Category: Star Trek

With CBS’s new Trek series, Star Trek is about to be updated to suit modern TV tastes and expectations. This bodes will for its success, but long-time fans need to prepare ourselves for just how different it will be.

To be sure, a lot will feel familiar: the costumes, the sets, the props, the dialogue. There are many early clues that even the classic Trekian themes will be on full display, despite our fears that CBS would try to go dark and nihilistic with a Game-of-Thrones-in-space knock off.

No, what will be different is much deeper than the color of the paint on the deck plates and the Klingon make up. It is the narrative structure undergirding the story that will be unlike anything we have seen on Trek in its 50 year history.

Two main reasons, the first of which I will discuss in this essay.

Like most streaming shows, DISCOVERY will have serialized seasons of 13 episodes. Each season will tell a primary, contained story. All of the episodes will be connected. There will be numerous story lines all woven together.

This is how most shows are written these days, but Trek was never like this. With all five previous Trek series, each episode told a contained story built around a theme or sci-fi concept or character exploration. The episode ended with the ship sailing off into space, and when we saw it again in the next episode it was as if that previous episode never happened. The idea that characters seldom changed for good–despite whatever bizarre or traumatic thing happened in any given episode–is widely mocked as the Reset Button. But it was how the writers and the studios wanted it, so that the episodes could be rerun in no particular order for syndication. (There is one striking example of serialization on TNG. The episode after Picard was assimilated by the Borg had him returning to his childhood home so his family could help him cope with the trauma, and I’ve heard that Roddenberry hated the idea.)

Today I think everyone is aware of the benefits of season-long serialization: richer and more complex character arcs; more dramatic stories with higher stakes. But there is one drawback that might sting Trek fans in particular. The concept of The Episode may lose its meaning in fandom. Most serialized shows, especially genre shows, do not really have episodes: they are 13-hour movies with credit sequences arbitrarily dropped in every 50 minutes or so. If Star Trek fandom is based on any common bond it is this phrase: “Remember that episode when…?” It is easy to remember that one where Kirk fought the Gorn; when Spock mind melded with the pizza-rug alien; when the crew got space drunk; when Picard was assimilated; when the crew got caught in a time loop and kept reliving the same day; when Beverly made love with a space ghost, and on and on… (I remember having these conversations when there were precious fewer aired Trek episodes than there are now!).

With DISCOVERY, this may no longer be possible. If it is one gigantic story that rolls into itself through each episode, it will be impossible to recall later where one episode ended and the other began. Not impossible–fans are known for their fastidious memory–but it will be pointless. And we DS9 fans know this. DS9 was worlds and away more serialized than any other Trek show, or any other genre show of its era. Most episodes were stand alone, but each season had a contained story arc. There were two instances where a string of episodes were fully serialized: the first six of Season 6, and the final nine episodes of the final season. These were wild rides to be sure, and exciting at the time and upon re-watch, but none of the actual episodes stand out in my memory. You recall the grand sweep–retaking the station from Dukat; defeating the Dominion and ending the war–but the particulars are all a muddle.

For a moment, just indulge a comparison of the DS9 finale and the TNG finale. TNG ended with a powerful but quiet moment: Picard sitting down with his crew at the poker table, having fully absorbed a lesson that was a theme of this one episode. DS9 ended with Sisko casting an ancient Bajoran holy book into an ancient Bajoran fire cave, the significance of which required many of the previous 8 episodes to understand. DS9’s finale did not quite work. It’s not that I am against complex stories. But when the writers know they have 9 or 13 hours of story to tell, they tend to focus on plot above all else. How else are you going to fill the time? When you know you have only 45-50 minutes, good writers first think of theme and character, and make sure the plot serves those ends. This is the danger of serialized seasons.

Star Trek has always been its best in those small moments of revelation brought about by a tightly focused 45-minute story. I’m not suggesting DISCOVERY will not pull off similar moments of revelation, but it may be delivered in a different way than we are used to.

