star trek reboot the universe

Star Trek: Re-Boot the Universe

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Star Trek: Re-Boot the Universe was a fourteen-page treatment detailing an ultimately undeveloped concept for a five-year-long Star Trek television series. The document was written by Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski and Dark Skies creator Bryce Zabel in 2004 . It was a concept that they never had a chance to submit to Paramount Pictures , because the studio announced that J.J. Abrams and Bad Robot Productions already had plans to reboot the Star Trek universe, in forthcoming film Star Trek . [1] (X)

Zabel and Straczynski began discussing the concept while collaborating on a network pitch for a limited series called Cult . " We started talking about the state of the Trek universe, " recalled Zabel. " Before we could stop ourselves, we banged out a fourteen-page treatment [....] I seem to recall having lunch at Art's Deli and our conversation veering off into the Trek situation. The take we came up with included using the original characters, but not as young officers at Starfleet Academy . We wanted to do what they would do in the world of comics : create a separate universe for all the past TV and film Trek continuity in order to free ourselves creatively so we could embrace the good stuff, banish the bad, and try some new things. In our reboot we wanted to start over, use Kirk , Spock , and McCoy and others in a powerful new origin story about what it was that bonded them in such strong friendship and show them off as you'd never seen them before. It was, admittedly, pretty audacious. " ( The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years , p. 749)

3 Star Trek: Discovery

Star Trek: Kelvin Timeline explained

We've remodulated our tricorders to help you make sense of the Star Trek Kelvin timeline from the recent Star Trek movies.

Our Star Trek: Kelvin Timeline explained article is here to tell Spock from Spock.

How do you reboot a franchise that’s been around more than 50 years old and whose fan base is, shall we say, passionate about the accuracy of its canon? If you wipe the slate completely clean and start afresh, you lose the benefit of five decades of lore from which to draw inspiration and characters. If you keep the continuity, you’re shackled to decades of details from which you can’t escape. What can you do? If you’re Star Trek, you create the Kelvin Timeline.

The Kelvin timeline, or "alternate universe Trek", creates a new environment in which the events of the more recent Star Trek films (Star Trek, Into Darkness, Beyond) won’t contradict those that came before. It’s also how Spock ended up meeting himself.

If you want to rewatch the new Star Trek movies, our Star Trek streaming guide will show you where to watch them all online. And if you're curious to see how the new movies stack up against the classics, check out our Star Trek movies, ranked worst to best article. Now, let's dive into the Star Trek Kelvin timeline.

Event One: Nero Travels Through Time

Star Trek What is the Kelvin Timeline: image shows Eric Bana as Nero in Star Trek (2009)

According to Star Trek (2009), the planet Romulus was destroyed by a supernova in the year 2387. Ambassador Spock attempted to use "red matter", a substance so powerful that a single drop can destroy a planet, to save Romulus by destroying the supernova. He did indeed manage to destroy the supernova, but not in time to prevent the planet’s destruction. To make matters worse, both his ship, the experimental Jellyfish, and the Romulan mining ship Narada were pulled into the black hole’s wake and sent hurtling backwards in time. Spock emerged in 2258 while the Romulans landed in 2233.

The Narada’s captain, Nero decides to use this opportunity to take out his grief on the organization he holds responsible for the ruin of Romulus and, by extension, the death of his family: the Federation. One of his first acts is to destroy the U.S.S. Kelvin, captained heroically to the very last minute by George Kirk, who lives just long enough to name his newborn son James.

And thus begins the Kelvin timeline.

Spock, Meet Spock

Star Trek what is the kelvin timeline: image shows Spock in Star Trek movie (2009)

Jim Kirk grows up as a rebellious punk constantly trying to outrun his father’s long shadow. Christopher Pike sees something of value in him and urges him to join Starfleet, which he eventually does. Through a contrivance of events, he ends up aboard the Enterprise along with Spock, Bones McCoy, Uhura, and the rest of the Original Series crew.

