Star Trek's Dirty Secrets

So basically, what it comes down to is that JJ Abrams' version of Star Trek will be the vision of a Trek-hater with a hard-on for X-filesish woo-woo, wispy-haired heroines, and too much damaged-childhood backstory. 

I mean, have you seen the trailer yet? It's all "Oh, I'm Kirk and I'm such a bad boy! Look at the trouble I got into with the police when I was ten!" and "Oh, I'm Spock and I'm a tragic mulatto! Whatever will I do, especially since I'm played by a guy who's a serial killer!"

Yesterday EW.com's "popwatch" blog asked the geek-horror question: If you could only watch one, which would it be? Watchmen, or the new Star Trek? And I had to say, without hesitation, Watchmen. This is partly because Watchmen is awesome, only gonna come around once, and we've never seen a film of the classic comic book before.

But it's also because Star Trek will just keep coming back and coming back. It's devalued itself through endless iterations, certainly. But since Roddenberry's death, the franchise has devalued itself even more by departing radically from Roddenberry's vision and set of values.

The series Enterprise was a perfect case-in-point. The series literally moved backward in time from the original's starting point: literal retrogression. It also retrogressed in terms of the series' politics. The series had, over four different versions and several movies, established the MO of moving diversity and politics forward with the times: having a black captain, having a woman captain, having an increasingly diverse cast, having a cast with multiracial characters. Enterprise went back to an almost all-white-male cast.

So this film reboot will be another retrogression: taking the original series back to the childhoods of its main characters and being about their establishment as an effective team ... something that happened before the start of the original series.

This is a part of the current trend of Freudian storytelling that has ruled literature and, increasingly, first film and then television since the 80's. Everything: motivation for action, characterization, clothing, gesture--everything--originates in some trauma of childhood. I've complained about this before with my favorite character, Starbuck of Battlestar Galactica, who isn't allowed to just be enchanting and destructive ... she has to be little girl lost. And now that people seem to have run out of ideas for Star Trek (or not "people" but JJ Abrams), all they can think to do is fill in the backstory ... which we DON'T NEED.

Here's an idea! Why not MOVE FORWARD with the story? Everybody wants to see a series with Hikaru Sulu as captain; why not make him gay, like the actor who portrays him, and have the franchise move forward with its first Asian and gay captain? The rest of the crew can include: a lesbian, more multiracial humans, and more multispecies folks.

Also, maybe this can move forward a bit into the future when the Federation is demilitarizing a bit and the ships are not so hierarchical anymore. Maybe they can have a leadership council on board and model a new way of organizing things.

Okay, that might be going too far. What do you think? What would a truly progressive Star Trek series be doing now?