With Star Trek still going warp speed at the box office, it's hard to grasp a time not long ago when the entire Star Trek brand had been written off by many people as a thing that had completely run its course. The previous few movies in the series had been severely lackluster and Star Trek: Enterprise failed to garner appreciable ratings on television.Such was the state of Trek five years ago in 2004. And at the time J. Michael Straczynski (the creator of Babylon 5 and writer of the recent film The Changeling on top of many other terrific endeavors) and television producer/writer Bryce Zabel (The Crow: Stairway to Heaven, Dark Skies), recognizing the franchise's foundering, conceived of an ambitious plan to "reboot" the entire shebang. A few years later Paramount handed Trek over to J.J. Abrams and Bad Robot. We already know how much of a stellar success that has been... but what about Straczynski and Zabel's treatment?
Bryce Zabel posted the entire "Star Trek: Re-Boot the Universe" treatment on his blog a little less than three years ago. It's quite an interesting read, especially how he and Straczynski re-defined the "Prime Directive" into something much more proactive and driving as a plot element, along with the entire rationale for needing to relaunch the series to begin with.