It is said that TV series today are like novels. You do not think back on a novel and say, “I loved that chapter.” Instead, you loved the whole book and you recall certain scenes or moments fondly. Star Trek used to be like an anthology of short stories, and you could savor (or hate) particular outings. This is no more.

By the way: Mad Men is the only show I know of that successfully bridged this divide. Show runner Matthew Weiner’s directive was the each episode must be a self-contained story, and yet each episode was seamlessly serialized with the one before and after it, constructing a season-long story arc. DISCOVERY should follow this model.

One last point: There is also the impact on characterization. A series made of stand-alone episodes sacrifices having evolving characters and complex arcs in exchange for character-centric episodes. The writers say: “We’re not going to do anything shocking or radical with Scotty or Chekov or Data or Beverly or Geordie, or even Kirk, Spock, Riker or Picard, but we will devote entire episodes to them.” This will not happen with any of DISCOVERY’s 13 episodes. By my count there are now over 10 announced important characters. This will be a true ensemble, with some getting more screen time than others. The 3rd or 4th or 5th-tier cast member might get their own big part in a story line, but they will not get their own episode all to themselves. With only 13 episodes (compared to 24) there simply isn’t time.

Next up, I will explore more about one fascinating aspect of DISCOVERY’s characters, and one that will also be a radical break form all previous Trek: The captain is not the lead character, or rather the lead character will not be the one sitting in the center seat making all the decisions. How can this work?

Discovery is the first Star Trek series since the Original Series that is written and produced to distinguish itself—to fight for its life—against an established and comfortably popular television landscape. Like TOS, DSC must stand on its own terms in a way that the four intervening series never did. In the 60s, Roddenberry worked hard to convince audiences who liked westerns and Word War II stories to follow the exploits of a starship crew set centuries after those two historical settings. Brain Fuller’s DSC faces a similar hurdle.

In the late 80s, when Roddenberry was producing TNG, he did not need to worry about selling the series over The Love Boat, MacGuiver and Knight Rider. All TNG had to be was an updated version of TOS, and the fact that so many early TNG episodes could have been TOS episodes proves the point. Of course, TNG became a megahit, partly because it had captured some of the TOS magic, but also because of its own unique strengths, such as the characters and the cast who played them. When DS9 and Voyager came around—at TNG’s cultural peak—it was enough that they had Star Trek in their title. When Enterprise came round, the writers’ mistake was that they assumed all they needed to grab an audience was Star Trek in the title—that’s not totally accurate because the show was initially only titled Enterprise. They assumed that warp nacelles, phasers, and Vulcan ears were enough. They were not. But long before ENT was canceled, the media landscape had changed. Just being Star Trek was not enough anymore.

A few words about what it was like in the late 50s and early 60s to dream up and write a science-fiction show like Star Trek.

Roddenberry’s first sci-fi TV pitch came in 1955, a pitch to an anthology show called Science Fiction Theater, which was a precursor to The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone (his story was about a deivce that would eventually be Trekified as the Holodeck, but which put me in mind of the Bradburry story The Veldt, the one where the spoiled children send their parents into the family holodeck to be eaten by lions). Other than the anthology format, there was no serious science-fiction action-drama on TV. And most sci-fi was horror in heavy makeup. Roddenberry was inspired by science-fiction to be sure, but mostly literature and full-length movies: Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, the novels of Robert Heinlein, and the film Forbidden Planet. There was nothing on TV like the show he wanted to write.

TV at the time was Wagontrain, Have Gun—Will Travel, Gunsmoke, Dragnet and The Lieutenant. (Roddenberry wrote the majority of Have Gun scripts, and was the reason that The Lieutenant was canceled, for having written a script about racism in the Marine Corps.) It makes sense that Lucy Arnaz, who greenlit Star Trek, initially thought it was a show about Hollywood stars on an SGO tours in the South Pacific.

