The Star Trek franchise is in reasonable need of a reboot. One production team, headed by Rick Berman, has been responsible for all “official” Star Trek output on film and television since 1992. That team no longer has a Trek series in production and creative control of the next Trek film has been given to J.J. Abrams. To further emphasize the point, sets in use for decades on the Paramount backlot as “planet locations” have been struck. Long time Trek model and costume makers have been let go. Paramount even reached into its warehouses and auctioned off much of the memorabilia it accumulated over 40 years. The direct creative link reaching back from Berman, Leonard Nimoy, and Harve Bennett to Gene Roddenberry himself has been broken. The old Trek is dead.

This is probably a good thing. The Star Trek universe seemed to be suffering (along with the science fiction genre in general) from a lack of good ideas during the latter years of Berman’s watch. Part of what made Star Trek: TOS so innovative was the completeness of its vision; others had developed ideas used by Roddenberry, but Star Trek was the only place you ever got warp drive, anti-matter pods, transporters, communicators, voice-activated personal computers, food replicators, tricorders, and floppy disks (tapes, as they were called) all at once. Some of those ideas proved to be popular and influential, to the point that scientists and engineers made them real (consider cell phones, digital voice recognition, and quantum teleportation). Reality has caught up with the rest and they have not aged particularly well — General and Special Relativity still limit interstellar travel, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle still makes matter teleportation very difficult, and while many interesting extra-solar planets have been discovered, none harbor benevolently logical creatures with pointed ears.

Beyond all that, the Berman production team appeared to suffer from a sort of creative fatigue. One need only look to the last Star Trek material that team produced — the season finale of Star Trek: Enterprise — to see how self-referential and tired the Star Trek universe has become. Rather than let the series finish standing on its own with an eye to a brighter future, the actions of Captain Archer and crew became fodder for a holodeck program while Will Riker puzzles out how to handle the re-discovery of the USS Pegasus in a retcon with a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode. The intellectual cupboard is bare, and Star Trek ended on television by devouring its own young.

Giving J.J. Abrams a shot at re-vitalizing Star Trek by producing and directing the next motion picture is a good first step at remedying this situation. The motion pictures have been carrying around a lot of baggage, in terms of cast, sets, costumes, and characters. Though the plot could be more original (Harve Bennett evidently pitched a “Kirk meets Spock, first adventure scenario” for Star Trek VI in 1990), going to an established producer/director from outside the Trek family for the first time in nearly 30 years does give someone with an independent eye the chance to hack away at some of the deadwood.

This all raises an interesting question, however. To what degree will Abrams make Star Trek his own? Successful movie makers often go back to the same creative well to find inspiration. Consider what the following producers/directors might do (or could have done) with the Star Trek franchise, given the chance:

• Steven Spielberg would center the story around James T. Kirk during two phases of his life: first as the young, brash adolescent who leaves the Iowa heartland and ruptures his relationship with his father, and then as the older man who must reconcile these memories with his paternal feelings for his orphaned nephew Peter later in life.
• Tim Burton would use the character of Spock to drive his Star Trek story. The cool, silent science officer, both part-Human and part-Vulcan but fully neither, would be free to act outside the closed and sometimes grotesque conventions of human society on the Enterprise, and thereby save the day.
• Two things are sure about a Star Trek film by James Cameron: the special effects for whatever aliens the Enterprise crew came up against would be ground breaking, and the story of the whole film would revolve around a buff Lieutenant Uhura played by Jada Pinkett Smith who kicks ass.
• A Star Trek film constructed by the late Stanley Kubrick would essentially re-make Star Trek: The Motion Picture with greater emphasis on the cold, impersonal nature of extending the human experience into the sterile vacuum of outer space. And oh yeah, it would also be good.
• The Star Trek of M. Night Shamalyan would find Kirk, Spock, and McCoy transporting down to an unknown planet and lost in a dark maze filled with a knot of conflicting clues about their situation that only resolves as they are finally able to leave.
• Quentin Tarantino would cast Samuel L. Jackson as Spock, Michael Madsen as Dr. McCoy, and Billy Zane as Captain Kirk. Together, the three would find themselves transported back to urban Detroit in the 1970s to find a pair of green Orion slave girls played by Uma Thurman and Salma Hayek.

Ok, these ideas do resemble bad fan fiction, but they make the point. Giving creative control over Star Trek to an outsider is not without risks. Will Abrams’ creative impulses overpower what fans see as “traditional” Star Trek? Or will 40 years of existing creative DNA absorb Abrams and produce something thoroughly traditional, but possessing a new, much-needed vitality? Will the next motion picture be more influenced by nature or nurture?

No matter what happens, Star Trek is a creative franchise in legitimate need of some new life. If Abrams does not supply the creative talent needed, Paramount needs to keep trying until the right person is found to restore Star Trek to some semblance of its former greatness. To do otherwise, would be to force the unthinkable: no more new Star Trek. And nobody wants that.