To my mind, it’s how you do the world-building which is really significant; in other words, it’s in the execution of world-building, just as in the execution of every other aspect of storytelling, where the other strategies come in. Fan-service–oriented world-building will tend to create material which feels like a comfortable fit for the setting and a logical outgrowth of stuff we already know; Lower Decks is fantastic at this, coming up with novelties like the idea that the Daystrom Institute has an entire wing where they keep all the megalomaniac computers that Starfleet captures. World-building oriented towards creative freedom will offer surprises and novelty, showing us something we never expected to encounter in the Star Trek galaxy which at its best can shake up our assumptions and open up fresh possibilities, at worst simply looks incongruous and silly and gets ignored and glossed over by later writers. (To take an example from the golden age, remember when The Next Generation established that fast warp travel was unravelling the universe and all Starfleet ships had a speed limit imposed on them they could only break with special permission? No shade on you if you don’t, I keep forgetting it too and I didn’t watch the relevant episode that long ago, and no subsequent Trek show has seen fit to yes-and that particular bit of world-building.)
Even if you could come up with a world-building approach which perfectly split the difference between fan service and creative freedom, all you’re doing is kicking the can down the road, playing for time without addressing the core dilemma any new Trek thing must address—where is it going to lie in that spectrum between honouring the franchise’s past and trying to establish its own legacy?
Posted 12 days ago.
