If something hits in Hollywood, you can be assured that it won’t last long before anyone else tries to recreate that success. As soon as Marvel proved that a rich man in robot armor, Norse mythology, a WWII hero, and a green giant with anger problems could form a successful supergroup, the shared universe became a pandemic. did.
Unfortunately, since then, wrangling a number of different characters into a series of interwoven story arcs has turned out to be not as easy as the MCU repeatedly shows.
Marvel’s striking competition at DC abandoned their attempt to emulate the Avengers when the former Justice League was frustrated by box office revenue. Universal’s Dark Universe, on the other hand, was an ambitious plan to bring together Frankenstein, Jekyll, Hyde, Invisible Man, and other classic literary monsters, and couldn’t even pass The Mummy, starring Tom Cruise. .. Godzilla / Con stood in front of MonsterVerse and could only claim that the eerie, low-budget conjugating movie (Annabel, Nun, La Lorona’s curse spin-off) played and won the Marvel game. rice field.
But on a small screen, the activated Star Trek franchise (the flagship of the restarted Paramount Plus) shows that there is another way to do a shared universe. Trek has layered all of its television series to pursue diversity with different types of storytelling set over different periods of time, rather than starring in each other’s shows. And unless you’re Marvel, and you’re trying to face it, the traditional rules don’t apply to MCUs. This may be the best way to ensure that your franchise lives long and prospers.
The current Star Trek Discovery, Picard, and Lower decks will be joined by the upcoming Strange New World, Prodigy, and (eventually) Section 31 and the rumored Starfleet Academy series, but on Trek’s first warp flight. There is none. Shared universe territory. In the 1990s, Star Trek: The next generation spawned several spin-offs that worked during the same period of federal history, with the storylines of the three shows working at the same time.
References to other show events occurred on a regular basis, with characters like Q appearing on multiple spacecraft and space stations. Captain Jean-Luc Picard made a cameo appearance on the Deep Space Nine Pilot, and bartender Quark found a way to both the next generation and the Voyager pilot. After the Klingon officer Worf posted to Deep Space Nine after the TNG, the writer was forced to develop the story’s sleight of hand to bring him back to Enterprise for First Contact and other films. Kathryn Janeway appeared to make an easy appearance in Star Trek: Nemesis, but she probably regretted it later.
They were voyages
But just as this shared DNA was great for Trekkies, the same kind of approach proved to be a temporary, but redoing of the franchise. When each crew member wore similar uniforms and operated the same computer interface on almost the same spacecraft, everything began to feel a bit the same.
Even the finest experiments of Deep Space Nine with space station settings and more continuous plots could not hide the fact that we saw 14 years after the 24th century. Many Of tachyon pulse and dysfunctional holodeck. Even the composition of the crew, including the standard comedy alien buddies of the time and the characters who longed to be more human, was stylized.
There are multiple ways to expand the franchise, but the current Trek TV wave takes a much broader approach to space construction. It’s logical enough to approve even Mr. Spock.
Alex Kurtzman, Star Trek’s director (and former protagonist of the short-lived MonsterVerse), told Variety in February 2021: Please see each program. “
Discovery is the flagship that has reopened the franchise, and while superficially the first two seasons are pure trek, the arc plot and more cynical tones have definitely brought the franchise to the 21st century. Picard then told the legendary story of the Starfleet, whose best years were far behind, before the Lower Deck became the franchise’s first comedy. Featuring a pre-Kirk enterprise, the next Strange New World promises another evolution, a reversion to the episodic mission of the original series of exploring space.
What matters is that the connective tissue between shows is not the characters, stories, or settings, but the vast shared universe in which they reside. In fact, Kurtzman states that there is “interoperability” between the television empires he directs, but he’s an MCU-like story leading up to spectacular Avengers-style conclusions. “It’s a lot of fun, but our goal isn’t to be so isolated that you get lost when you’re watching another show if you’re not watching one,” he admitted.
In other words, there’s no reason why fans of anarchy and flashy lower decks have to obey the slower and more thoughtful Picard.
Explore a strange new world
However, perhaps the most important part of the master plan is the main instructions for investigating different periods of the Trek timeline.
It’s been over 50 years since Gene Roddenberry first launched USS Enterprise on its famous five-year mission. Over 800 TV episodes and 13 movies that followed mean that there are plenty of Trek canons out there, and it’s like a double-edged sword. Sure, it would be great for fans to be able to devote themselves to an existing story, such as an important appearance like “The Eternal Guardian” in the third season of Discovery, but I want to avoid conflicting with what has happened so far. If so, it’s also a big headache.
After all, it’s about respecting Canon without being enslaved to it. And if you have the choice, why are you trapped in a small corner of a vast chronology when there are so many unexplored territories? Just because all the stories Star Wars has told on the screen so far are limited to relatively short ones doesn’t mean that Trek has to do the same for a 70-year period.
For example, before Picard, Canon had never dealt with what happened after the Nemesis event, except for the destruction of Romulus in JJ Abrams’ first Star Trek movie. Today, Sir Patrick Stewart’s vehicles are plotting entirely new coordinates in the 25th century. Discovery began relatively close to the sector of the original series on the timeline, but has been blown into the distant future where Kirk, Picard, Cisco and Janeway are entrusted to ancient history. Even Strange New World, a spin-off of Discovery, will occupy most of the 10-year free space before it begins to overlap with the events of the original series.
Therefore, these television incarnations are already in a fully functional shared universe, so there’s no need to tee up Strange New World with Picard’s end-credit sequence or have Michael Burnham meet Jean-Luc. Kurtzman and co-workers are following a blueprint that allows Trek to continue boldly to places it has never been before. Indeed, that’s all about storytelling and successful franchises. Please do so.
Star Trek: Discovery, Star Trek: Picard, Star Trek: Lower Deck are all available on Paramount Plus in the United States. Viewers elsewhere can watch Discovery on Netflix and Picard and Lower Deck on Amazon Prime Video.
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