September 2006
News:
Das Re-boot
JMS and Bryce Zabel reveal their aborted plans for Trek
“We wanted to do what they do in the world of comics, create a separate universe so we could embrace the good stuff, banish the bad, and try some new things,” Zabel wrote on his blog. “We wanted to use Kirk, Spock and McCoy, but show them off as you’d never seen them before.”
Now Zabel has chosen to post the 14-page treatment he and Straczynski developed on his blog. “Might as well let the fans who’d heard about it and wanted to see it, see it,” Zabel wrote.
The plan was to re-cast the entire crew of the first (in TV terms) USS Enterprise, from Kirk, Spock and McCoy to the secondary characters like Sulu and Scotty. “It is time to boldly go back to the original, the classic,” they wrote in their 14-page treatment, “reborn and retooled for a new millennium.”
The first episode would have done what possibly JJ Abrams’s forthcoming film will do and show the first meeting between Kirk and Spock and also show how Kirk won the command of the Enterprise.
Obviously, we now know that Paramount didn’t pick up the series, cancelled Enterprise and sought out JJ Abrams to reboot the original (we think) himself. But if you’re interested in seeing a Star Trek that never was you can read the whole proposal in PDF format by going to http://bztv.typepad.com/newsviews/files/ST2004Reboot.pdf. ( SFX historical note: it’s still there!)
