It’s sounding like there will be another Star Trek film, and that J. J. Abrams will be its producer (and possibly its director).
There are people that say the Star Trek film and television franchises are dead. They say that Rick Berman and Brannon Braga are the ones who killed them. Now I don’t know if those two statements are true, but what I can tell you is that I am a computer scientist. I believe only in facts.
The fact of the matter is that there is clearly a curse on the Star Trek franchise; this is a well documented fact (I will leave finding such sources as an exercise for the reader). However, the origins of the curse are sketchy at best, as no one has documented or proven when or how the curse was first placed upon the franchise. Experts only have evidentiary support as to when the symptoms of the curse first manifested.
The consensus among experts is that the curse retroactively manifested with the release of Star Trek IV, when it was discovered that it was “really good.” Further discoveries also showed that Star Trek II was also “pretty darn good,” and newly uncovered evidence of the time revealed that Star Trek I and Star Trek III both “sucked donkey balls.” The curse continued on throughout the later releases of all the Star Trek films, leaving all odd numbered releases destroyed in its wake, and raising all even numbered movies to glorious success.
In an unexpected twist, the curse was able to spread across mediums, infecting the well known television series of the same franchise, albeit with a slightly different array of symptoms. There are two schools of thought on this matter. The first school of thought proposes that each Star Trek series is “inherently good,” but lays dormant for two seasons until its “true goodness” flourishes upon the broadcasting of its third term. The second school of thought argues it unlikely for a strain to have mutated so wildly in the jump to television to cause such vastly different symptoms, and that it is more plausible that the series exhibit similar and only slightly different symptoms. This second school of thought proposes that during the jump to television the polarity of the “curse-aligned entity” reversed, thereby causing all odd numbered series to be a success and all even numbered series to be failures. Indeed, there is strong evidence supporting this theory as it has been proven beyond a doubt that the original Star Trek, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and Star Trek: Enterprise were all “really great shows.” This is again further strengthened by the fact that Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager both “blow chunks.” You will notice the curse is particularly virulent, as it was able to detect that the animated series is not officially part of the canon.
Skeptics have argued that the curse has since been broken (or never existed in the first place) with the release of Star Trek: Nemesis. Incredulously, said skeptics attribute the successes and failures of the various films and series to mere coincidence. Throughout history, science has shown us that there is no such thing as coincidence; that for every effect, there is a cause.
A controversial recent theory shows why the curse is still in effect. Paraphrasing, it states that the earliest findings based what was known of the curse at the time were, in fact, misinterpretations. The oft-quoted mantra that “all even numbered films are good, and all odd numbered films are bad” which the majority of Star Trek-ologists take for truth is only partly true, as it only applies for numbers less than 10. In much the same way that early philosophers’ theories of time, space, and relativity, held true for what they knew of the time, those theories needed to be altered or updated to still hold true for newer findings of string theory and quantum mechanics. To this day, we do not consider those early philosophers as fools or ass clowns; they were simply misinformed, or rather, not altogether there.
The new theory states “all even-summed numbered films are good, and all odd-summed numbered films are bad.” This new theory can be neither proved nor disproved until the release of an eleventh film. As for what will become of the strain affecting the television series, only time will tell. Will it die out, or will it mutate yet again? Thus, we can only assume the film curse is indeed still in effect until such time as an eleventh film disproves the theory, or until some other theorist comes up with better bullshit than I.
