What Happened to Star Trek?

In trying to find another creative approach to teaching social science, I came up with the idea of doing a Political Economy and Culture in Star Trek course. This led me to review some of the episodes from Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I've also taped and watched a couple of episodes of Enterprise. I was struck by the quality of the scripts from the first two shows and the weakness of the scripts for the most recent (and now cancelled) Enterprise. My nine year old, who watched the episodes with me, independently came to a similar conclusion (Patrick Stewart has a new, next generation, fan). Star Trek: TNG and DS9 included some of the best sci-fi writing to be found anywhere, particularly on television. TNG episodes such as "Measure of a Man" and "The Inner Light" and DS9 episodes such as "Time's Orphan" and "Far Beyond the Stars" stand independently (of the Star Trek universe) as excellent and thought-provoking writing. These were all scripts that did not rely upon special effects, explosions, or video-game like combat scenes. It was clear, however, that at least part of the blame for the serious drop in quality with Enterprise was that writing for the more recent show was dominated by Rick Berman and Brannon Braga. For some reason, there was an executive decision not to seek out story lines and scripts from the larger sci-fi writing community, even writers who had penned some very strong sci-fi scripts for TNG and DS9. It reminded me a bit of the movie, The Player, where you get the sense that the suits in the exec suites of the movie studios find writers a pain in the rear and this is epitomized by the main character killing a writer and then rising to the top of the movie studio food chain. I don't know if Paramount/Viacom's decision to eschew writers was meant to be a profit-maximizing decision, but I suspect the result of this strategy has been to lower the value of the entire Trek franchise and reduce the potential cash flow to Paramount (Viacom). Someone who understands this franchise better needs to take control of it, either by buying it from Viacom or by taking over Viacom. The Trek franchise is extraordinarily valuable property but Viacom's executives clearly do not understand this and have completely mismanaged the asset. In any event, I'm still working on the course and have not, as yet, made a decision of whether to offer it. (I currently offer a course called Economics in Popular Film.)