Although Roddenberry pitched it as a “Wagontrain” to the stars, it’s ironic that the episodes that were actually filmed would not be too different from the setting of a WWII battleship in the South Pacific. Except that—and here is Roddenberry’s oft-touted Vision—though his characters served aboard a ship very similar to a modern Navy/AirForce vessel, and they spoke and behaved as modern military officers, they claimed an enlightened sensibility, a cosmic humility that would have been impossible for any other character on TV at that time. They mugged like most characters on TV—their western frontier or military counterparts—but their fundamental beliefs were radically different, rooted in the idea that our political and religious views will simply be radically different centuries from now. Individual people will not be different, but society and its institutions will be. That was the essence of Star Trek’s optimism.

In any case, Roddenberry knew that he could not sell all of that without making his show synch with the rythym of what was currently popular. It contained elements of the western and the WWII ship drama that made the moral dramas palatable to his audience.

Which brings me back to Star Trek: Discovery. Brian Fuller has committed himself to write a Star Trek show true to those original values, but also to appeal to the sensibilities of the modern TV-viewing audience–Exactly as Roddenberry had to do 50 years ago. But today, what is our western, and what are our WWII touchstones?… Even if you have answers to those questions (dark psycho-dramas of our era like Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones etc., and Middle Eastern terrorism wars) how does that square with the classic Trek formula of a crew on a battleship/submarine–style vessel exploring the depths of space? I don’t know. But Fuller is having to solve story-telling problems that no Trek writer/producer has had to solve since 1966.

Star Trek’s trademark optimism gets a lot of lip service by us fans, the media, and especially Hollywood producers assigned to Trek projects who feel they must justify their jobs to the fans by paying homage to “Gene’s vision.” It is rare that you see anyone apply more than a surface reading of Trek’s vision of the future: we don’t destroy ourselves; technology is used for good; poverty and famine have been obliterated; abundance for everybody; blacks are okay (but women and gays are still cultural minorities). This reading isn’t nothing; these are all laudable characteristics (except for the still-prevalent sexism and homophobia in the franchise products). Although considering the cultural optimism of the Space Age during the 50s and 60s, it’s not exactly surprising that a show like Star Trek was created.

Today is different. In today’s socio-political/entertainment landscape of Doom & Gloom, there could be no more radical, necessary message than our future will be brighter than our past.

Jaron Lanier explains the lightning in Classic Star Trek’s bottle, and how it might be captured again.

In a brief tangent of his book Who Owns the Future, Lanier tells us what the Star Trek optimism is really about, and I would hope that all of those Hollywood producers would read it. His argument is two-fold: Classic Star Trek depicted advanced technology as no threat to humanity; it was not a threat because real people were always in control, Kirk in particular.

The idea that advanced technology does not ruin us is a backdrop theme of Star Trek, mostly unstated but starkly apparent when contrasted with so much other science-fiction. According to Lanier, technology on Trek results in a “more moral, fun, adventurous, sexy, and meaningful world.” The prime reason that “a more instrumented world” does not lead to the kind of dystopian vision of so much sci-fi is because “a recognizable human remains at the center of the adventure” and not only succeeds but thrives due to factors—human factors—that have nothing to do with technology.

Star Trek says there is something in the human that is essential and cannot be matched or even defeated by even the smartest, most advanced technology.

Trek sometimes—err, pretty frequently, or at least in memorable episodes—makes this theme explicit by depicting technology run amuck free of human handlers. The obvious example is the Borg, but there were many 60’s episodes where super computers took over entire populations and had to be stopped by Kirk and Crew. There were always machines carrying out their program without adult supervision, from the Doomsday Machine to V’Ger. The Trek optimism—even if the overall mood of the story is dark or frightening—shines through when the human(oid) heroes stick it to these amoral algorithms.

