The Ephemeric

While there remains a great deal of uncertainty surrounding this consolidation and the future of the various media properties owned by the new super-conglomerate, one consequence which seems all but certain is that the present era of Star Trek is coming to an end, with franchise chief Alex Kurtzman apparently heading for the exit.

This represents a conflicting moment for fans of Star Trek, many of whom have long been displeased with the direction of the franchise under Kurtzman, yet remain wary of changes that the new ownership may implement. Today I want to explore this unusual tension and, in doing so, draft the final epitaph for this era of Star Trek.

Star Trek is, of course, one of the world's most celebrated science fiction franchises. Beginning as a low-budget cult classic of the 1960s, the franchise progressed through a rapid expansion in the 1980s and 1990s into a global brand, and an early prioneer of the shared transmedia universe. Long before the Marvel Cinematic Universe was a thing, Star Trek put this model into practice with a series of linked TV series, films, videogames, comics and novels, all of which featured crossover stories and characters, and in doing so became a global entertainment juggernaut.

But by the early 2000s, the stature of the franchise was in decline. There are many reasons for this: franchise fatigue (and repetition) caused by its own success in the 1990s, changing tastes in entertainment style following 9/11 and the Bush years, broader shifts in television from syndicated 30 episiode seasons to leaner, more serialised series. This period was capped by the one-two punch of an unmitigated cinematic bomb in Star Trek: Nemesis, and the early cancellation of Star Trek: Enterprise, a series which unwisely attempted to appeal to too broad an audience, and had the effect of alienating longtime fans - perhaps an early premonition of things to come. The result: the franchise was put on ice, with no new projects in development for the first time in decades.

The franchise was dead in the water, until J.J. Abrams brought it back to life. It's funny, the Trek fandom generally disdains the J.J. Abrams films, but they absolutely saved the franchise from oblivion, and would go on to represent a commercial and arguably a pop-cultural high point for the franchise. Suddenly Star Trek was winning Academy Awards and pulling in worldwide box office in the area of $500million. These were critically acclaimed films. This had never happened before, certainly not at this level. It put Trek back on the map. That it took almost a decade between 2009's smash hit revival and a return of the franchise to television has to go down as one of the worst cases of IP mismanagement in entertainment history. But when it eventually did, it was one of J.J.'s collaborators, Alex Kurtzman, who emerged as the man to take Star Trek, finally, into the 21st Century.

This brave new era got off to a rocky start. The first project, Star Trek: Discovery, initially appeared to be an attempt to merge the classic Trek setting with the sensibilities of the J.J. films that had proven so successful. They even brought in experienced Trek writer and acclaimed television showrunner Bryan Fuller, at the time something of an icon of the franchise. Optimism was high. Unfortunately, what we got was an uneven, poorly realised mess.

Discovery suffered from a number of egregious creative missteps. Star Trek, at its core, had always been more of a character-driven workplace drama than anything else. A team of competent, idealistic explorers solving problems, forming relationships, and uncovering intellectually satisfying mysteries. Discovery pivoted hard into mainstream action, with only the most superficial of character development. A television franchise that had previously featured entire episodes of courtroom drama or philosophical debate now barely went five minutes without an explosion, violence, or some other high stakes twist. The competent professionals of previous series were replaced by teary-eyed melodramatic characters who whisper-spoke half their lines. Focus shifted from the usual ensemble cast to just the one central character, with many of the supporting cast not even having names until later seasons. The turbolift (effectively an elevator) reimagined as a Doctor Who style magical void. Klingons reimagined as grotesquely monstrous orc-like creatures. Matrix-style slow-motion mid-air camera shots. I could go on and on, but the summary is that it was severely dumbed down, desperate to appeal to the mainstream lowest common denominator, and obsessed with visual spectacle and melodrama.

It is worth considering the launch of this era of Star Trek in the context of the time. These were the early days of the streaming era of television, where every network was desperate to have its own piece of the pie and needed content to justify the existence of their own completely unnecessary platform. Star Trek Discovery was imagined as the flagship of the nascent CBS All Access (later Paramount+) platform, alongside a number of other series including reboots of the Twilight Zone and Frasier. They were all absolutely godawful. I think this is a key point to remember here, it wasn't just a Star Trek Discovery problem. CBS/Paramount just had bad people running their creative division, right from the start. Unfortunately that left a legacy that was never quite resolved.

In fairness, the creatives eventually started to acknowledge some of their missteps. They quietly retconned the Klingon re-design, shifted focus back on to more of an ensemble cast of characters, and started to attempt more intellectually ambitious storytelling. But while Discovery did improve somewhat in later seasons, the result of all these shifts and changes was a disjointed, inconsistent mess of a series. One where the core cast and setting would change frequently for little discernible reason, and where strong concepts and plotlines would be introduced, only to be unceremoniously dropped an episode later and replaced by often poorly conceived plotlines (season 3's "The Burn" comes to mind, dear Lord).

There was a more fundamental problem with this show that even the positive tweaks couldn't resolve. This was a Star Trek show that desperately didn't want to be Star Trek. One can excuse writers who perhaps were not fans of the old series inadvertently making continuity errors, forgetting how the in-universe science works or how various species are supposed to look. But more than this, it is clear that very deliberate and conscious decisions were made to try and distance this era of the franchise from what came before. We had the significant structural and artistic changes from early Discovery, but there was also a clear shift in the writing style from the timeless "period" dialogue style of the 90s to more colloquial contemporary slang and speech patterns - these shows will age terribly as a result. But the most divisive decision of this era has to be the unnecessary and unwanted 1,000 year jump into the future. Suffice it to say, this did not go down well.

