A Time of Magic

Once the original Star Trek series started to do really well in syndication after it had been cancelled it was obvious that “something” would be produced to follow it up although possibly not so obvious that so many “somethings” would be done.

Clearly the easy thing to do is to produce a follow-on of some sort but for a successful series that becomes more and more difficult to do both in terms of the writing and indeed of the fees demanded by the actors to reappear. In the case of Star Trek this meant that the follow-on series were spin-offs with very little real connection with the original series. Certainly the Next Generation and Deep Space Nine made little attempt to truly place themselves within the confines of the original series. Funnily enough, although Voyager was effectively in an entirely different universe, it was the one that seemed to me to be closest to the concept of the original series in exploring new worlds, new civilisations and boldly going.

Once the sequels had largely been exhausted it was time to consider prequels. In a science-fiction series these can get away with being set so many years before the original that there’s no problem with actors needing to appear younger and so Enterprise got away with an entirely different cast. The problem with that series seemed to be that it’s quite difficult to develop a plausible set of technologies that whilst more advanced than what we have now, are less advanced than what’s to come. Unfortunately in the case of Enterprise this was rather difficult as a lot of the techologies from the original series are already available now eg the communicator, electonic notepad, etc. which meant that those remaining seemed to be confined to limitations of what was shown on the original series eg the less perfected transporter, the slower warp drive, and, of course, the much grimmer decor of the ship (I suspect that this last one is what felled the series ultimately: it didn’t look science fiction enough).

Which brings us to the prequel film. Clearly the studio had decided that it was time for another Star Trek film but apparently didn’t want to pay enough to drag the various actors out of retirement. Thus we have an entirely different set of actors with pretty much the only common link to what had gone before being the name of the film. But, then, what else could they do?

It’s all so much easier to do in books….

One of the amazing things about science fiction on TV and on films is that there’s lots of the technology which you can buy in the shops today.

OK, it’s going to be a while before you can nip out and buy something that will let you travel in time but, surprisingly, it’s something that should be available some day in that it’s not impossible going by present day theories and, of course, anything that isn’t impossible will surely be available someday.

However, if you consider the original Star Trek series every single item can be bought today with just two exceptions. We have a primitive version of the communicators (the Enterprise wasn’t tied to using transmitter poles!). The original version of the notepad was available in the late 1980s and is actually obselete having been replaced by present-day PDAs after a gap of 10 years or so. Talking computers were available in the early 1980s and are now commonplace (although strangely more primitive than those available 20 years ago!).

The exceptions? Well, warp drive is, in principle, possible but isn’t on sale just yet.

It’s the transporter that’s the one you’ll not be able to buy anytime soon as nobody has, so far, worked out even a theoretical way that such a thing would work.