Pitch: Star Trek meets 24

The cancellation of Enterprise has given me a lot to think about regarding the future of Star Trek. Mostly this thinking takes the form of musing about what sort of show TPTB should create to bring it back. I have heard a lot of ideas around the internet, from a show set at Starfleet Academy, to a show about the Timeship Relativity, to a show about the crew of the Excelsior under Sulu. To be frank, most of these ideas seem like crap to me. The academy show would have to pile contrivance upon contrivance to get the cast into space exploring week after week. The time travel show would quickly collapse under the logical contortions required. And anyone who's sat through all 79 episodes of the original series and thought the Asian guy in the seat up front should get his own spin off is either insane or George Takei.

I got my idea for the next Trek spinoff from a column in the Chicago Tribune. The writer suggest Star Trek try out 24's real time format. I think that's a terrible idea; the vast distances and travel times involved in space travel would mean that the show would be confined to a rather small area of space for a whole season. It would be even more static than DS9 before the Defiant--at least they had runabouts. But while the real time concept of 24 wouldn't translate well, other aspects would. In particular, Star Trek could take the other defining feature of 24's narrative style, namely season long story arcs. Star Trek has done similar stories before, in the beginning of the sixth season of DS9 when the Dominion occupied the station and in the last ten episodes of the series' run. The writers of Enterprise tried something similar last year with the Xindi arc, to a lesser effect; with a few exceptions, each episode told a distinct story, and they were largely separable from each other.

But the theft of ideas from 24 need not stop at its narrative style. Why not show the CTU of Starfleet? When I first considered this, I didn't think much of it, because terrorism wouldn't be a main focus in the Star Trek universe, which generally focused on Great Power conflicts. But as of the late 24th Century, the Klingons are allies, the Romulans are too weak from the events of Star Trek: Nemesis and the Dominion war to be much of a threat, the Cardassians have been decimated, the Dominion has withdrawn to the Gamma Quadrant, and the Borg are in disarray. The Federation's position after the Dominion War would be similar to America's after the Cold War. It would be the only great power left, meaning the threats it faces would be asymmetrical in nature. Hence Starfleet CTU. I picture something like 24, except the big threat of the season isn't a nuclear bomb, it's a terrorist group trying to blow up some Omega particles in the Solar system.

If Star Trek: CTU is too similar for Fox's lawyers to allow, then perhaps a different angle. I picture Chinatown in space: a private investigator, in the course of another investigation, stumbles onto a massive web of conspiracies that cut to the very heart of the Federation. Or maybe Star Trek meets Lost: a ship crashes onto an uncharted planet with no hope of rescue and the crew has to learn to survive on its own. It could be the show Voyager promised but never delivered!

The interesting thing about all this speculation about new series, is that it's not so crazy to think that I might someday help create one of these shows. I have often considered television and/or screen writing. Theoretically, I could get a good enough start in Hollywood in the next few years, that when Paramount finally decides to resurrect the franchise, they hire me as a writer. Hmmm.