Like most of us, I am greatly enjoying Strange New Worlds. One of the small benefits of the series, in my mind, is that it has finally broken one of the strangest of fan habits – the insistence on literalism for TOS visuals, especially on things like ship designs and controls. Is there anyone still holding out for a “refit” of the beautiful SNW Enterprise so that it “really” looks like a set from the late 1960s? The updated look is a big part of what makes the TOS world seem relevant and alive for contemporary viewers, instead of just a nostalgia trip (as it was in the tribute episodes that showed TOS sets within a TNG/DS9 context).
Given that they have made the biggest remaining move of recasting Kirk, the idea of continuing past SNW into Kirk’s Five-Year Mission seems unavoidable. Given that Paramount seems to be contracting their streaming footprint, it is admittedly unlikely that anything like this would ever get made. But something like the Kelvin Timeline tie-in comics where they redo TOS stories and intersperse them with new ones could actually be a good format – reintroducing new viewers to classic stories while retrospectively granting more cohesion to TOS.
Obviously there would be drawbacks to redoing the old episodes. Fans would howl at any changes to the scripts, and of course there would be questions about whether any of this was worth anyone’s time or talents. And maybe it wouldn’t be! But redoing the most stone-cold classics of TOS in a more modern style could literally be the only way some new fans would engage with those stories. Young people are very intolerant of entertainment that seems old or outdated. Looking back at my childhood, I never liked TOS in large part simply because it looked too old and the acting style felt weird. If we really think that these stories are classics that deserve to endure for the long haul, a remake could be a way to inject new life into them.
What do you think? [UPDATE: You all have convinced me this is a bad idea. I will keep that in mind if I ever become head of Paramount.]
While I welcome the more flexible interpretation of TOS visuals to make a world that is more immersive and functional while still keeping the color, and perceived campiness, I’d draw a hard line against making a genuine “Re-TOS” as it were. The idea of overwriting, or demoting old performances strikes me as a path to perpetual reboots and origin story retellings like we see with comic book superhero’s, and seems a tad rude to trek’s own past and how it got here.
Its also pretty unnecessary, folks often talk about how they want to see the old stories updated for a modern audience, but its often the case that the same stories have been retold with different characters and places already throughout trek’s subsequent series, and as a result we are flush with ways to retell TOS’s hit scenarios without crossing that line. Naked Time(TOS) vs Naked Now(TNG) vs Singularity(ENT) would be a commonly cited example, and we even already saw SNW demonstrate one such way to go about this with “a quality of mercy” a time traveling what-if reimagining of “balance of terror” had pike been captain and not kirk.
I accept and expect paramount to still be making at least one show set in the 23rd century for as long as SNW and its successors do well, but these should be used to look forward and expand on the time period not backwards at where we’ve already gone before.
