Star Trek is sailing in choppy waters following the disappointing Section 31. Does the franchise need a spell in dry dock? We log our thoughts.
20 years ago, what some consider the Golden Age of Star Trek came to an ignominious end. The cancellation of Star Trek: Enterprise after just four seasons, when its three predecessors since The Next Generation had all reached the traditional seven, followed a lacklustre ‘final’ Next Generation movie in 2002’s Nemesis.
After two seasons in which the show tried to reinvent itself and keep viewers interested, Enterprise had failed. In a rapidly changing television landscape, thanks to cable efforts such as The Sopranos and The Wire, which in the early 2000s pushed the boundaries of American TV, Star Trek began to look old hat. Diminishing returns saw Enterprise seemingly bring down the curtain on over 25 years of consistent Star Trek at the cinema or on television.
Fans were devastated. Star Trek had been consistently on TV for an entire generation, churning out hundreds of episodes within a shared universe and timeline. While the JJ Abrams-fronted reboot in 2009 relaunched Star Trek as a successful cinematic concern, tapping into 1960s nostalgia as well as working to tie old and new approaches together, Star Trek was always first and foremost a TV show. That’s where it belonged. That’s where most fans wanted it to be.
When Star Trek: Discovery was announced to launch in 2017, off the back of the Abrams’ films success (albeit less so 2016’s Beyond), fans were therefore thrilled. CBS and Paramount resolved to make this the crown jewel of their new streaming service, pulling in actors such as Michelle Yeoh and Jason Isaacs, creatives Bryan Fuller and Nicholas Meyer (the latter a legendary figure in shaping Star Trek’s post-1960s success), and the kind of budget earlier network Star Trek shows could only dream of.
Whether Discovery lived up to that promise is between you and your omnipotent super being (my thoughts are very much on record), but the hunger fans displayed for Discovery spearheaded a project by Paramount for which Alex Kurtzman, a protege of Abrams who helped write two of his reboot films, was tasked. Star Trek would be on the air almost every week of the year. Multiple new series were placed in development while Discovery remained the flagship. Some, such as the return of Sir Patrick Stewart in Star Trek: Picard, had fans in a tailspin of excitement.
The signs that perhaps not all was rosy in this utopian future were, in hindsight, there from the beginning. Fuller, as he is admittedly wont to do, abandoned ship early on, aware his vision for Discovery ā as a seasonal anthology series in the universe- was not shared by CBS/Paramount. Two subsequent showrunners were relieved of duty for bullying behaviour. Michael Chabon, drafted in to craft Picard, left after one season, perhaps not having achieved the initial character study intended for that show. Covid-19 no doubt didn’t help matters either, which the franchise had to bear just as it was revving up.
Read more: Star Trek: Section 31 review | An exemplar of a struggling franchise
Fans, ultimately, ended up rather polarised about the direction of travel Discovery and Picard went in, which was perhaps inevitable. It took years for both The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine to find acceptance among the fanbase. Voyager was eternally looked down on. Enterprise, arguably, was never truly embraced as those previous shows were, outside of a core fanbase. Even The Original Series only truly broke out and became popular in syndicated re-runs the decade after it was cancelled. Star Trek has always evolved at a challenging canter as opposed to free and easy warp speed.
The current era of Star Trek is no different. Everything is met with a built-in scepticism. Nobody truly knew whether the animated attempts would work, in Star Trek: Lower Decks and Star Trek: Prodigy, with the only yardstick being an offbeat 1970s Original Series animated show that is largely a curate’s egg to modern audiences. Lower Decks managed five consistently enjoyable seasons before (somewhat inexplicably) being cancelled this year. Prodigy was rather ignominiously dumped, with fears some of it would be lost under tax write-offs, though it perhaps just didn’t gel in the same way.
Perhaps the biggest success story of this era is Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, a loose offshoot of the early seasons of Discovery but also a direct prequel to The Original Series. The 2009 film aside, itās the most direct homage to the 1960s series that Star Trek has ever produced. It placed viewers back on the Enterprise, back with Spock, Uhura and most of the original crew (even Kirk himself at points). Back to the very nuts and bolts origin of the entire franchise. Unsurprisingly, itās the best product the modern era has yet given us, with a five year mission almost certainly destined to be completed under the aegis of Captain Christopher Pike.
Star Trek has arguably begun 2025 in a dark place, dealt the largest hammer blow in 20 years thanks to the hugely misjudged one-shot movie Star Trek: Section 31. See my review for more detail on the specifics, but this Discovery spin-off, playing on a big concept originated in Deep Space Nine, is by some register the worst piece of Star Trek put on screen in 60 years. If anything deserved to be a tax write off never seen by audiences, it was this. Mercifully truncated an originally-planned limited run series, Section 31 was not only a bad idea that fans overwhelmingly didnāt want, but it also points to the question at the very top of this article.
Should Star Trek go away again for a while?