It’s now 2258 and Ambassador Spock emerges from the black hole just in time to be scooped up by Nero, who keeps the Jellyfish — and its cache of red matter — for himself while abandoning Spock on the frozen planet of Delta Vega. He wants Spock to bear witness as the Narada drills a hole into the center of Vulcan and releases red matter at the planet’s core. The Enterprise tries to stop him and fails, though they do manage to rescue Spock’s father, Sarek. Nero is eventually defeated, and Spock's young and old take a moment to reflect on their coexistence

Enter Khan, Exit Kirk

star trek what is the kelvin timeline: image shows Benedict Cumberbatch as Khan in Star Trek Into Darkness (2013)

Nero’s too-close-to-success-for-comfort attempt to destroy Earth shifts Starfleet’s ethos from one of discovery to one of protection. They still want to "seek out new life forms," but only to find out how dangerous they are. In Into Darkness (2013), Alexander Marcus, leader of the secretive Section 31, finds the SS Botany Bay, stuffed to the rafters full of augmented humans in cryostasis. He wakes one of them up — Khan Noonien Singh — and forces him to build weapons that Earth could use to defend itself against alien threats.

Huge surprise, Khan betrays Marcus, exacting vengeance on various Starfleet targets. In doing so, he kills Kirk’s father figure Christopher Pike. Marcus tries to leverage Kirk’s hot-headedness by sending Kirk after Khan, who has fled to the Klingon homeworld of Kronos. He figures Kirk will kill, not capture, Khan, thus removing a threat and evidence of Marcus’ secret project.

Kirk goes off script and keeps Khan alive, much to the chagrin of Admiral Marcus, who tries to blow them all the heck up. The sacrifice that leads to victory happens just as in the original, except in the Kelvin timeline it’s Kirk who gives his life to save his crew. In the prime timeline, Genesis brought Spock back to life, but here it’s Khan’s blood that gets the job done.

That bit of ugliness behind them, the Enterprise receives its five-year-mission. You know the one.

Farewell to Spock

Star Trek what is the Kelvin Timeline: image shows Captain Kirk (Chris Pine) in Star Trek Beyond (2016)

In Star Trek: Beyond (2016), the Enterprise discovers the USS Franklin, a Federation ship that had been lost for decades. Here’s what’s fun about that: the Kelvin timeline doesn’t start until 2233. The Franklin disappeared before that, so it exists in both timelines, which means a different version of it could theoretically pop up in Star Trek media that doesn’t adhere to the Kelvin timeline.

In Kelvin, however, the Franklin is half-buried after crashing into the surface of the planet Altamid. Few of its former crew remain, and those that do are unrecognizable, having been transformed by technology they’ve used to keep themselves alive. The Franklin’s captain, Balthazar Edison, now known as Krall, rejects Starfleet ideals of peace. He’s a soldier and he believes that he should be allowed to do what he does best. He returns to starbase Yorktown with the goal of commandeering it to launch an attack on the Federation, but first he’ll have to kill every living thing in residence. Kirk et al save the day, of course.

This is also the point at which Ambassador Spock leaves the timeline due to the passing of the peerless Leonard Nimoy. Kelvin Spock had been planning to rejoin what remains of the Vulcan people, but instead chooses to honor his other self by remaining in Starfleet.

Crossover With the Prime Timeline

Keeping track of the Kelvin timeline is important because there are still Star Trek properties operating in the prime timeline, such as Picard . However, there has been a little bit of crossover between the two. Picard takes place long after the titular character has quit Starfleet, and early on we discover the destruction of Romulus was why.

Picard wanted to launch a rescue mission to save as many Romulans as possible before the detonation of the supernova, but Starfleet pushed back. He went forward with it anyway, but when his ships were decimated by a fleet of rogue synths, Starfleet gave up all rescue efforts. Picard resigned in disgust. Everything that happens after that — and therefore everything taking place in the show — is part of the prime timeline, despite being kicked off by Event One.

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Susan Arendt is a freelance writer, editor, and consultant living in Burleson, TX. She's a huge sci-fi TV and movie buff, and will talk your Vulcan ears off about Star Trek. You can find more of her work at Wired, IGN, Polygon, or look for her on Twitter: @SusanArendt. Be prepared to see too many pictures of her dogs.

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Simon kinberg in talks to produce ‘star trek’ movie franchise for paramount.

Paramount is looking to the ‘X-Men’ producer to boldly go and relaunch the property on the big screen.

By Etan Vlessing , Borys Kit May 21, 2024 9:28am

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Longtime X-Men producer Simon Kinberg is beaming up to a new franchise.

The multi-hyphenate is in talks to produce a new Star Trek feature for Paramount Pictures , The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed. If all goes well, the door would open to him taking active creative roles on the rest of the storied franchise’s film side. Alex Kurtzman and Akiva Goldsman are the main creative producers on Star Trek ‘s television side.

