Echo Chamberlain on the Death of Star Trek

It didn't die of natural causes. They Killed Star Trek - Echo Chamberlain's Substack

Carthage, 146 BC: Rome destroyed the city, enslaved the surviving population, extinguished it as a centre of civilisation and salted the earth.

Baghdad, 1258: The Mongols killed thousands and destroyed palaces, institutions and libraries. Books turned the Tigris River black with ink.

But nothing in history has been more ransacked, pillaged and desecrated than Star Trek.

Like most Sci-Fi and Fantasy today, including the stuff coming out of Marvel, it is written by people who don't like the source material, who don't understand the source material, and don't like genre.

After several years of covering modern entertainment, I’m still stricken with the same question: how can it be this bad? How can things be the absolute worst version of themselves? How do the makers not register how pathetic the content is? How could things take their precisely most aggravating and disappointing form? How can it be, with almost preternatural exactness, the furthest measurable, and travelable, distance from the point of the franchise’s ideal form?

When every franchise has been, and continues to be, destroyed in similar ways, it is not a coincidence. It is an assault on the very idea of heroic entertainment.

Indiana Jones and Luke Skywalker are no longer heroic figures, but bitter old men, who were never doing things right. Tolkien's Orcs are not the embodiment of chaos and destruction, but are just a misunderstood minority. Sauron is not the embodiment of evil, but a hottie who Galadriel has a thing for. It is the systematic destruction of Western literature, and Western civilization.

Or that is my opinion. Click thru to see what Echo Chamberlain thinks.