Earlier this year, it was announced that CBS will be creating a new Star Trek television series to celebrate the franchise's 50-year anniversary. Very little was known about the series except that it would be under the leadership of Bryan Fuller (a former Deep Space Nine staff writer), and that it would premiere on CBS's All-Access streaming service. As one of Fuller's first actions, he made a lot of Trek fans very excited by hiring Wrath of Khan and Undiscovered Country director Nicholas Meyer to be the chief writer of the new series. These happen to be my two favorite Star Trek movies (with Undiscovered Country getting better each time I see it).
A leaked poster for the new Star Trek series.
The biggest questions were when would the series take place, and what would it be about. Many of the previous pitches for show ideas that I had read sounded terrible. Many sounded like really cheap fan-fiction concepts. Like the idea of a series about James Kirk's descendant becoming captain of a new Enterprise to save the Federation from an extra-galactic alien threat. Boy, that one sounded dumb.
I avoided talking about the topic of CBS's new series up till now because I wanted to reserve judgement until something more concrete about the show was announced. Well now, something has, and it has me very excited. According to rumors, Fuller and Meyers are producing a seasonal anthology series similar to the popular American Horror Story. This means that each season would contain its own self-contained, independent storyline that could explore any time period, characters, locations, or concepts from the entire series' canon. I've been saying for years that Star Trek would be a great fit for an anthology series. The canon is large and expansive enough that focusing it on a singular time, place, and characters feels very restraining and limits the types of stories that can be told.
The first season will supposedly take place sometime after the events of The Undiscovered Country.
Of course, when I started pitching that idea to friends and anyone who would listen (don't know why I never blogged about it...), I hadn't conceived of a seasonal anthology. I was thinking more along the lines of a true anthology similar to The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits. The problem that I was fully willing to point out was the difficulty in establishing compelling characters and relationships within the span of a single hour-long episode. I had, at the time, proposed to resolve this by occasionally re-visiting specific characters and events from specific episodes in order to further flesh out their plots. I had even suggested having a few independent story threads going simultaneously each season, and then maybe tying them together through a uniting theme, plot element, or some other relation. A seasonal anthology is an elegant and easy solution, and American Horror Story has been a fantastic model.
In addition, the first season is rumored to take place after the events of the The Undiscovered Country (during the gap between the original series movies and The Next Generation). There's a lot of material in that time period that is rife for exploration. We could have a whole season of the "Adventures of Captain Sulu and the Excelsior"! The changing dynamics between the Federation and the Klingons could make for some good stories. First contact with the Cardassians occurs sometime during this period. And the end of hostilities with the Klingons meant that Starfleet finally had an opportunity to de-militarize and go back to performing the peaceful exploration that it was founded to do.
An anthology could go anywhere and anywhen in the Star Trek canon - even an entire season in the mirror universe!
But that's only scratching the surface of what an anthology series (seasonal or not) could do! The anthology nature of the series means that it won't be constrained to that single time period. They could go anywhere, at any time in the franchise's history. They could show us alternate histories, possible futures, and so forth.
An anthology could truly go where
no Star Trek has gone before.
Subsequent seasons could take place entirely on alien worlds. The could show us the formation of the Borg collective. They could [finally] explore the Earth-Romulan wars that Enterprise teased but never actually got around to showing us. They could go into the distant future of the series and show us the death of the Federation. We could see the Eugenics Wars that supposedly happened in the 1990's. Even more, there's nothing to say that an entire season couldn't take place within the mirror universe (like Enterprise's episode "In a Mirror, Darkly", but extended out to a full season); or, a season could even hypothetically take place in the new continuity created by J.J. Abrams.
This new anthology series is one that truly could boldly go where no series has gone before, and it can boldly go anywhere!