As an aside, this is why the technobabble solution—invented by TNG, but on Voyager and Enterprise know as the Act IV Resolution—is not only an affront to what Trek stories should be, but also to the type of optimistic sci-fi that Trek represents. In these episodes where some unexplainable technological gimmick saves the day, the human crew usually comes off seeming hapless and helpless while their technology is superior to their will and wits. In these episodes, you don’t even need a crew. The ship’s Computer could have easily assessed the parameters of the threat and sprayed it with a reverse polarity tachyon beam, or whatever, and called it a day. In contrast, the Doomsday Machine was not thwarted by technobabble. It was stopped because of the distinctly human brew of heroism, vengeance, love and madness that manifested as a will to act in the mind and heart of Commodore Matt Decker. The best of these stories end with an idea sweated out of a human brain, an insight, a whim, a gamble, a sacrifice.

Trek’s optimism teaches us that advanced technology is always a positive benefit—the Enterprise is run on amoral algorithms too. But also that technology is the necessary-but-not-sufficient element of human progress. As Lanier puts it, “At the center of the high-tech circular bridge of the starship Enterprise is seated a Kirk or a Picard, a person.” And that person makes all the difference.

The technology on Star Trek was just window dressing, but its presence conveyed a quiet, almost subliminal and powerful message. Roddenberry’s Enterprise was just a futuristic naval battleship. The technology was backdrop to tell space adventure stories. Still, this positive view of technology was a point of view the writers chose in stark contrast with so much popular sci-fi. Even before the 1960s, writers have always speculated about the dangers of powerful, pervasive technology, from Bradbury to E.M. Forester, who Lanier reminds us wrote a dystopian technology story in 1909 called “The Machine Stops” about an Internet-like system that takes over people’s lives. Star Trek refutes this negative view of technology. Or rather it posits a sunny future where technology continues to be used as a valuable tool, and where all of the problems that we fear about technology won’t actually come to pass because those tools will be wielded by decent, gloriously flawed people.

Lanier argues that the optimism exhibited in TOS and TNG-era Trek, which he praises as “pure kitsch, ridiculous on most levels” and “silly,” represented the better angles of a technologists’ nature. He thinks that it is “a shame that there aren’t more recent examples to supersede it.”

Lainer writes that the dominant narrative of our age will be about how so much of our lives are becoming “more software-mediated, physicality is becoming more mutable by technology, and reality is being optimized.” The problem he foresees is “that the humans aren’t the heroes” of this new reality; humans are obsolete, unimportant, slow and in the way of real progress. He argues that this narrative needs to be opposed, and that the importance of actual people must be reinserted into the utopian visions of the role of future technology. He writes, “Drawing a line between what we forfeit to calculation and what we reserve for the heroics of free will is the story of our time.”

Of all science fiction out there today, Star Trek is uniquely situated to make this progressive, optimistic but also subversive statement. The reasons it is progressive and optimistic is obvious. The reason it is subversive is because the power brokers of modern society—from Google to Apple to Facebook to the NSA—keep arguing that We the People need to take a backseat and let their algorithms take care of everything. Kirk would not approve.

Lainer’s analysis of Trek’s optimism offers a potential roadmap for CBS as they set out to create the first post-IPhone Star Trek series. The new show’s writers will have to update not just the design of the tech—when Enterprise premiered in 2000, the solution was to make the communicator’s smaller—but how people use and interface with tech. If CBS really wants to express Trek’s optimism, and make a statement that would launch a thousand think pieces because no one else in science-fiction is making this particular statement, they should imagine the technophobe’s worst nightmares and recast them in sunny, glorious, kitschy wonderment. Imagine Google Glass/Tricorder contact lenses. The Ship’s Computer as artificial intelligence that can be wired (or wi-fi’d) directly into people’s brains. No more need for Holodecks—just tell the computer what you want to experience and have her beam it into your temporal lobe. No need for communicators because you are constantly tracking and tuned into the people on your team so that on a mission you function as a hive mind, not unlike the Borg. Starfleet constantly uploads personal data on the crew to better plan missions and design starships to maximize effectiveness. The ship’s Computer collects information from every crew member and operates the ship by reflecting the collective will of the crew, presenting them with options optimized to their likes and needs. All of this and more—so long as the humans using the technology, with their foibles and their genius, remain at the heart of the drama. So long as the humans use the tech to enrich their experience, and not the tech using the human to enrich itself. So long as the human overrides the judgment of the computer algorithms just as often as they accept them, proving that the computer only offers an interpretation/expression of what the human already knows, and while sometimes the algorithm is useful, sometimes the digitized middleman isn’t needed or is just plain wrong. The man or woman in the center seat is still the indispensible hero.

