us to the prequel film. Clearly the studio had decided that it was time for another Star Trek film but apparently didn’t want to pay enough to drag the various actors out of retirement. Thus we have an entirely different set of actors with pretty much the only common link to what had gone before being the name of the film. But, then, what else could they do?

It’s all so much easier to do in books….