According to Star Trek: Section 31 star Rob Kazinsky, the franchise’s producers think it’s ‘dying’. We unpack what could be a broader issue…
Have you watched Star Trek: Section 31 yet? My hope is that someone else did so you didn’t have to. If you’re interested in Star Trek enough to read this article, though, you probably have seen it. You might have loved it or at least enjoyed it. Good for you. Everyone likes something. One person who didn’t enjoy it, however, was one of its own cast members.
Actor Rob Kazinsky, being refreshingly British now the film is out, and cutting through the PR guff, recently said the following to TrekCulture:
When I got this job I was like… why are they doing a Section 31 movie? It’s going to going to be hated from the get-go, no one’s going to want to watch a Section 31 movie, and we’re doing a TV budget movie… this isn’t going to be what people want. Then I spoke to Alex [Kurtzman, producer] and I spoke to Olatunde [Osunsanmi, director] and they explained to me that Star Trek is dying. I don’t know if people know that.
Kazinsky, who played Zeph in Section 31, adds that he recently trained with a younger generation of people who didn’t know what Star Trek was, and expressed his concern and sadness over that fact. It’s perhaps the wrong forum, a gym; you’re not likely to find a huge number of Klingon cosplayers at your local Bannatyne’s.
Still, Kazinsky taps into a genuine concern, not just for the Star Trek franchise, but others as well. Could the fans of some well-known and established intellectual properties, especially those founded in the 1960s, ageing these franchises out? James Bond could be facing a similar problem. The world’s most famous secret agent is no longer the action hero young boys go and see at the cinema or watch on TV. Similarly, Star Trek no longer has the audience draw or cultural cache it had decades past.
Read more: Star Trek: Section 31 review | An exemplar of a struggling franchise
Kazinsky makes some adroit points about Star Trek in his comments. He suggests the franchise has always been a relative minnow when compared to Star Wars. He’s not wrong. Even at Star Trek’s height of popularity in the 1990s, that scope was mainly on TV, and outside the United States, the series has never made a huge box office impact with its films, one or two exceptions aside. Moreover, he makes the point that new fans would struggle to get into The Original Series from the 1960s and the early seasons of 90s spin offs such as The Next Generation, given how dated the production values and measured the storytelling styles are.
He isn’t wrong on either point. 1960s Star Trek has aged better than the first two, late 1980s seasons of The Next Generation, much of which are painful to watch as the series was still finding its feet. Both, in different respects, reflect a production style that is radically different today. Modern TV is slicker, takes longer to arrive, has fewer episodes and arguably in most cases looks better than it ever did before.
Star Trek since 2017 is no exception. Argue over the quality of writing or performance or direction all you like, the Alex Kurtzman-led era of Star Trek has never looked better on a production level, certainly in terms of special effects. Keeping up with the latest trends was always a necessary means of ensuring modern audiences found older franchises appealing. Star Trek’s recent problem in this regard is, one or two elements aside, it has veered too far away from catering to the audience who might find the series appealing.
Section 31 is a case in point. Kazinsky is also quite correct that few Star Trek fans wanted that film (or earlier planned series), nor entirely understood why Kurtzman thought it would hold true to creator Gene Roddenberry’s core principles. My suggestion is that developing a star vehicle for Michelle Yeoh, who following her stint on Star Trek: Discovery a became much bigger Hollywood star following an Oscar win, was the primary reason Section 31 was greenlit. The fact it had poor viewing figures and dire critical notices suggests Yeoh wasn’t quite the draw that producers expected.
If Kurtzman really did say that Star Trek is dying, then the solution, I’d argue, doesn’t involve building wholly inappropriate projects around big actors. Section 31 has patently done more harm to Star Trek than good, and will have done nothing to help prevent its supposed demise. Abruptly cancelling popular animated shows Prodigy and Lower Decks are perhaps equally poor choices in working to keep the series alive.
Read more: Star Trek | After the disappointment of Section 31, does the franchise need shore leave?
The farm now appears to be bet on the forthcoming Starfleet Academy series, set in the same far flung (and rather dull) Discovery era. It balances new talent with some genuinely exciting, established actors to create a series clearly aimed at a youthful audience. Kurtzman appears to believe Star Trek will survive by being cool, edgy, sexy, occasionally profane, essentially all of the things the Star Trek he grew up with was not. The 90s era of the franchise was wonderful, but it wasn’t the TV all the kids at school were talking about. You didn’t admit you liked Star Trek if you grew up at school in the 90s, trust me.
This strikes me as a problem across the world of ageing IP. How does something that now makes a great deal of money for established conglomerates stay relevant despite, in most cases, existing as a product of its time? Star Wars is an example of a successful brand that seems to be tarnished not just by divisive films but also a pivot toward small-screen storytelling (a means of helping Disney build its streaming service). It’s done little for Star Wars other than reduce an iconic fantasy space opera to an exercise in fan fiction world building.
Not to take a pot shot at The Acolyte, which plenty of people enjoyed, but in terms of viewership, it was the worst performing Star Wars show by some distance. It strikes me as what the handling of IP is now about: providing audiences with more content than a meaningful extension of a story they fell for in the first place. Where Star Trek is concerned, only Strange New Worlds, in recent years, feels true to what Roddenberry created. Its characters have lost the deliberate future cadence provided by the 1990s series, and the storytelling is shot through with 2020s cultural influences, but it still feels recognisably Star Trek.
Therein lies the irony at the root of Kazinsky reporting how the makers of Star Trek are trying to prevent its demise. Too often, they make shows – or in Section 31’s case, a film – so unlike what people recognise as Star Trek that they alienate the existing fanbase without drawing the new audiences they want to capture. My fear is that Amazon’s full control of Bond will lead to a similar issue for that franchise, milked as it is likely to be with all kinds of extensions and world-building add ons that pull us away from what people want to see – James Bond fighting bad guys in glamorous locales.
To keep these older properties and worlds alive, maybe their owners should stop trying to pander to audiences and generations who didn’t grow up with them and will never care about them in the same way. Star Trek will survive if new people are drawn to a consistent world of ships, crews, adventure and exploration, as opposed to half a dozen genres and styles drawn from half a dozen different franchises or narrative devices. It might never be as big as it was. Maybe that’s okay. Maybe everything has its time. Maybe, even, everything should have its natural end. Even Star Trek.
You can find A J. on social media, including links to his podcasts and books, via Linktr.ee here.
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