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For Star Trek Day, we decided to have a look at how all of the Star Trek films and TV shows across the entire universe rank together. Interestingly, the most recent entry in the franchise came out on top. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds — led by Anson Mount as Captain Christopher Pike, Rebecca Romijn as Number One, and Ethan Peck as Science Officer Spock — boasts two Certified Fresh seasons at 99% and 97% on the Tomatometer. Not too bad for the youngster of a franchise whose history goes back 57 years to its inception with the original Star Trek series created by Gene Roddenberry.

Related: • Star Trek TV Series Ranked by Tomatometer • All Star Trek Movies Ranked by Tomatometer

It’s worth noting that while SNW has a 98% average Tomatometer on 84 reviews across two seasons, the 2009 reboot film Star Trek in the No. 2 position is Certified Fresh on 356 reviews. Some might argue that the film’s volume of reviews makes it the top title, but if we want to start nitpicking on the franchise level, the series also represents 57 hours of programming compared to the film’s 2 hours and 7 minutes. Perhaps the audience score can settle the debate: a 78% average for the series versus 91% for the film. And should No. 3, The Animated Series , even be counted with its relatively meager 18 reviews?

And no “probably” about it, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier is officially — by Tomatometer standards anyway — the worst of the franchise.

What do you think? Tell us which is your favorite Star Trek movie or series in the comments.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (2022) 98%

Star Trek (2009) 94%

Star Trek: The Animated Series (1973) 94%

Star Trek: Prodigy (2021) 94%

Star Trek: First Contact (1996) 93%

Star Trek: Lower Decks (2020) 92%

Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987) 92%

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993) 91%

Star Trek: Picard (2020) 89%

Star Trek Beyond (2016) 86%

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) 87%

Star Trek: Discovery (2017) 85%

Star Trek Into Darkness (2013) 84%

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991) 83%

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) 82%

Star Trek (1966) 80%

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984) 78%

Star Trek: Voyager (1995) 76%

Star Trek: Enterprise (2001) 56%

Star Trek: Insurrection (1998) 55%

Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) 53%

Star Trek Generations (1994) 48%

Star Trek: Nemesis (2002) 38%

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989) 21%

Star Trek movies and series can be viewed by subscription on Paramount+ , and purchased on demand on Vudu , Prime Video , Apple TV , and elsewhere.

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The Inventory

Star Trek' s 2009 Reboot Changed Everything

J.j. abrams and company didn't just revive star trek, they steered the franchise—and hollywood—in a new direction..

Star Trek has been an important fixture of sci-fi TV for decades, and alongside its continued existence, movies have helped further flesh out the characters. But in both the movies and TV, the early 2000s weren’t kind to the franchise: 2002's Star Trek: Nemesis was a critical and commercial disaster, and Star Trek: Enterprise had a respectable four-season run, but the shortest of the shows since the original series. Change was in order, and it was eventually decided that would take the form of a reboot that took everyone by surprise.

'Star Trek' At 10: J.J. Abrams' 2009 Film Reboot Reinvigorated The Franchise With A Perfect Cast

Released ten years ago today, on May 8, 2009, director J.J. Abrams' Star Trek reboot is the cinematic equivalent of a rock band going mainstream. It's a hit remix version of an old song. Critically and commercially, the film was an unqualified success. Holding steady at 94%, edging out classic big-screen entries like The Wrath of Khan and First Contact , it remains the highest rated Star Trek movie on Rotten Tomatoes, as well as the top-grossing film in the series according to Box Office Mojo. Anytime a band goes mainstream, however, there's always going to be a contingent of old-school fans that you hear affecting a Leonard McCoy grumble. They were with the band from the beginning but now it's out there in the world and it belongs to everyone.

By the late 2000s, the Trek franchise was in a place where the overlapping runs of four straight television shows had ended—their viewership numbers falling victim to the law of diminishing returns. Fans like me, who grew up watching The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine in syndication, had lost touch with the final frontier. This is the movie that resuscitated that brand and opened the door to more adventures like the ones we're seeing now on Star Trek: Discovery and the ones we'll soon be seeing on the Captain Picard series .

