Star Trek-related meanderings

Unless you somehow googled your way here, chances are you already regularly visit a lot of the same places I go to, so you already know about Marco's Vanguard announcements not too long ago, and the apparent fact that a new Star Trek movie is being developed, and that Brannon Braga may finally have the X-Files knockoff series that he always wanted Star Trek to be (and it shares a title with one of Star Trek's all-time lowest moments, "Threshold," a Braga classic).

The Vanguard news is interesting, but I'd like it better if it hadn't come shortly after the news about the cutback in the Trek novel line. I no longer think that the news about that cutback is anything but bad. It may well result in better books overall, but I thought Kevin Ryan's TOS trilogy a few years back was disappointingly amateurish, and it's getting a sequel trilogy, so I can't completely buy the "fewer books but better books" line. Many other fans would disagree with me on that, of course. But getting back to Vanguard... it sounds really interesting, and the long wait between books in the series will probably vex me something fierce. I think it may be time to treat the non-TV series as limited series with a finite run, and wind up some of them over the next two or three years so that others can have their chance. The TV series are the core of the franchise. New Frontier isn't.

As for the new movie... I don't think doing a prequel movie is a great idea. Enterprise spent its first three years struggling against the constraints of being a prequel series before a new producer chose to celebrate its status as a prequel instead. Neither approach had much luck in getting people to watch the show regularly. Hard as it may be for a longtime fan like me to admit, most of the current audience knows Star Trek from The Next Generation and any prequel series or movie has to avoid a lot of what TNG and its successors introduced. What's the upside of doing a prequel? Darned if I can think of one, after four years of Enterprise.

(Now playing: Ivy, "I Guess I'm a Little Too Sensitive," Lately EP.)