Back after Star Trek: Enterprise went off the air (and by “went off the air”, we mean “got brutally cancelled”), nobody knew how to fix the once ridiculously valuable Star Trek franchise. And if you’ve already forgotten how worthless the Star Trek name was, keep in mind that Activision actually sued Viacom back in 2003 for ruining the value of the franchise to the point that no one wanted to buy Activision’s Star Trek games.
While J.J. Abrams has redeemed the name with the Star Trek reboot movie, it turns out a bunch of people pitched new TV series before Abrams got involved, only to get shot down. Among the would-be Roddenberrys were Jonathan Frakes (The Next Generation‘s Commander Riker), William Shatner…and long-time Trek fan and X-Men director Bryan Singer, who is such a Trek fan that he even agreed to act in Star Trek: Nemesis, easily the worst Star Trek film to feature a retarded robot.
While Singer’s TV pitch has never been released, Ain’t It Cool News got a tip from an insider that claims a friend who read the pilot described it to them. The notes are a little vague, but according to the source, Singer’s Star Trek included these details:
We are somewhere just beyond the 30th century.
The Klingons are less warrior-like and more political.
The Romulans and Vulcans completed reunification and are busy with that (obviously this doesn’t take into account Romulus’s destruction).
And the Federation has expanded through a huge portion of the galaxy — so far in fact, transmissions from the frontier to Starfleet HQ takes years at subspace frequencies.
Ships sent to these distant areas of the galaxy are near autonomous, expanding the Federation while exploring new worlds and civilizations unknown to the Trek universe.
In a way, this parallels Voyager exploring the far Delta quadrant and DS9’s wormhole access to the Gamma quadrant, except our hero ship is not trying to go home, yet the crew is literally on thier own to deal with whatever gets thrown in the way, while still making headway on thier mission of exploration and expansion.
Sounds promising. Here’s hoping the pilot script gets leaked eventually, although we’re more curious about Shatner’s pitch. We’re betting it was nothing but 60-minute Kirk monologues.
[Ain’t It Cool via UGO]