Well, it's over.
After forty years, twenty eight seasons, 540 hours of TV, ten films, over 500 books, several dozen computer games, an animated series, a ride, an exhibition, countless toys, a collectible dinner plate; the enormous franchise machine that is Star Trek ground to a halt not with a bang, but with a whimper.
I love Star Trek. Not as in like a show, but as in like a place. It is a place. It's the largest shared fictional space that's ever been created. Tolkien comes second but he's lagging way, way behind. The neat thing about Star Trek is, inside this space, it can be anything it wants to be. Horror, comedy, romance, action, bleak, uplifting, stupid, fun, realistic, unbelievable, pertinent, pointless. Thought provoking. Thoughtless. And it has been all these things, over and over. And over.
Which is why it had to die.
Star Trek died, as a show, because its 'formula', while endlessly malleable, was still trapped in a stylistic mode that has been more or less unchanged since 1966. Static cameras, overlit, line-by-line dialogue. Almost every show that uses this formula has been or will be extinct over the next few years. We're used to them because they're like going to see Shakespeare: For the first few minutes you're like: "People don't talk like that! This is unbelievable." Then your brain changes gear and you're caught up in the drama and by the end you're crying for Hamlet even though he is obviously not lying dead up there on stage. Star Trek is like that. Obviously the sets are fake and the alien prothestics look ridiculous and the lines are corny. But you've been watching this mode of television for so long that you just switch gears and ignore the fourth wall and everything seems to make sense.
Until you switch channels to 24, which is shot in a realistic, documentary-style (although the plots are more ridiculous than any sci-fi), and suddenly it all looks a bit stupid. It's outmoded. In truth, It was already outmoded when Voyager ended. That's when Star Trek needed to take a break. Enterprise was a bad concept, badly executed. If it had been 'overhauled' in terms of mode, updated to suit the TV-sensibilities of the noughties, it might have survived. As it was, it was steamrolled by shows like Firefly and Battlestar Galactica (which, more than any other show, I think highlighted the difference between the 'old' and 'new' way of shooting for television). It had to die.
Trek will be back, of that I have no doubt. Titanic, the highest grossing movie ever...made less money for Paramount than Star Trek does every year, just on franchise rights. But it needs a break. A long one. It needs to come back renewed, not just a retread of a stale formula. It needs to come back feeling like it's real.
In the meantime...the show may be cancelled, but the place still exists. It's in me, and the thousands on thousands of other people who collectively imagine it, fill it in bit-by-bit.
And it can wait.
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Very well put. I think in the same way, James Bond must die too.
Know what you mean. Was extremely disappointed in the last episode of Enterprise though. If you're going to kill something that big, you may at least do it with style. Bah. Riker *grumble*
Yeah, it was pretty terrible, although I'd heard so many rumblings about it being the worst thing ever that I was kind of prepared for it. Great to see the Enterprise-D again, if nothing else.
Christ, and *I* get a snarky "navel-gazing" comment on my site.. then THIS?
It's a TV SHOW fer chrissakes.. and not a very good one.
*runs for cover*
It was a TV show. Now it's....something bigger.
And the navel-gazing comment was not being snarky! 'Intellectual masturbation, ejaculating pointlessness all over the navel' was my first take on the matter. THAT was snarky.