As a storyteller, Abrams' great strength is character. His weakness is plot. Both of those qualities are on full display in Star Trek, but the movie has such a velocity to it (not unlike the U.S.S. Enterprise itself when traveling at warp speed) that the viewer can't help but get swept up in the youthful exuberance of this faster-than-light reboot. Beam yourselves aboard, then, and let's take a long and winding trek into Star Trek on its tenth anniversary.

TWIN PLANETS IN A UNITED FEDERATION

Now more than ever, the world needs Star Trek . At a time when it feels like Aldous Huxley and George Orwell's vision of the future is coming to pass — with civilization moving closer to the distracted dystopia of Brave New World and the post-truth landscape of 1984 — the world needs a reminder of the hopeful ideals that humanity can embody when it's not bent on dividing and destroying itself. There are different ways to inspire that kind of hope but the way the 2009 Trek film goes about it is by making us believe that people who are destined for greater things can overcome their differences and find a common purpose.

The movie seeks to distill the essence of all these classic '60s characters from Star Trek: The Original Series into new affable forms. It succeeds beautifully on that front. As James T. Kirk, the future captain of the Starship Enterprise , Chris Pine embodies a different kind of swagger than the one William Shatner originally brought to the role.

Shatner's Kirk had a quieter confidence to him. Pine's version of the character, as seen in this movie, is brash and has yet to learn the lessons that will make him a good leader—one who's capable of putting the good of his crew above his own life, even.

That scene after the bar fight in Iowa, where Kirk is talking to Captain Pike (played with great gravitas by Bruce Greenwood), is so well done that it becomes almost transcendent when Pike says, "Your father was captain of a starship for twelve minutes. He saved eight hundred lives, including your mother's. I dare you to do better." Sitting there watching that scene, you feel like you're the one being dared not to "settle for a less and ordinary life." You feel like you're the one "meant for something better, something special."

The movie draws immediate parallels between Kirk and Spock, showing how their trajectories on Earth and Vulcan align as much as they differ. Until he meets Dr. McCoy and makes his first Starfleet friend, no one sees anything in Kirk except for Pike. In the bar, he has burly cadets ganging up on him, dismissing him as a "townie." This is directly preceded by a couple of scenes where we see how Spock's half-human nature has made him the target of both overt and subtle discrimination.

It doesn't get much funnier than the first scene on Vulcan where we witness the hyperintelligent version of school kids taunting each other. "I presume you have prepared new insults for me today," says the young Spock, all stoic and resigned to his fate as the-kid-who-gets-picked-on. "Affirmative," replies one of the older bullies. Spock drolly intones, "This is your thirty-fifth attempt to elicit an emotional response from me." And then the restrained Vulcan equivalent of bullying begins.

Inheriting the black bangs and pointy ears of Leonard Nimoy's character, Zachary Quinto balances out the contradictions in an adult Spock who's still a paragon of rationality but also full of repressed rage. It's a show-stopping moment when he finally employs the famous Vulcan nerve pinch. The movie amps up the tension between him and Kirk, and there are some really good scenes where the two of them are hashing out their fundamental differences in approach as Starfleet members on the Enterprise bridge.

One of these is a tense mid-warp scene where Kirk pleads his case that the ship is flying into a trap. At that moment, we see how Kirk and Spock, the Earthling and the Vulcan — one impetuous, the other logical — are diametrically opposed in terms of their outward behavior. They couldn't be more different, yet we know from what we've seen of their lives leading up to Starfleet that they also have similar experiences running deep into their backgrounds.

Ultimately, they're able to get more done by putting aside pettiness and working together in the spirit of a United Federation. With the real world seemingly teetering on the brink of destruction in 2019, maybe we should all aspire to that model before some crazed Romulan (whose name references Nero Caesar ) sets off a black hole causing the planet to implode.

REVIVING HUMANISM WITH FRESH FACES

If the essence of Star Trek can be regarded as humanism, then everything else — all the sociopolitical allegories the franchise has become known for over the years — would have to flow first from that foundation. Say what you will about it, but Abrams' film and the characters running through it are aggressively, irrepressibly human. This extends beyond Kirk and Spock to the rest of the quippy cast, most of whom were relative unknowns at the time.

2009 was the Year of Zoe Saldana. She was, by far, the best thing about Avatar , which you may remember as the fourth best science fiction movie of that year (with Star Trek, District 9, and Moon comprising the top three, of course ). Here she delivers a star-making performance as Uhura, a character whose verbal tangos with Kirk are fun to watch and whose relationship with Spock feels more believable than it probably deserves to be, thanks largely to Saldana's emotive range. She can wield sarcasm but there's also a soulful quality to her that comes out in moments like the one when she and Spock are on the turbolift together and she's attempting to console him after the obliteration of his planet .

