BW Media Spotlight

At some point it might be fun to examine Star Trek’s in-universe future and its three major timelines, Classic, Prime, and Kelvin, Yes, I treat Kurtzman’s Trek as a different timeline because things don’t make sense even by Star Trek continuity standards–though still more sense than Kingdom Hearts or Doctor Who. Alex Kurtzman’s vision of Star Trek, which he stated himself is less about making Star Trek and more using Star Trek to “send a message”, has not exactly been a hit. The preview stream of the Starfleet Academy pilot on YouTube was outdone by Nerdrotic streaming a static image of a Leonard Nimoy Spock sitting on host Gary Buechler’s computer chair without anything else until he realized he was getting a bunch of Super Chats and responded to his viewers.

(I think it was more protest and a glorified chat room than actual entertainment, but it still happened. Now Buechler owns one of the shuttle chairs from the show, not the biggest trophy but he probably made more from that stream than the show did for Paramount Plus.)

Of the Paramount Plus and rebooted movie periods only the final season of Picard, in which Kurtzman was forced by scheduling to take a backseat while an actual fan of the franchise gave fans what they wanted the past two seasons, ever made a positive impact. Four live-action series, two animated series, and a TV movie originally intended to be a TV series, all otherwise hit a deflector screen with a thud that could be heard in space. Now the sets are coming down or already down, only completed filmings of Strange New Worlds and Starfleet Academy‘s final seasons are yet to come out, and few tears are shed outside of the creative teams, performers, and people of a certain political viewpoint who wanted to “own the chuds” with something they probably weren’t watching given viewer stats.

Book & Film Globe has a good politics-free breakdown of why the Kurtzman shows didn’t work on a technical level and never felt like Star Trek… as in Enterprise understood the assignment better and between them and Voyager that’s a low bar to duck under. Pretty sure you could win a limbo contest making it under that bar. Full disclosure if it matters to your perspective so I don’t waste your time: I can tell you that I saw the first episode of Discovery when it aired on CBS and wasn’t impressed enough to want to see more, having already passed up those other two I just mentioned and the movies, which Kurtzman was also part of when he was still with Bad Robot versus his own Secret Hideout company.

I also saw the first episode of Lower Decks and wasn’t impressed because Rick & Morty wasn’t my style (it’s where the writers came from) and the focus seems to be on the worst character because her VA is also one of the writers (who also wrote herself a bit part in Starship Academy as the new Dax host). I went through the first episode of Prodigy with lukewarm interest that I never had a chance to follow up on. That went ignored by everyone else because cartoon while the other shows had such bad scene by scene reviews that even if I had Paramount Plus or it came up on Pluto TV I really wanted nothing to do with it. I didn’t even need that to tell me Starfleet Academy was going to be bad because the promotion itself told me they didn’t have a clue about making good Trek…and it turns out they couldn’t even make good TV according to reviews. I even thought Discovery looked okay standalone but lousy as Star Trek, and it proved me wrong as the series went on.

So this is more of an outside prospective and not review on each series. You just saw how much of it I was exposed to, and even with that caveat somebody on X-Twitter or Tumblr gets mad at me for daring even mention it because of it. Maybe if I made money reviewing the slow demise of my childhood like Buechler does or could make fun of bad media like SF Debris I’d have reason to devote my limited time to something that doesn’t appeal to me that I could be spending watching good Star Trek. You know, like the original and animated series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, or reading the novels and comics like I’m doing right now with The IDIC Epidemic. Instead we’re talking about where Gene Roddenberry’s creation is going to in a post Kurtzman world with the announcement of a new movie. Will it help the franchise? There are too many questions to be sure.

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