Phoenix...

Star Trek "First Contact": The Phoenix

Topics: Dark Humor, Doomsday Clock, Star Trek, Nuclear Power, Treatment

A Fan's Star Trek Treatment, © 2 April 2015, (at least this is the date I started typing away), but this instruction from LOC.gov clarified things for me: i.e. what I can't, and won't claim rights to.

So, Star Trek is definitely not "my baby," I am not a screenwriter; member of SAG nor am I remotely related to Gene Roddenberry. I'm having some tongue-in-cheek fan fun, and hopefully if CBS/Paramount decides to use it, they'll at least give me a byline, but...probably not.

*     *      *     *     *

Note: The following follows no known treatment format I'm aware of. Just that with the passing of Leonard Nimoy and the 50th anniversary of the Original Series next year, it got me thinking of some unresolved important things in the Trek timeline I wouldn't mind seeing on television. The strength of Star Trek has always been a positive view of the future; its only flaw other than fantastic, Heisenberg and Relativity-defying technologies (I think) are the missing baby steps taken to societal maturity and tolerance of diversity.

Nerdist reports of two possible new Trek series in the works. Judging from the write ups, one is a re-re-boot of Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Uhura, Chekov, Sulu and Scottie; the other a darker version of the Trek universe in the future when the Federation, like most empires, is bloated, over-extended and falls from galactic grace. I wouldn't mind either, really. I would delight if both story lines were brought to the flat screen and set my DVR accordingly.

However, as I found in the post “Farpoint,” there is a part of the faux human history that is being avoided, perhaps purposely, perhaps because no one has a treatment or script idea centered on it, or we’re just too close to the subject matter: World War III and its aftermath.

From Farpoint: "Nuclear war would be a fool's errand - whether as in Federation we established colonies on off worlds, the conflagration would leave swaths of Earth clearly uninhabitable for thousands of years. Corpses would have no care who actually "won" such an insane engagement. The Trek universe eludes to the discontinued existence of Washington, Moscow and other global capitals, hence the location of the fictional United Federation of Planets in San Francisco." We should see this in a dramatic new Trek series; ponder the term "Mutually Assured Destruction" (M.A.D.), and that we still have an active doomsday clock. Disturbingly, from the press release by the Bureau of Atomic Scientists, we are now 3 minutes to midnight.

Star Trek: Deep Space 9 suggested in a two-part episode rampant inequality in the 21st Century (how prescient), to the point in the United States at least, the uber 1% build “sanctuary cities” for the poor to be warehoused in to eventually die (DS9: “Past Tense” Part I and Part II).

I've always fancied a "Star Trek: Phoenix," as in rising from the ashes of destruction and building something quite different, more democratic and less stratified than our current society and its inequality that is now epidemic -  - and reinforced by modern-day cults: commercial, personality, religious types; news pundits and politicians, our own fairy tale beliefs of society and our place and mobility in it. It also happens to have been the name of the first warp ship built by Dr. Zephram Cochrane a lot of fans would remember. Plus, with the exception of the novel Federation, Zephram is almost an afterthought with no back story, that I think would be quite interesting to watch.

For example, even though humanity was in a barbaric state at the end of "Star Trek: First Contact," can you imagine a few of our current loons accepting a pointy eared, bowl-haircut, and green skinned alien with a “live long and prosper” salute? Civilization collapsed on itself; not a single cell phone tower would be up; no malls; the Internet and million player online games in a complete shambles and unresponsive. I could see loud zealots and teenagers in neurosis. I’d expect riots up to the point the Vulcans showed us how to replicate a T-bone steak! Also, as Copernicus and Galileo did with the Heliocentric (correct) view of the solar system, the idea we’re not only not alone in the universe, but there are these intelligent "other" beings that don’t share our cultures; our history; our prejudices; our religions: that would be upsetting and faction-creating. For the sake of moving the story along in Trek, a few billion people suddenly stopped being cruel to each other and started getting along in a fitful flight of magical thinking. In light of current events I see on the evening news, it would light initially an existential powder keg. As a case-in-point, the indictment against Galileo (as of this 2013 post) is STILL in effect!

“Phoenix” would have the feel I appreciated from “Enterprise” (a show that ended too soon), this would be before even a glimmer of a thought of a “Prime Directive.” After a flirt with the sixth extinction event on Earth, this time self-caused, the former United States was apparently fighting an Eastern Coalition that warred with them frequently. Colonel Green - another barely a-mention in the Original Star Trek or Enterprise - used genocide after the war to purify humanity from the ravages of radiation poisoning. The scary part is I could see some political demagogue thinking this quite "rational," and gathering a following in authoritarian fashion. He had been influenced – as I said in Farpoint – by the Optimum Movement, itself an outgrowth of Khan Noonien Singh and his sister and brother genetic supermen. It could be gritty, grimy, and dangerous even involve the current vogue: Zombies of a kind, with a biological explanation. It wouldn't need much high tech technology as we’d be trying to recover what we lost and discover new designs and paradigms. It would be like after any terrible disaster – Earth as “Survivor Island” – as humanity clawed its way up from barbarity and created a new civilization, one less stratified; more fair and just and above all, rational and sane.

Sir Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, Marina Sirtis, Denise Crosby, LeVar Burton, Gates McFadden, Michael Dorn, Brent Spiner – doing cameos in a two-episode pilot, leading to a confrontation where traditionalists fighting change want to return to the “old ways” – that ahem, plunged humanity back into the dark ages. I could see either Stewart or Frakes shouting “no more!” after an emotional soliloquy about not going back to the previous ignorance and fears, selling the scene. Star Trek, like any great science fiction/fantasy story asks the question through its characters (e.g. Data, Picard, Worf) over again we never tire of: “what does it mean to be ‘human’?” It's a prequel, but for example, I watch Gotham with the full knowledge of how the Batman mythical universe will eventually flesh itself out, villains and all. It's just fun watching the creativity of writers building the bricks of it to its logical conclusion: cape and cowl in one instance; warp drive and aliens in another.

"Phoenix" would then be a story not of warp drives and miracle materializing technologies: but the miracle we survived our own hubris at all to venture forward to the stars. Its impact could be quite powerful as a mirror to ourselves in light of current events; a way to start conversations without partially following the famous dictum of Carl von Clausewitz: "War is merely a continuation of politics"— or "of policy"—"by other means." A few enthusiastic cheerleaders drop the important prepositional phrase at the statement's end.