There have been rumors floating around about a new Star Trek movie. Rick Berman has said that, assuming it retains its current (extremely nebulous) form, the movie would focus on the Romulan war (which falls somewhere in between Enterprise and The Original Series). Furthermore, Berman has suggested that the movie might not take place aboard the bridge of an Enterprise - he believes the franchise is strong enough to move away from its namesake starship and strike out into (relatively) uncharted terrain.
Which, realistically, they have to do. We know enough about each of the ships named Enterprise to realize we're running out of material under that particular flag. There's a lot unsaid about the timeline surrounding the Enterprise-B and -C, but we know the first of those two spent a lot of time out of contact with Starfleet on exploratory missions, and we know exactly, precisely how the Enterprise-C was destroyed, who was in command and who was on board. That doesn't bode well for the continuity lovers.
And besides - there's more to Trek than the missions the flagship gets to go on. That's why Deep Space Nine was so raw - up until the fourth season, DS9 was a big floating donut, spinning in space and mostly defenseless and pissing practically everybody else in the galaxy off. It wasn't a Federation station - it kept her engineers up at night trying to integrate Federation and Cardassian technology. It was a crossroads, filled with hucksters, assassins, diplomats, spies and the whole lot. It worked because it radically changed the way we thought about Starfleet and the Federation - going from the hockey rink-sized bridge of the Enterprise-D to DS9 was one helluva shock for many of us.
We need more of that.
I realize this is probably sacrilege, but I don't necessarily think we should take the original series as literally as many people do. They were first, yes, but so many things from that series have been modified and contradicted by later (and earlier) events that it's almost an anachronism. Things like Spock saying that ESP isn't provable by any means and revealing a season later that Vulcans have minor telepathic abilities. Like The Enterprise flying backwards at warp. These shows were written before anyone realized how closely we would end up watching them and pointing out their mistakes. It might be better to just...forget about it for a bit, or at least not treat it so strictly as canon.
And then there's the fact that, after 5 distinct series, we have a set idea as to what the Trek-type future looks like. The continuity for computer displays, ship design and all that really started with the movie era, not the original series. As far as I know, we've never seen Kirk's original Enterprise outside of Kirk's enterprise's universe. The jump from those designs to the enterprise refit is too far to be reasonably believed.
- - -
If there's one thing I don't like, it's unresolved plot issues. I can deal with incontinuity - the fact that Enterprise modified the date of first contact with the Klingons doesn't bug me much, I mean, every series needs a villain and a familiar one couldn't hurt. But things referred to over and over that we haven't actually seen? That bothers me. And I have a solution.
I want to see the first Cardassian war, the war that made Chief O'Brien hate those 'Bloody Cardies' with all his heart, that produced Cardassian spies altered to look like starfleet officers, that produced captains the likes of Ben Maxwell. I want to see the questionable moral choices Starfleet officers made during this war. I want to see the underside of Federation history in a context I'm comfortable with (the Cardassian war took place only a few years before the Enterprise-D left spacedock for the first time).
I want to see the Federation's Vietnam from the bridge of a warship, armed to the teeth and fighting between what's right and what needs to be done. I want to be able to be shown the good and the bad and pick for myself.
I want to be shown how imperfect the future is.