Not content with having completely buried Star Trek, pRick Berman now intends to dig it up again to slide yet another rancid thrust into its exhausted corpse.

But wait - don’t dismiss it just yet. This could be good - this could a winner. This is, like, instead of a sequel… it’s a prequel! Yeah, that’s right! Instead of going forward in time, we’ve gone back! Isn’t that crazy?! They’ll have never seen that before.

For those of you who don’t know, a prequel is a type of film you make when you want to make more money, but have absolutely no idea how to progress your story with any original ideas. For further information, see the recent pungent streak of cow diarrheah that was Enterprise, or the first two and a half of the recent Star Wars prequels.

The idea of Kirk and Spock’s First Adventure is not only utterly cringeworthy, it’s about as new as my wardrobe. It was being bandied about when Gene Roddenberry was slowly losing the plot back in the pre-TNG 80s, dribbling ignored rantings from his pen about Starfleet Academy and the involvement of the Enterprise crew in the assassination of JFK.

I used to love Star Trek. I grew up on it. It used to be pure science fiction as it should be - allegory and social commentary in a setting and style that most people wouldn’t once expect to find any credible or intelligent message. And anyone who can propose an undeniably Communist society as a vision of America’s (sorry, sorry, I meant humanity’s) future in a time of rife McCarthyism deserves at least one bad idea to be forgiven.

But since Voyager (which I did like, but like the impressively arbitrary and meandering Deep Space 9, it just wasn’t proper Star Trek) it’s all just guns and bosoms now. It’s all just special guest star explosions and the seasonal leotard change for Jeri Ryan or Jolene Blalalollock or whatever her name was. It doesn’t have anything new or interesting to say. The commentary and allegory and interesting, challenging writing is now largely non-existant. It doesn’t challenge prejudice or preconceptions anymore.

A Hawk. Yum.

There was controversy in Paramount as far back as the late eighties, when Roddenberry wanted to introduce a regular gay character into the series. Most of the other production staff laughed this idea off instantly. Evidently it didn’t occur to them that a gay character didn’t need gay storylines. Nor did he need to wear a pvc uniform or squeal “ooh, duckie” everytime a Romulan warbird decloaked off the starboard bow. All that was needed to show that this really was a tolerant and morally advanced society was the use of the word ‘he’ when a male character talked about a love interest. I say male because lesbianism did in fact feature in Star Trek beyond the usual subtext (e.g. come on, it is so obvious what’s going on between Janeway and Seven), though it was only ever in some clichéd dominatrix schoolboy wank fantasy type scenario, like the mirror Kira in DS9. Shows like Buffy have taken the lead Star Trek once had in breaking those kinds of stereotypes and preconceptions. The idea enjoyed a feeble revival in the mid nineties with First Contact’s inexcusably hot Lieutenant Hawk played by Neal McDonough. Hawk, again, was supposed to have been Star Trek’s first gay character, yet despite a lot of pouting no mention or even suggestion of this was at all made in the film. It was interesting the Berman was quite happy to perpetuate the tacit suggestion that homosexuality had apparently been “cured” by the 24th century.

Someone should tell pRick that the reason why Nemesis utterly flopped at the box office had nothing to do with people being tired of Trek’s current cast or were wanting something new. It was because:

1) The script sucked.
2) The script made no sense.
3) The script wasn’t even remotely original. Did you watch five minutes of Star Trek II and think “I could do that”? It shows.
4) Rather than wait for a quiet patch in the sci fi/fantasy market, YOU CHOSE TO PREMIERE IT AT THE SAME TIME AS LORD OF THE F**KING RINGS FOR CHRIST’S SAKE.
5) Enterprise did as much for attracting new fans to the franchise as Myra Hindley would for The Early Learning Centre.
6) The script really, really sucked.

So please don’t do this. Don’t make Star Trek: Spy Kids. Leave it to rest for a few more years to recover from the utter damage you’ve caused to it. There are more important concerns than money, believe it or not. The revival of Doctor Who has proven that a good idea can be left in a dusty box for almost two decades and be given a whole new exciting lease of life, with intelligent stories and believable characters making its return worthwhile - not just expensive effects or pin up eye candy.