June 16, 2017

You’d love to see a Star Trek series in which the theme arises organically out of plot and characters rather than starting with a social-issue-of-the-day, mashing characters and plots to fit. A series based on the characters over time, on their specific problems, personalities, goals, desires, histories, mistakes and relationships. You’d love to see (maybe only) under represented actors on the show, but within the story itself, you want people broader and deeper than their types, not fungible chess pieces (with quirks) that can be slotted into any number of allegories. You’d have to ditch the episodic nature of previous series opting for a season-long external challenge difficult enough to bring out the internal tensions, to see them develop and resolve over a year. You don’t need another drama telling you that racism is bad or that stealing is not nice (though sometimes necessary) or that a too-fixed dedication to any one principle leads to absurd cultural distortions, to human misery. You don’t want to be told diversity is a good thing. You want to discover it in action. You want to feel it.