Going Where No One Should Have Gone Before

Earlier this year I posted "Where No One Should Go Before(or ever)!", in which I discussed the audacity of Viacom/CBS Paramounts decision to bring back Star Trek with an all new cast playing the original characters with the major plot point being how Kirk and Spock met at Starfleet Academy(which they didn't, I don't care what some of these Star Trek sites say. Spock was on the Enterprise at least 13 years before Kirk became Captain).
My two major points were that you couldn't have new people playing established characters and bring any credibility to the story(or the actors playing them for that matter), and you had an estimated 86 year gap between generations: Fill it!
Then I discover that Cawley Entertainment Company and Retro Films Studios have for two years been doing what CBS/Paramount only plan to do with Star Trek: New Voyages!
Instead of going back to the early days, they are continuing with the original five year mission, essentially picking up where the series left off, even revisiting some old episodes(another suggestion I made in my earlier post), using the original blue prints for the set, an original writer from the series, original bit actors that appeared and original guest stars, and now even original cast members! In fact the show is so faithfully done, that you almost forget that these are just people playing costume.
Almost!
James Cawley makes a good Captain, but he is not Jim Kirk, and John Kelley's "Damn it I'm a Doctor" impression is just embarrassing, and don't get me started with Charles Root's performance as Scotty. I'm not really saying the performances are bad, it's just that doing it this way doesn't allow the actors to establish their characters, it forces them to act like the characters as we remember them. The one exception so far would be Andy Bray's performance as Pavel Chekov, especially in the episode "To Serve All My Days" only to be out done by original Chekov actor Walter Koenig, who should win some sort of an award for best supporting actor, only proving the point that the only people who should play those parts are the ones that actually played them.
Check them out for yourself at http://newvoyages.com and tell me what you think, but in my opinion with the performances which are faithfully done(almost to a fault), and stories that are too good, even the special effects are too good for the original Star Trek, I am forced to stick to my original conclusion:
A new Star Trek, or no Star Trek.
PAC