Outside the Beltway

How to Save Star Trek

James Joyner · Thursday, February 10, 2005 · 6 comments

Adam Yoshida has some amusing yet interesting ideas on how to revive the Star Trek franchise after the failure of Enterprise to last the requisite seven years.

Star Trek: Smallville: The ‘Starfleet Academy’ idea proposal has been floating around for years. At least since the time before Star Trek 6 was made. It’s an idea with potential. If executed correctly, it might well work. There’s two ways of doing this: cast people to play famous characters when they were younger or create new characters. I tend to favor the former. Hence why I’ve designated this option “Smallville.” I’d favor doing it with original series characters, since the later ones lack the fame and, in the case of the later generations, too far separated in age.

Star Trek: The West Wing: We’ve established a little bit about the Federation Government. Why don’t we learn a little more? It strikes me as entirely possible that world of the Federation President, if well-written, would make for an interesting show. This would give us the opportunity to explore the more traditional areas of the Federation (particularly Earth, Luna, Mars, etc.) which we’ve yet to see explored.

CSI Vulcan: This is actually my personal favorite. Frankly, the CSI-genre and the Star Trek-genre strike me as the perfect two areas for the creation of a fusion product. Criminal investigations (and the ability of criminals for disguise) in the Star Trek-universe just seems like a perfect candidate for a future hit.

I’d watch any of those, I think.

Hat tip Stephen Green, whose wife would especially be thrilled if Tom Welling, preferably minus shirt, were featured in ST: Smallville.