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If Star Wars could do it by bringing Lawrence Kasdan back to the franchise, why couldn’t Star Trek do it with Nicholas Meyer?
Variety is reporting that Meyer, who directed Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, and who also wrote the screenplays for The Undiscovered Country as well as Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, has been hired by CBS Television Studios as consulting producer and writer for the new Star Trek series set to debut in early 2017.
Kasdan knows Star Wars, and by bringing back his talents and his original trilogy mindset, The Force Awakens successfully returned audiences to a familiar world they had been clamoring to see for over 30 years.
The new Star Trek series is boldly going where no Trek has gone before, with first-run episodes airing exclusively on CBS All Access, its streaming on demand service, instead of the familiar safe territory of a network television broadcast. Thankfully, it appears they are looking for a revitalization of the franchise with a fresh start in this landscape. They need to go big if they want this to be a success.
When Star Trek: Enterprise went off the air in 2005, it concluded a stream of successful, but slowly declining shows, starting with Star Trek: The Next Generation, followed by Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager, and lastly, Enterprise. The episodes were quality, but became increasingly watered down with each new incarnation, and clearly a break, and a change in showrunners, was needed.
Meyer was responsible for directing what Trek fans largely consider to the best of the films in The Wrath of Khan. It is, indeed, the great legitimizer of the franchise, layered with theme and rich with character, with a more militaristic submarine warfare take on the Federation juxtaposed against a passionate humanistic revenge story.
Meyer scripted The Voyage Home, which has the most fun, humor, and heart of all of the Trek films to date.
Meyer knows Trek, but perhaps more importantly, he knows Trek his way. I wouldn’t expect this new series to emulate any of the previous incarnations in the slightest. With the success of the J.J. Abrams reboot of the franchise, I would have expected the new series to be set in the same time period and take on the same palette of visuals, theme, tone, and style. But Meyer isn’t known for rehashing what has come before. If they are bringing him in to lead the charge, one has to assume the new show is going to be very different from anything we’ve seen thus far.
Personally, I’m hoping for a return to the deep space exploration aspect of Trek embodied by the original series with Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock. That show uniquely found a way to wrap adventure, drama and heart around science and technology. We live in a time now where the furthest reaches of our galaxy are a lot closer, where we can see a closeup image of a mountain range on Pluto, where black holes are very real, where we can identify potentially habitable worlds. Star Trek has always been the closest we’ve been able to come to exploring these far off places up close.
And now with Nicholas Meyer at the helm of the new show, anything is possible.