13 Star Trek Pitches Out There (And Where They're At)

7. STAR TREK: UNITED

*UNity - archer - these are the voyages ENT
CBS Media Ventures

Talk about diving even further into the stockpile of Trek characters! What’s been hot in the past year since Legacy is a trial balloon for former Voyager and Enterprise writer Mike Sussman, hatched almost as a lark. Working with actor and Captain Archer himself, Scott Bakula, on another project, Mike floated the idea of a President Archer, post-Enterprise series that he’d been toying with for years — since he’d thrown that factoid into the quickie Prime Archer bio-screen barely glimpsable in In a Mirror, Darkly.

What’s great is his idea combines my longtime yen for a series set in the unknown Trek era midway between Archer and Kirk, and/or another I have long dubbed Star Trek: West Wing. That would be a political intrigue set on Earth among the various Federation Council delegates and exploring their cultures, but with hotspot-hopping capacity any time a crisis breaks out across the quadrants. Mike’s idea actually combines those two, setting it when Archer is supposedly an early Federation President after his NX-01 days, complete with family, aides, and regular ambassador characters. Who knows, maybe Star Trek would FINALLY make its first onscreen visit to Tellar Prime?

We know Mike and Scott did formally have a meeting with Secret Hideout and Paramount, but so far back that United was seen as a confusing duplication of the themes of Starfleet Academy. But it’s ironic that as tired as Enterprise was perceived to be among fans, the holler has really arisen for United this past year.

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Contributor
Contributor

Back when nerds and geeks were just called "hobbyists," Larry's ninth-grade science teacher ended a bewildering conversations with him about Halkans by finally saying, "Oh Larry — don't tell me you don't know Star Trek!"— along with a commandment to go home and begins watching the daily after-school rerun. The rest is history — well, future history, anyway. Larry had always been a NASA kid and a history fan (not so much sci-fi), so Star Trek fit right in: for the phenomenon that was worldbuilding before the term was invented, Larry felt passion-called to take up "backgrounding" and gap-filling before the term "retcon" was invented. Star Trek is fun and inspiring, but it doesn't pay the bills —at least in those days— but after college and work in theatre and print news, Larry somehow managed to combine both fields with his non-fiction Trek fandom and created the monster that today is Dr. Trek. His self-published, pre-Internet star charts and TNG Concordance were precursors to the official Stellar Cartography map set and the bestseller TNG Companion, after a move to Hollywood /SoCal in the 1990s boom years. Add in a stint as managing editor of official ST Communicator magazine, the first editor and later content producer of the original startrek.com, and the franchise consultant for everything from the Star Trek World Tour to the storied Star Trek: The Experience in Las Vegas. When Star Trek went wandering in the wilderness for the first time in 18 years amid the "Paramount divorce" of 2005-06, so did Larry — until, finally, the entrepreneur web world eventually found a path and a way to stay afloat. Since then, Larry's "Trekland" has come to mean more media projects and podcast/streaming alongside the old standbys like convention guest speaking and even text writing. Sure, there's The Trek Files for Roddenberry, his own Trekland Tuesdays Live, and Dr. Trek;s Second Opinion reaction shows — but that passion for spotlighting and archiving the creatives of Trek across all arenas and eras still drives him to pioneer experiences like the monthly backstage Portal 47 features, and the Trekland Treks day tours of Trek location sights. And now ... in-depth Dr. Trek turns for TrekCulture, too!