CBS Just Announced A “Captain Pike” Star Trek Series: Here’s What I Want From It
By: John Sherrod
Tags: Television, TV Series, Star Trek, Culture, TV

The CBS All Access era of Star Trek has been, to say the least, controversial. It’s definitely attracted fans, but it’s alienated many long-time Star Trek fans, myself included. Discovery and Picard are both great-looking shows, but clearly written and produced by people without much love for what made Star Trek what it was. This new Star Trek is decidedly not family-friendly featuring R-rated violence and R-rated hard cursing.

Season 2 of Discovery did, however, introduce something that seemed to please just about everyone: the re-introduction of Captain Christopher Pike, the man who captained the Enterprise before Kirk. Pike was played by Jeffrey Hunter in the original (and unused) Star Trek pilot episode The Cage, parts of which were later re-used in the Star Trek two-part episode The Menagerie. This time Pike was played by Anson Mount, and count me as a fan of his interpretation of the character. He proved such a fan-favorite that CBS has actually greenlit a new series for CBS All Access to be titled Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Returning for this series will be Ethan Peck as Spock and Rebecca Romijn as Number One. We didn’t get a lot of Number One in season two of Discovery, but I think we saw enough from Romijn’s performance to see a lot of potential. And while Ethan Peck’s Spock was inhibited by bad writing, I think he showed he has the potential to play Spock well in this new series. So with that set up in mind, here’s what I want from this new series.

Make It Family-Friendly

The R-rated content in Discovery and Picard were a colossal mistake that CBS All Access needs to correct with this new show. Star Trek needs to be a franchise that the whole family can gather together and watch. Make it so, CBS.

Make It Look Like Star Trek

I’m on record as being against the “new look” that Discovery brought to Trek. If you want to reboot Star Trek, it’s fine. But don’t tell us it takes place in the same continuity as Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation if it doesn’t visually fit. I don’t expect Strange New Worlds to abandon the new-Trek look, but at least make it look as much like the classic Enterprise sets as possible within the framework of your new designs. I think what little we saw of new Enterprise sets indicated they can do this, I just hope they understand the task.

Make It Episodic

Yep, this one might be my most controversial suggestion (and I haven’t even gotten to politics), but if you’re going to use this crew, on this ship, in this era, make it feel like Star Trek by going back to the episodic format. Hire great science fiction writers to write great sci-fi teleplays. Serialized storytelling is great and has it’s place, but let’s go back to the classic formula for this one. Besides, the Discovery and Picard writers can’t seem to write any other storyline other than “bad A.I. from the future is threatening us in the present.” If all Star Trek had been serialized we’d never have gotten great episodes like The City On The Edge Of Forever or Errand Of Mercy or The Inner Light.

Keep Your Politics In Check

New Trek has embraced a far leftwing version of feminism. The sort of Twitter “men are bad/yasss queen” version of feminism. Don’t do this in Strange New Worlds. Just tell great stories involving characters of both sexes without being so on-the-nose with your politics. You’ll accomplish your goal of portraying a future where women and men are on a level playing field without alienating a large chunk of your audience that doesn’t view the world through the lens of intersectional tiers of oppression.