Less has been written about the Star Trek spin-offs, however. The second volume, The Next 25 Years, dives into the rest of the franchise, up through the 50th anniversary release of Star Trek Beyond. The Next Generation and its movies, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Enterprise, and the "Kelvin timeline" films all get coverage, and it's a compelling read for any Star Trek fan.
Each series gets an unvarnished examination. While some key players apparently declined to be interviewed for this book, you still get a variety of perspectives on each show -- praising the good moments, but not attempting to paper over the rough patches. The latter is probably of more interest to the sort of fans inclined to read this kind of book. It was to me, at least. It transcends tawdry gossip, though; the book is often a confirmation of behind-the-scenes turmoil that explains periods of lower on-screen quality.
The story of The Next Generation, unsurprisingly, is of a show struggling at first to find its way. Any fan will tell you how rough the first season and much of the second was, but this book really shines a light on just how much more upheaval was going on than was even apparent from the product. The transition from writers of classic Star Trek (who weren't listened to enough) to multiple other show runners is a rocky road indeed. Even in season three when they landed on Michael Piller (who would shape Star Trek for years to come), the team was just barely sprinting ahead of the runaway boulder to get the work done.
Deep Space Nine is a very different story, of the child that feels unloved and underappreciated. Many of the people involved seem to still have a chip on their shoulder about the neglect... but that made them bond with each other in a profound way, staying devoted to the show more deeply than others were to the other Star Treks. And that relative lack of a watchful eye also meant a creative freedom they definitely made the most of.
Voyager is a tale of intermittent strife and smoothness. In began with the struggle to find a star, and then settled when Kate Mulgrew took charge as Captain Janeway. But stability on the set hid a lack of inspiration behind the scenes. Creative doldrums then led to the addition of the Seven of Nine character, which caused tensions and unhappiness among the cast that was never resolved. Voyager is a tale of missed opportunities, with many of the people involved wondering today what they could have done better, what might have been.
Enterprise is a tale of lofty ambitions never realized. So much forethought went into creating something new and different... only to wind up being more of the same once it went before the cameras. The book gives a good account of how it somehow all happened as it did despite no one actually setting out to do that, and reveals how the show almost had the plug pulled after three seasons instead of four (which would have kept us from getting the one season fans generally agree was the best one).
The book concludes with a look at the first two J.J. Abrams Star Trek films (with the third he produced just around the corner at the time of publication). The material on Star Trek Into Darkness is particularly interesting, since very little time has passed to gain perspective on it, compared to all the other Star Trek chronicled here. The conflicting opinions on that experience are an interesting contrast to the widely praised success of the first movie.
The Next 25 Years is a great read for the deep Star Trek fan who's watched it all. There's a bit of an imbalance here, what with 25 seasons of television and 6 movies crammed into about the same space as another book that covered much less material. Still, it's hard to imagine the die-hard Trekker who wouldn't like it. I give the book an A-.
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