Lainer is a technologist, so he applies that lens to Trek, but this is only one way that CBS could make Star Trek into a relevant social commentary again. There are dozens of other ways that would be just a valid and important, from dealing with xenophobia to gender issues to climate change to economic inequality to imperialism and terrorism and civil liberties, or all of the above. We can only hope that after 15 years of meaningless Trek, CBS will pick a point of view for this show to make it meaningful. It doesn’t have to be Lanier’s interpretation of what worked with classic Trek, but CBS needs to choose something and run with it.

 

It is premature to engage in any fanboy handwringing over the new Trek series since we don’t yet know if CBS Access is creating a show that will be worthy of our interest. For all we know it could be a cartoon. Talk of Star Trek being CBS’s “crown jewels” aside, if their goal is to attract viewers to their streaming site they might figure they don’t have to pull out all the stops to increase usage over what it is now, which is apparently no one.

But since fanboys love to wring our hands, here goes.

Here is my list of red flags that—if I hear them from CBS’s marketing and eventually from the show runners—I will consider bad omens about the new series.

Characters

Token Person of Color: I won’t go so far as to say that we should expect and demand the captain not be a white male. I don’t care who plays the captain, or even if there is a captain. But I would find it hard to watch another Star Trek show where people of color are represented by one, poorly drawn, dull or dimwitted minor regular. The cast should reflect Earth’s diversity with similar ratio that Ridley Scott got for The Martian.

   Vs.  

Token Gay Guy, or Trans: I’m also not suggesting there must be a gay or trans character, partly because I fear how they would be depicted by the straight, white male writers who will most likely be writing such a character. Not that they should have an excuse. It is not surprising to me that TNG never had a gay character. It premiered in 1987, the height of the AIDS epidemic, when most gay professionals were in the closet, when few gay youth were out in high schools and colleges, when there was no political or social support for gay rights. It would have taken a supreme act of imagination for men of the 80s and 90s, who were not personally close to any gay people, to take the popular impression of gays at the time and project what a gay person would be like three hundred years in the future. As a gay man, I’m grateful they did not try. They probably would have come up with a cross between Liberace and Boy George.

Writers today don’t need much imagination to picture what a gay Star Fleet officer would be like. Still, I cringe to consider the likely scene where it is shockingly revealed that the handsome and dashing Number One is gay when he goes into his quarters, strips his uniform off of his washboard abs and jumps into bed with his hot young twink boyfriend from stellar cartography. There are many ways to depict gay people without sexualizing it, but I’m skeptical the writers’ imaginations will extend that far.

The Women: There is a lot riding on how this show portrays its women characters. It has the potential to bring Star Trek into the 21^st Century so far as gender is concerned (let’s forget for argument’s sake that DS9 already did this). The new show’s women characters can put to bed the 60’s overt sexism and miniskirts, the underutilization of Troi and Dr. Crusher, the mixed bag gender politics of Janeway’s captaincy, the truly awful cat suits and decon. gel of Enterprise. This show needs to get it right.

Token Vulcan: No more Vulcans for a while. Be your own show with your own aliens. Stop trying to carry “break out” characters on Spock’s long coattails. Create actual break out characters. And let’s remember that an actor playing a Vulcan must be as difficult as playing Hamlet. The only actors to effectively portray Vulcans were named Leonard Nimoy and Mark Leonard.

