“Oh Yeah, Well What Would You Do With It, Then?”

I dunno if you guys know this, but I’ve been a Star Trek fan for pretty much my whole life.

If anything, Captain Kirk, Batman written by Steve Englehart, Bruce Willis, and my Dad are responsible for who I am today.

I dressed up as Spock in 1979 in rural Vermont for the premiere of Star Trek: The Motion Picture way before anybody had heard of cosplay.

I helped write a Trek special for MTV with my oldest friend.

I published all kinds of action and SF graphic novels before anyone knew what a graphic novel was.

I firmly believe all of the Constitution-class ships have their own insignia, if only from a storytelling standpoint, no matter what Bob Justman once wrote in a memo no one ever saw until the Big Bang Theory was in its eighth year..

Point is, I have a lot of opinions on Star Trek, and I’m not shy about making them known.

Every once in a while, some chuckleberry will ask me OH YEAH, WELL WHAT WOULD YOU DO WITH IT THEN? and I always have to laugh.

There are so many economic and political factors involved in that, I’m surprised any new Star Trek is produced, at all.

Somebody owns TV rights, somebody else owns movie rights, some third party owns the Daleks, who can keep track?

But nobody owns space opera, so you can file the serial numbers off and do your own thing. What is Lost if not The Prisoner with pretty people? What’s the difference between every cop show and lawyer show ever made? I’ve got a pitch: It’s Die Hard… but in a building!

So in 2005, I wrote a book with a bunch of fully-realized twelve-page teasers called Proof of Concept.

One of the stories was called “For the Time Being,” and is what I would do with Star Trek. Use the trope of the mad Starfleet Captain as the Big Bad, smear him through time and space so he could appear anywhere and anywhen, and explain every doofus continuity error in every iteration of Star Trek as the Mad Captain messing with the time stream.

You have four standing sets: the Bridge of the timeship, a TOS Conny Bridge, a TNG-era Galaxy class bridge set, and some corridors and a transporter. You could jump around all of Star Trek history telling stories to cajole and instruct and entertain while making right what once went wrong, getting all the fans of all your iterations love you or at least nod in grudging admiration.

But somebody owns TV rights, somebody else owns movie rights, some third party owns the Daleks, who can keep track?

All you can do is file the serial numbers off, and tell your own heroic timeline-fixing story, one page at a time.

Proof of Concept is still available in limited quantities at Amazon.com