If we are to be buried under an avalanche of film/TV remakes, reboots, revivals or, as THR called them “requels” Hollywood can at least have the courtesy of trying something new within the constraints of the familiar. Luckily, if you look closely enough at most franchises you’ll often find some unexplained gap in the story which can be exploited for another movie or TV show. So Hollywood executives task producers and writers with finding those gaps, spending millions to find the narrative opening which will allow them to squeeze out as much as they can from an intellectual property. The latest example is Star Trek.
BirthMoviesDeath’s Devin Faraci exclusively reports that the new Bryan Fuller-produced Star Trek series set up at CBS All Access “won’t be set in the JJ Abrams reboot universe. The new show will be set in the original, classic continuity.” Specifically, it will take place “some time after the events of Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country, so between the original series and The Next Generation. ”
If true, that will arguably enter Star Trek into X-Men-level jumbled continuity, revisiting a timeline Paramount effectively waved away back in 2009. Furthermore, it will do so in such a way that all of those Next Generation/Deep Space Nine/Voyager cast members will be ineligible to return as their old characters, even if just to cameo. The Original Series characters are the most logical candidates for any kind of appearance, but most of those actors have passed away by this point, although William Shatner might be entirely sustained by his conviction to some day make one last appearance as Kirk after being left out of the J.J. Abrams movies and disliking his character’s death in Generations.
However, this ultimately looks like Bryan Fuller’s attempt to exploit one of the more obvious gaps in Star Trek lore: what exactly happened in the 71 years between Undiscovered Country and “Encounter at Far Point” (Next Gen‘s pilot)?
FYI, this Star Trek Generations prologue technically takes place in the same year as Undiscovered Country
We’ve been told bits and pieces here and there, but we’ve never had a film or TV show devote itself exclusively to filling that gap, albeit just partially. The new Star Trek will follow an anthology format with a new time period and cast for a potential season 2, should it get that far. However, at least for this one season there’s plenty of potential for, as Devin said, “a rich vein of stories to be mined between the years of the swashbuckling OG crew and the more reserved TNG crew.”
One idea Fuller is toying with: What if after the human-Klingon peace treaty at the end of Undiscovered Country hostilities lingered long enough for Klingons to serve as the villains in the new series?
Where’s the gap in the story we already know? That’s how we got a prequel about Sleeping Beauty‘s villain Maleficent, and a Rocky spin-off finally answering what became of Apollo Creed’s family after his death in Rocky IV. However, it’s not necessarily the question we knew they were asking when brainstorming a new Star Trek series. After all, they could just do a simple sequel series to Next Gen, or something entirely new in the Abrams universe. However, Fuller has recently proven himself quite adept at filling in the gap of the familiar. His Hannibal not only prequeled Silence of the Lambs but also Manhunter and Red Dragon, showing us what had previously been told in passing.
That gray area between what we’ve been told to be true and what we’ve actually seen with our eyes is often the only opening needed for franchise-obsessed Hollywood executives. For example, Disney is now spending untold millions on Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, a feature-length depiction of what was previously contained to a single line of dialog in A New Hope (“Many Bothans died to bring us this information”). Once upon a time, that type of story would have only been told in fan fiction and expanded universe novelizations/comic books. Now it can become its own big budget movie.
Of course, Disney can get away with that because in the wake of Force Awakens putting the Star Wars name on anything right now is as good as printing money. Plus, it does fit into LucasFilm’s longer-term devotion to filling in the gaps of the Star Wars story. They’ve just usually done that through animated TV shows. Six seasons of The Clone Wars explained the gap between Attack of the Clones and Revenges of the Sith, and Rebels is currently two seasons into its run of explaining what happened between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope. Thankfully, our first glimpse at Rogue One has everyone excited, and this gap-filling story looks like it has provided the skeleton for a massively engaging movie.
That doesn’t always happen. Sometimes the “untold story of a familiar legend” ends up looking like this:
Hook, Pan, Tiger Lily and Blackbeard in Warner Bros.’ notorious box office bomb
And no one particularly cared to learn about that one time Peter Pan and Captain Hook were best pals before becoming enemies.
Sony struck a similar tone with its tagline for The Amazing Spider-Man in 2012, promising us “The untold story begins,” heavily teasing that they would finally answer the question of what exactly became of Peter Parker’s parents. Because that is the obvious gap in the Peter Parker origin story. Before he ever gets to Aunt May and Uncle Ben, he has to first lose his parents, and Marc Webb’s, ahem, spin on the character wasn’t going to look past that the way Sam Raimi had.
And there’s the rub: In the brave new world of franchise-building where you’re constantly playing with pre-made toys, when you notice a gap in a familiar story which can be exploited for obvious marketing purposes the true question is not “What happened there?” but instead “Does anyone care?” Disney is betting Star Wars fans have been dying to know what the hell Mon Mothma was talking about when she vaguely referred to “Bothans.” Bryan Fuller might be guessing that we’re super curious to see what really did happen in the Star Trek universe to take us from swashbuckling Kirk to stiff upper lip Picard.
Source: BirthMoviesDeath