Setting

The Enterprise: Go ahead and set the show on a starship if you must, but don’t make it the Enterprise-H or any other version. If they do go with another Enterprise it will be a sign that the writers do not have faith in their ability to tell stories that will get people’s attention unless those stories harken back Kirk and Picard’s ship. It was one thing for Roddenberry to do it in 1987 when he wanted to stress continuity to the original series. But that is no longer necessary. Nothing Archer ever accomplished on the Enterprise NX-01 was made remotely more profound because it happened on a ship named Enterprise. It felt cheap, that we were supposed to care about silly stories simply because they were happening on a ship with that name.

Theme

“We’re going to stay true to Gene’s Vision”: If CBS says this, I sure hope they do what people who have said it in the past almost never do, which is explain what they think that vision actually is. Too often the executives pay lip service to the fans with hollow praise of whatever we think made Trek great, but they don’t actually share that vision or even have a vision of their own. To them it is just a brand. They need to take Trek’s vision of the future and update for our time.

“We’re not going to stay true to Gene’s Vision”: The most simplistic expression of Trek’s message is optimism for the future, and CBS may decide that optimism is not hot right now. They might want to make a Trek show that can compete in the “gore Olympics” (and Binge-watching Olympics) with Walking Dead and Game of Thrones. Trek is malleable, but it’s not build for apocalypse and cynicism. If it was turned into that kind of show it could only reasonable be called Star Trek during its title sequence.

Time will tell. As CBS starts to divulge more details, we will be all ears.

 

NOTE: Now that Star Trek is coming back to episodic TV, I thought I’d repost an essay on the topic from last year.

Is Star Trek old and in need of re-engineering, or does it need to be abandoned to the museum of 20^th Century science fiction?

I was getting caught up on HBO’s The Newsroom last night, and in episode 5 of Season 3, there was a Star Trek reference that peeked my interest. Trek references in pop culture are telling signs of the status of the franchise. If Trek is on the cover of Time magazine (1995) or getting full page coverage in The New York Times (2009), then it is probably a good year to be a Trek fan. But this reference put me in a particularly morose mood about the state of Trek. It was not a negative reference. The problem was the type of person the reference associated with Star Trek, and not because the character was a stereotypical nerd like on Big Bang Theory. It wasn’t like that at all.

For those of you who do not know The Newsroom or Aaron Sorkin, this is a show (and a show runner) that glamorizes the past over the future. The show’s hero Will McAvoy played by Jeff Daniels is constantly equated to the 17^th Century anti-hero Don Quixote (just as The West Wing’s hero Jed Bartlet was a throw-back to JFK).   The central conflict of the episode with the Trek reference is whether the newsroom can adapt to a new millennial corporate overseer who wants to replace their Edward R. Murrow business model with an Internet-driven/TMZ/citizen-journalist style of news. Just one of the questionable things they are being asked to broadcast is an on-air debate between a rape victim and her accused rapist. The show’s heroes can’t adapt, as evidenced by the crusty old president of the news division, Charlie Skinner played by Sam Waterson, suffering a heart attack in this episode. A young reporter, Jim Harper played by John Gallagher Jr., is just as old-school idealistic as the other heroes of the show (and Sorkin), as evidenced by the fact that he broke up with his girlfriend who left the newsroom to write gossipy click-driven Internet columns, as opposed to the ‘real journalism’ he thinks he does. Sorkin has said in the commentary that Jim is a younger version of Charlie, the embodiment of the old ways of journalism instilled in a young man just starting out.

Jim is the character referred to in this episode as someone who watches Star Trek. He takes umbrage at the fact that someone confused the Star Trek episode he was watching with Star Wars. There is a scene where we actually see him watching a classic Star Trek episode on his iPad. To my ears this brief, insignificant reference, screamed this (probably unintended) message: the guy who says ‘piss off 2015, I prefer my media like it was 1955’ is the Star Trek fan.

