It was a shot heard round the world.
Well, not a shot, really. An explosion. And everyone picked it up at different times. And it was in space, rather than the world. Which, now that I think about it, means no-one could have heard it at all. Except those poor Klingons, I guess, but they all got blown to bits, so really-
I’ll start again.
Some people say that when Admiral James T. Kirk spat out the code which spelled death for his beloved Enterprise, he embodied the franchise itself, begging for the sweet release of death. The loss of the actual means by which our heroes trekked across the stars was one last attempt to draw a line so thick and final it would never be crossed.
It was perhaps a vain hope, given trying something similar with possibly the show’s most adored character had already failed - hence why The Search For Spock exists in the first place. Certainly, if that were the plan, it could not have failed more completely. The flames of the USS Enterprise’s Viking funeral did not cause the franchise to catch light and burn to ash. Just three years later Star Trek: The Next Generation proved that Roddenberry’s creation could not only survive the loss of the first and most famous Constitution-class vessel, but entirely without the original cast. And we can't even employ a phoenix metaphor here, because the original offspring of the Great Bird of the Galaxy was back in theatres by roughly the same time.
Still, despite the easy confidence and playfulness of "The Voyage Home", it was clear TNG was outpacing its predecessor to an astonishing degree. It did so well it spawned a spin-off to the spin-off, and when it ended, there had to be another spin-off to replace it, so that the first spin-off’s spin-off wouldn’t be lonely.
Everything was coming up space-Milhouse. But the upward trajectory could never continue into infinity. Sooner or later even science fiction franchises must come back down to Earth. Deep Space Nine inherited a healthy proportion of TNG viewers, but it was unable to hold on to them. Voyager found itself watched by even fewer people, and Enterprise could only wish it were Voyager. After almost two decades of continuous interplanetary antics on the world’s TV screens, the franchise faded out with a mournful whimper.
The diagnosis-by-democracy was simple: franchise fatigue. We were weary of warp drives; fed up with the Federation.
I never actually thought that made sense, though. After all, there’s almost no genre the franchise can’t simply fold into itself whenever it wants. Drama on a space station. Romance on the moon. Slapstick comedy whilst orbiting a comet. Saying you’re tired of Star Trek is like saying you’re tired of stories set in the 19th century. Or the 20th, come to think of it. When and what don't actually need to intersect at all.
If we can’t pin Trek‘s collapse on people tiring of the idea that the future exists, though, where do we lay the blame? For me, the problem is simple: anyone who’d amassed enough experience of the franchise to comment usefully on its post-imperial phase must also have seen so many episodes that each new instalment could easily be likened to an earlier one. The expert’s own weight of knowledge tended to crush the experience into a lens through which only one stellar body was ever looked for: the original story. Critical analysis kept collapsing into a memory test. And anyone can do that.
With IDFC, I want to change the game. I want to think about the highs and lows of the pre-Discovery franchise in a way that doesn’t involve just watching Voyager and tutting about how Picard did it all first. Frankly, if you want to sensibly compare these shows, the worst thing you can do is watch them in broadcast. Not only does that set up for the Originality Trap, but you end up doing self-evidently unreasonable things like comparing DS9‘s first season to TNG‘s sixth. Shows change as they move forward. There isn’t time to provide IDIC on any single day. The timescale of a show’s life is far more important than piffling details like actual dates.
That’s why, three times a week for the next nine months or so, I'll be putting up essays which considers these shows in the only sensible way possible: comparing them episode by episode to finally answer the question of which show climbed the peaks of Mount Awesome to the highest ledge. These essays will be substantially similar to those that originally featured on the Geek Syndicate website, but I'll be tweaking them with the benefits of hindsight, my development as a critic/person, and my increasing unwillingness to keep things civil.
Welcome to Infinite Diversity, Finite Combinations. Going boldly going where millions have gone before. Hopefully, though, never from this direction.
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