Well, it certainly seems like we’ve reached the end of the final frontier.
“Star Trek,” starring William Shatner as Captain James T. Kirk, premiered 60 years ago this week on CBS.
Accompanying the U.S.S. Enterprise on its five-year mission to boldly go where no man has gone before, the groundbreaking show set the course for modern science-fiction storytelling as we know it and smashed societal barriers.
Ahead of its time, Gene Roddenberry’s series was canceled in 1969. Call it the “original” sin. But those three seasons birthed a sprawling franchise of interconnected TV and movie properties decades before the concept of onscreen “universes” was widely embraced by Marvel, “Star Wars” and, oy, King Kong.
And, for a while, “Trek” kept getting better and better. “The Wrath of Khan,” “The Next Generation,” “Deep Space Nine” — all glorious.
Um, what the hell happened? The current powers that be have certainly not heeded the sage wisdom of Lt. Spock: “Live long and prosper.” Because what was once — and what still should be — the jewel in Paramount’s crown is now a mismanaged, barely watchable afterthought that nobody pays any attention to.
I’ve attended “Star Trek” conventions. I stood in line and forked over $60 for a photo with an unsmiling Kate Mulgrew from “Voyager.” But now I can hardly make it through any of the dull and badly conceived dreck they’re routinely churning out.
Overabundant “Star Trek” shows are irrelevant castaways on Paramount+ that have been banished from CBS and are canceled before you’ve heard of them. A bunch of other duds are weirdly animated. And in-development big-screen movies keep falling apart. Here’s another less auspicious anniversary: It’s been 10 years since the last one.
There was one recent dreadful streaming movie called “Star Trek: Section 31,” starring Oscar-winner Michelle Yeoh. It boasts a 15% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, and makes “Nemesis” look like “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
Really, I’m not convinced the franchise is salvageable. At best it’s doomed to nichedom. Forget tribbles. The trouble’s with “Trek.”
Ever since the execrable movie “Star Trek: Into Darkness” starring Chris Pine hit theaters 13 years ago, Paramount has made almost exclusively wrong turns with this property to the point that people in their 30s on down have zero connection to it.
“Into Darkness,” by the way, was written by Alex Kurtzman, the no-talent man who is now perplexingly in charge of “Trek” on TV.
I yell “Kurtzman!” like Shatner yells “Khan!”
“Discovery”? Dismal. “Strange New Worlds”? Overrated. The only great thing that’s happened on his watch is the third season of “Star Trek: Picard.” And the man who was actually creatively responsible for that was showrunner Terry Matalas, who innately understands what makes “Trek” tick. He irresistibly brought back the cast of “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” which ended way back in 1994.
Nothing new is sticking.
While “Star Trek” was stupidly relegated to streaming — a mistake many of its competitors also made — there has not been a big-screen movie in a decade. The last one was “Star Trek Beyond.” Beyond terrible.
Even so, S.J. Clarkson (“Madame Web”!) was in talks to direct a sequel to it in 2018. Didn’t happen. Noah Hawley (“Fargo”) was hired to write and direct one in 2019. Didn’t happen.
Quentin Tarantino, of all people, pitched an R-rated, gangster-tinged film to Paramount, and they accepted it. But the “Pulp Fiction” director dropped out in 2020 and it was never made.
Now the writer-director duo behind “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves,” Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, are working on a darker take on the story set ever further into the future.
That untitled flick has been in development — not in production — for more than a year, so who knows when or even if we’ll get to see it.
Heads should roll. The new bosses should stop trying to pander to youth and instead focus on what makes “Star Trek” great — its spirit of adventure, its social complexity, its gravitas and its instantly memorable characters.
I never thought I’d miss T’Pol from “Enterprise,” but here we are.
A famous episode of the ‘60s original series is called “Mirror, Mirror,” in which a transporter malfunction sends Captain Kirk and his crew to a frightening parallel universe where evil alternate versions of themselves exist. Good is bad. Bad is good.
With what Paramount has done to my beloved “Star Trek,” I feel like I’m stuck in it with them.