Am I overreaching? I don’t think so. Consider the summersaults Hollywood types are doing right now to update Star Trek for modern sensibilities. The Bad Robot reboot is one example. But those who want to produce a new TV series, who will have to film dozens of hours of TV, have a higher hurdle to make their show relatable to modern audiences, of which the most important demographic will be millennials.

Enter Michael Gummelt, apparently in talks with Paramount/CBS, who said to TrekMovie.com about a potential series: “[Star Trek] needs to be reinvented for a new generation. Not a reboot, that’s already being done in the movies. What I want for this series is for it to be the future – a Star Trek TV series that feels modern and feels futuristic relative to our current times.”

Futuristic relative to our current times. There’s the rub. This is the real reason Trek canon gets a bad wrap by current Hollywood people involved with Trek. It’s not that writers and producers feel constrained by fictional facts, decades old lines of dialogue, Trek history. They desire to be free of the old Trek aesthetic, the look, feel and sensibility of TOS and TNG-era Trek. They want a Star Trek that seems futuristic to people in this decade, not the 60s or the 80s.

Classic Star Trek was standard science fiction of that era (written by some well-know 60s science fiction writers), but as TV, Roddenberry knew that the setting, the characters, and how they interact had to be visually familiar and relatable to his audience. His solution was to make the Enterprise look, feel and sound like a WWII battleship in outer space. There was the bridge, complete with pinging sounds; tight crew quarters; a sickbay; a rec. room, etc. The viewer tuning in could make the necessary suspension of disbelief—Oh I see, it’s the Navy is space—and then enjoy the story.

When TNG came around 20 years later, that TV audience did not have the same cultural reference points as a generation before—we did not come of age close to WWII and Korea or having seen a lot of WWII movies. So the Enterprise-D resembles a plush, leather-interior luxury cruise liner, more Love Boat than the Battle of Midway. The bridge, it has been said by the show’s own writers, looked like the lobby of a chincy hotel; sprawling crew quarters; a lounge (ten-forward); state-of-the-art entertainment (holodecks); children romping down the corridors—a cruise ship in space. Voyager, TNG’s sister show, was virtually identical in sensibility.

In these shows, the way the characters interact is deeply 20^th Century. They communicate using glorified radios. Decisions are made from a central authority, distributed down a clear chain of command. They hang out socially in rec. rooms and lounges (bars, when they are in alien environments). There are more robots and devices that want to be human than there are humans who want to be more technological. Nobody ever Tweets, or even emails. I don’t expect Twitter to still be a functional company in the 23^rd or 24^th Centuries. But you have to admit that characters on even TNG-era Star Trek do not interface with technology as much as the average person does in a coffee shop or elementary school in 2015.

The change to Trek lore that potential future Trek writers and producers are calling for is not about technology per se, warp drives and sleeker communicators (there is not more archaic-sounding term than ‘communicator’ is there?). No, the so-called necessary change is about the interface between people and technology. It’s about a millennial seeing a star ship on TV they’d want to hang out on, instead of one modeled on a naval battleship, or an ‘iBridge’ grafted onto a naval battleship, or a cruise ship.

This is why Michael Gummelt says that the future trek series he envisions is “set sometime in the future, distant enough that it doesn’t really matter which universe it takes place in. It’s universe-agnostic.”

These are the words of someone who wants to tell a Star Trek story on a completely blank canvas. He wants to eject the archetypes of characters that would be familiar to those of us who grew up in the 1980s, or who saw many WWII movies, or, in the case of Kirk’s archetype, read stories about 18^th Century naval captains (Horatio Hornblower, as a character born in 1776, as a piece of fiction born in 1937). All of that, and necessarily all of Trek canon, needs to be relegated to the dust bin of pop culture history. In exchange for… what exactly? Maybe it will be great, modern science fiction. But will it be Star Trek? If so, what threads of Star Trek DNA will it shed and what will it retain? On The Newsroom, the heroes have to ask what exactly can be considered news in 2015? For us Trekkies, what is Star Trek in 2015?