A quick word on the time jump, and why this has been so controversial. Massive time jumps are always a bit problematic in sci-fi, especially where your starting point is already the far future. It means you need to imagine how the already futuristic 24th Century technology might become eclipsed by even more advanced 32nd Century technology, and the result invariably is either underwhelming and silly, or amounts to technological stasis where things don't meaningfully change simply due to a lack of imagination. One of Star Trek's main appeals has always been that it is a relatable future. This is our world, our civilisation, extrapolated into a vision of what our future may look like. The more it veers from science fiction into science fantasy, the less that appeal holds. But the bigger problem is that it felt like a naked attempt by Kurtzman to shove aside what came before, to craft an entirely new sci-fi property without the baggage and slap a Star Trek label on it. The fans were right to be incensed.

Next came Star Trek: Picard, ostensibly an attempt to win back some of the "legacy" Star Trek fans. It was definitely better than Discovery, but suffered from many of the same flaws: the overly contemporary characters and dialogue, an overreliance on spectacle and melodrama. My feelings on the first two seasons of Picard are complicated. I don't necessarily think they were bad, but they were dragged out for way too long. These were effectively movie-length stories stretched out in order to fit a 10-hour miniseries run time, and it showed. Then there's season 3. Massive credit has to go to Terry Matalas, one of the few writers who managed to make something that worked both in the context of this era, while managing to recapture some of the magic that made us fall in love with Trek in the first place. This third season was brilliant, striking all the right tones, balancing the old and the new. It got everything just right, and for the first time since Kurtzman took over, presented a strong vision for how to take the franchise forwards. So, naturally, Kurtzman got rid of Matalas and rejected his proposals for future projects.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is arguably the most successful of the Kurtzman series. A conscious acknowledgement of the previous criticisms of the series of this era, this show's whole concept is essentially built around trying to embrace the old style of Star Trek, and sometimes to a fault. A welcome return to an ensemble story-of-the-week format. A good, solid focus on character development. A perhaps slightly unwelcome rehash of legacy characters (Pike, Spock, Uhura and others). This show contains some genuinely excellent episodes, especially in its second season which stands as some of the best work of this era and arguably one of the best TV series in general of 2023.

Lastly, we have Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, arguably the purest distillation of the Kurtzman era of Trek and a series which, accordingly, has had a marmite-like effect on the fandom. The idea is not actually a new one. There has long been talk of an Academy set series dating back to the 1990s. Originally envisaged as a prequel depicting the early days of Kirk and Spock, this final iteration has been reimagined as a spin-off of Discovery, picking up on that 32nd Century setting and cementing it as, at least for the remainder of the Kurtzman era, as the default Star Trek setting. So we have the unpopular 32nd Century setting, a connection to the most unpopular of all Trek series, and what amounts to a teen comedy being crafted by a Kurtzman-led team who seem to want to make anything except Star Trek. Let's face it, for many, this show was dead on arrival.

So it is generally quite shocking that... this series really isn't bad? In fact it's pretty good for what it is. I can understand Trek fans not wanting a high school comedy, but if you're willing to engage with that concept then this is actually quite well done. Sharply written, well directed and performed. Incredibly, this might actually be one of the better shows of this era, albeit one that will never, ever be accepted by a significant chunk of the fandom.

Let's be clear. Few, if any, Star Trek fans will mourn the departure of Alex Kurtzman or his vision for the franchise. Many will be outright celebrating it. The trepidation that remains is due to the person that is taking over.

Not to beat around the bush, but David Ellison is a controversial figure. A far right ideologue who is accused of using his growing media empire to push extreme propaganda. Said to have been involved in the questionable dealing which resulted in the ouster of various CBS media personalities deemed unfavourable to the current regime in Washington. This is not a good guy, and the fear is that Star Trek, a historically progressive and idealistic franchise, may be perverted into some monstrous and cruel imitation.

I think this is a real concern, and the early murmurs from the new owners about re-centering the franchise have done little to allay such concerns. Despite this, I suspect we are unlikely to see the kinds of radical propagandistic changes that people are fearing for a few reasons. It's one thing to skew news coverage to be more politically favourable, but there isn't really much evidence of the same being done for scripted series by these or other political owners, nor any real data to support the efficacy of doing so. Additionally, it would be a clearly disastrous business decision if they did try to do so. Ellison may be many things, but he is also a businessman, and he knows as well as anyone that you can't sell a product people don't want. There is a reason why the right wing Fox network never stifled Seth MacFarlane's output, for example.

At the same time, I think Star Trek's left-leaning fans would be surprised at just how popular the franchise is with those on the right, particularly the tech-billionaire class. Some might see this as a contradiction, but I think the lesson is that different people take away different things from artistic work. You might be surprised by just how little someone on the right actually wants to change that classic Trek formula.

So while I watch with trepidation, along with all other fans, to learn what the future of this franchise will look like, I am cautiously optimistic. I am of the view that Kurtzman's departure and the end of his version of Star Trek is an unambiguously good thing and an opportunity to forge a new path.

My hopes for the future:

1. Stop trying to make Star Trek something it is not. This is a franchise built on big ideas and intellectual exploration of those ideas. It will never be a mass-market action-adventure franchise.
    
2. Put people in charge who at the very least respect and appreciate that. Evolve and expand the formula on that basis, rather than constantly chasing a broader, more mainstream audience who will never be interested.
   
   
3. Above all, make sure to retain the best talent in the franchise, your Terry Matalas and Tawny Newsomes. People who actually have talent, have an understanding of the franchise, and know how to craft a good product. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater just because they worked for the previous guy.
   
   
4. Allow your creatives to have freedom on their project. It's ok for different people to have a different vision for how Star Trek can look and feel. It's the universal mandates that cause problems. Let people experiment. If it works, build on it. If it doesn't, move on.