By revealing her as Spock's girlfriend, the movie does inadvertently set Uhura down the path toward underutilization . In Star Trek Into Darkness , she would fade to the background a bit, to the point where her concern and anger with Spock and his apparently casual willingness to sacrifice his life would become her whole subplot. In Star Trek , however, their relationship is merely one element of her character. She comes across as more well-rounded, enough so to justify the positioning of her face in DVD box art as the movie's third lead.

Karl Urban is a revelation. The beauty of this Trek is that i t's the kind of movie that you can watch and rewatch, shifting fondness to a new favorite character every time you do. For me as a first-time viewer, the real MVP was Urban, whose scene-chewing turn as McCoy bowled me over in terms of how it channeled the spirit of the character without lapsing into imitation. As the curmudgeonly doctor, he's so pitch-perfect, talking out of the corner of his mouth, that you completely forget you're watching the same Viking-looking dude who led the Riders of Rohan in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.

Speaking of Vikings, before there was Thor, God of Thunder, there was James T. Kirk's dad, George Kirk. People love to debate who the best movie Chris is , but whatever the answer, Star Trek introduced the world to two of them: not just Pine, but also Hemsworth (who would go on to star in his first Marvel movie two years later).

For viewers behind on their Edgar Wright films, Star Trek might have also been their first real exposure to Simon Pegg, who is so likable (and appropriately excitable) as chief engineer Montgomery "Scotty" Scott that there's almost a comedown that sets in when you see Pegg in his other, non- Trek roles. Likewise, Scotty's sidekick — for reference, his name is Keenser, and he's played by actor Deep Roy — deserves a shout-out as one of the movie's two best aliens, the other being the long-faced creature at the bar counter between Uhura and Kirk.

Foregoing the Monkees-inspired moptop of Walter Koenig, the late Anton Yelchin portrays a baby-faced Chekhov, one who's referred to as "Russian whiz kid" and whose accent is so thick that he has to keep repeating himself because even the voice-recognition computer can't understand what he's saying. John Cho's Hikaru Sulu, meanwhile, inhabits the other forward station on the Enterprise bridge. In this movie, Sulu is more straight-faced, less bug-eyed, than he was when he first employed his fencing sword in the Original Series episode "The Naked Time." H is most meaningful contribution to the lives of some LGBTQ fans would come later .

All of these characters live in service to the utopian exemplar of Starfleet, which we're told functions as "a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada," but which can also be seen as a surrogate family unit for individual characters in individual crews like the one on board the Enterprise. To anyone who followed its previous adventures on television, the environment of the ship feels very much like home. Its living room is the bridge and its soundscape is iconic , not just the music, but also the sound effects: all the chirping communicators, whistling intercoms, swooshing doors, and other noises that make up the fabric of what we hear.

With his memorable music theme from the opening and closing credits on TV, Alexander Courage left some big shoes to fill, but c omposer Michael Giacchino wears them well. His score is its own character in the film. There's a sweep and — at key moments — a poignancy to it that gives the movie lift and bears it aloft, in new ways, to the soaring heights we've come to expect from Star Trek .

One moment that really tugs on the heartstrings, music-wise, is the birth of Kirk and death of his father. My favorite moment comes right after that, when the soundtrack transitions into the first cue of "Enterprising Young Men" and we see the escape pods: these little black dots breaking away against the backdrop of a huge, fiery sun, showing the terror and awe of humans in the cosmos. Then the title logo appears, lighting up like it's been waiting on the dark side of an adjacent planet.

That's a sequence that manages to convey the full, breathtaking wonder of Star Trek . Though not without its flaws (more on those in a second), this is a movie that's beautifully orchestrated both in the sense of its music and in the sense of its staging.

RED MATTER AND LIGHTNING STORMS IN SPACE

Updating Star Trek for the twenty-first century, making it flashier and more accessible to modern audiences, is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it keeps Trek relevant and not too beholden to the past; on the other hand, you run the risk of compromising its integrity, betraying its core ethos. While motorcycle jumps set to Beastie Boys music and the pointless, pre-release, is-he-or-isn't-he Khan dance of Star Trek Into Darkness may have soured some fans on Abrams and the direction he took things, he deserves some credit for restoring Trek 's vitality with an entertaining blockbuster. If the franchise was flatlining circa the late 2000s, then this is the film that broke out the defibrillator and set about re-electrifying it.

