Mission: Reinventing Star Trek

I’ve never watched an episode of Lost, never seen more than a few minutes of Alias, and haven’t seen Mission: Impossible 3, but no matter what, I’m thrilled to hear that the Berman-Pillar days of Star Trek are over. J.J. Abrams seems to understand cult TV, and if any cult TV show deserves reviving, Star Trek—a series which has flagged worse than the Bush Presidency—is it.

But to do it the way Ross Douthat suggests in his blogging heads conversation with Matt Yglesias (in which he takes on a weird, glowing, possibly alien presence himself)—a reinvention that throws out Roddenberry’s post-money socialist utopia in favor of something darker and more character based (and presumably more conservative)—is absolutely the wrong way to go about it. Douthat claims it’s a Batman Begins approach, but that’s not really an accurate analogy. Batman has never had a consistent chronology, and the various incarnations (film, TV, comic-books, novels) have never attempted to keep things straight. Batman Begins didn’t rewrite the whole of Batman history for the first time, it simply gave up on the film chronology, doing what every new iteration of Batman has done: return to the basics of the character, which is all that really ties the last 6 decades of Batman material together anyway.

All of the live-action, filmed versions of Star Trek, on the other hand, have retained a more or less consistent timeline, and in fact, that’s one of its selling points. It’s a multi-century history of the future stretching from the eugenics wars of 1997 that spawned Khan to the Borg-riddled 24^th century future of Voyager.

No, dumping the basic rules of Gene Roddenberry’s future would be more like reimagining Batman as a guy in a trench coat who carries a gun—a total evisceration of settled, expected elements. A better approach would be to move toward a darker, character-based drama set within Roddenberry’s technology-driven socialist utopia, revealing its seedy criminal underbelly, its bureaucratic corruption, its backroom dealings with alien governments, its moral tradeoffs and human follies.

Part of what Christopher Nolan recognized with Batman Begins was that the essence of Batman’s iconic status is his character, and whatever flaws that film has, it nailed the Batman/Bruce Wayne persona—the angry, brash, slightly manic moral crusader on a mixed mission of justice and revenge. Similarly, part of the essence of Star Trek is the world it has constructed, and the post-money Earth is a key element of that. Character, of course, is also important to the series, and it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to keep Kirk as a gung-ho, rule-flouting individualist, but simply make him more skeptical of the socialist regime. The all-out war with the Klingons or Romulans that Ross wants might be a bit of a weight on the continuity, but I don’t see why there couldn’t be smaller, though still major, space battles aplenty.

An ordered, government-run socialist society is a necessary element in the Star Trek universe. The right approach wouldn’t be to reinvent the show’s mythos, it would be to take the original concept and, Battlestar Galactica-style, remove the squeaky-clean surface to explore its grimy, unpleasant social and political consequences.

Card-carrying capitalist goon-squad member that I am, this will, I suspect, be the only time I ever defend the necessity of socialism.

Related: A while back, the Cornell Review ran an amusing essay arguing the minority view on the original Star Trek--that Kirk was actually something of a conservative, or at least a U.N. flouting scalliwag. I'm not entirely convinced, but it's a good read nonetheless.