The gap between Enterprise and Discovery was 12 years. Three movies filled that space, but not since the 1970s had we witnessed such a break between Star Trek series as that one, and both shows ended up separated by a gulf in how television was made and distributed. Discovery launched at a point conglomerate when streaming companies thought in IP rather than creativity. Star Trek was to be a property milked for all it was worth, hence the (unfulfilled) promise of all-year-round episodes. Hence the snazzy bespoke studio in Toronto built to allow modern Star Trek almost any kind of setting or effects sequence without ever leaving a soundstage.
In theory, Star Trek has never been in finer fettle. It has the backing of a company with significant resources and pedigree which considers it a key piece of IP. It has an engaged, if typically for fandoms, often divided fanbase. It doesn’t fear the reaper in terms of cancellation, which Star Trek often had under the network system.
Why, in which case, does all of this feel like it is hurting Star Trek’s brand, rather than the reverse? Why is it that, the more Star Trek we get, the lesser the return?
Admittedly, some might suggest this is opinion rather than fact, and many Star Trek fans will declare Discovery or Picard or Strange New Worlds just as well put together and valued as anything from the 1960s or 1990s. Time may well be kinder to some of these projects, as it has been to Voyager and Enterprise specifically. Yet with the possible exception of Strange New Worlds, no current Star Trek show seems to have developed by the end of its run the accepted belief that it’s a truly worthy entry to the universe, as arguably The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine did after their difficult starts.
It’s worth remembering that the promise of all Star Trek, all the time was largely lived up to in the 1990s. From 1993 through to 2001, two shows consistently aired on television, presenting audiences with two new Star Trek episodes around 24 weeks a year, even if those weeks werenāt concurrent. And yes, the quality did vary. Which makes me suspect the current issues with Star Trek do not lie with volume. They lie more with creative choices and a general understanding of the franchise those in charge are steering.
Read more: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home | How the 1986 sequel took the series back to its roots
One aspect mentioned when discussing Section 31 is how much the characters sounded like 21st century people, but this is not a problem relative to that film alone. All of the modern era shows have fallen prey to writing that avoids the cadence and tempo of previous eras. Most of this era has been about avoiding Starfleet directly or casting them in either a suspicious or haughty light, or placing them in the background, but in doing so Star Trek has lost both the deliberately nautical and specifically futuristic style of speech that made it stand out among other science fiction franchises. Everyone could be from 2025 these days.
Even if we tolerate the use of profanity (which was there as early as 1994’s Generations), this absence of cadence is down to Kurtzman’s desire to modernise the franchise. Star Trek was always allegorical, always glancing toward political commentary, but the storytelling often reached for philosophical or scientific ideas beyond the mundane. Modern Star Trek is obsessed both with the galaxy-ending villain scenario but also the redemptive salvation or rehabilitation of characters ā Michael Burnham, Beckett Mariner, Phillipa Georgiou, the list goes on. It’s as though the only Star Trek any of the writers ever watched was The Wrath Of Khan.
Modern Star Trek cannot be structured as it was in the 1960s or 1990s because television has changed ā especially genre-television. Serialisation is now king. Strange New Worlds has benefited from working to be more standalone, but you often sense the writers are desperate to place more direct arcs in there, or their toes are curling that the show lacks a pantomime, leather-clad villain who has some kind of doomsday weapon (in a backpack, to borrow from a recent episode of Film Stories’ We Are Starfleet podcast). The natural inclination of Kurtzman’s writers seems to be stakes stakes stakes when most Star Trek fans want meaningful stories about the human condition.
This is not to say that fans do not also want galaxy ending stakes. The Next Generation’s ‘The Best of Both Worlds’ or the Dominion War of Deep Space Nine were majestic pieces of television, primarily because they were earned. Nothing about Section 31, for example, was earned in the slightest, hence the stakes meant nothing.
There is an emptiness that pervades projects such as Discovery or Section 31 or even Picard, to an extent, because writers take narrative short cuts. Granted, they no longer have 24 episodes in which to tell stories, but by having less time, they might be better served scaling down their ambitions.
Read more: Star Trek: Looking back at every series finale
Arguably, the problem of Star Trek constantly trying to be all about grand stakes, essentially trying to be Star Wars, is why we haven’t seen a movie for almost ten years. Star Trek films only make money in America, bar one or two exceptions. Yet Paramount cannot bring itself to resort to the days when a film like Insurrection, about a principled stance protecting a few hundred people on a paradise planet, is enough for a Star Trek movie. That isn’t the best Star Trek film, but it is 100 percent true to the series it was based on. Those running the franchise fail to understand this reality time and time again.
Star Trek doesnāt need shore leave. But it does need to rethink what kind of stories it tells. It needs to balance grand narratives with stronger character tales. It needs to stop relying on characters and ideas from its own past, and chart bold new courses with fresh, original ideas. It needs to appreciate the core of Star Trek is the concept of a crew, of exploration, of reflecting humanity through discovering the frontier. It should embrace the diversity of cast, of plot lines operating in different timelines, different creatives styles such as animation and live-action, and different kinds of narratives, while remembering what made Star Trek stand out for over half a century.
Perhaps crucially, future seasons of Strange New Worlds, the upcoming Starfleet Academy series, and any future projects, needs to tell stories we will still be talking about in 30 or 60 years. Thereās a lingering suspicion that, in the current era such episodes are few and far between.
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