Having said that, Star Trek is one of those movies whose immediate glow seems to have worn off some in the intervening years. Among hardcore fans, at least, there's a mound of quibbles that is sure to arise like Tribbles in any room where Abrams and his overall effect on the franchise are being discussed. In 2013, at the annual Star Trek Convention in Las Vegas, Trekkies greeted Star Trek Into Darkness with boos and voted it the worst installment in the series , behind even Galaxy Quest , which is a spoof of Star Trek that's not actually part of the official franchise or even produced by the same movie studio.

This would be like Star Wars fans abandoning any pretense of impartiality and ranking The Last Jedi behind Spaceballs, just out of spite for Rian Johnson. In the present online climate, that's actually a believable scenario, but let's put that aside for now. Given that Trek Into Darkness (can we all agree that dropping the "Star" from the title would have made it less clunky?) is Abrams' direct sequel to Star Trek, it's possible there's some very real, residual distaste being felt for the 2009 film based on the 2013 film.

Indeed, people with a permanent Movie Sin Counter dinging inside their skulls will find much to nitpick in Star Trek . You don't have to be a hardcore Trekkie to dislike this film, of course, but I can understand why those people especially, the longtime fans, might have serious issues with Abrams' reboot. It's a less cerebral take on Star Trek , one that puts heart over head because it's more concerned with wrangling as much delight out of the mythos as possible.

Here's the thing: Star Trek is, first and foremost, a TV franchise. By its very design, it's best-suited to the format of the hour-long drama, which allows for both self-contained, episodic stories and serialized, long-form ones. Creator Gene Roddenberry originally pitched the series as " Wagon Train to the Stars," and trying to translate that to the big screen has always led to mixed results.

The long and short of it is that if you're going to watch the movies, you have to meet them on their own terms. Like Fight Club 's "single-serving friend," the 2009 reboot is single-serving Star Trek, perfect for a plane ride, even if you never see it again (which you will, because it's the kind of flick that demands a revisit every few years). A fairer way to judge it, then, might be to stop comparing it to the TV shows and just sort it against the other twelve Trek movies, in which case it definitely belongs more in the "hit" than the "miss" column.

It's not as though the TV shows are free of embarrassment, anyway. Like any other long-running franchise, Star Trek has some goofy, graceless, outright cringe-worthy moments in its history. Shall we put on our nerd glasses and talk about Kirk vs. Gorn, and the Original Series punch that spawned the dubious tradition of "double ax-handles" in awkwardly choreographed fights?

The cynical response would be to ignore this history and insist that the reboot dumbed Trek down, raising the action quotient and sexing it up into a glib rendering for the masses: something that takes all the thought out of Trek and panders to the popcorn crowd. If we carry this line of thinking further, it's not a stretch to see the reboot as a complete mercenary endeavor, as opposed to something that was a labor of love for many people.

Admittedly, there are plot contrivances in the movie that might cause one's bullshit detector to bleep—much like James T. Kirk, giving a blank-faced pause before swearing in an ice cave at the unbelievable claims of Old Man Spock. This is, after all, a J.J. Abrams film. Personally, I like Abrams; I think he's that rare breed of director who has never made a bad movie. At the risk of trotting the Tomatometer out too much, it's worth noting that the five films he's directed are "Certified Fresh" across the boards. There, you see? Objectively not bad. Because the review aggregator says so. (I am aware that this is not true Vulcan logic and am being facetious).

Nevertheless, the bullshit detector, the poppycock radar, the Movie Sin Counter, whatever you want to call it, does go to red alert at odd intervals in Abrams' films, if and when they slow down enough (in-between requisite action beats) for you to catch your breath and think. In Star Wars: The Force Awakens , it was Rathtars and mind-numbing exposition about thermal oscillators that massaged the grief of thinking persons. In Star Trek , it's red matter and little snippets of dialogue for dummies, like the oft-repeated phrase, "a lightning storm in space."

With its "super ice cubes" for volcanoes, 300-year-old frozen men in torpedoes, and cheap resurrections via super blood serums, Star Trek Into Darkness is arguably sloppier. Credit where credit is due: screenwriting duo Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman penned the script for both films. Their best work has come when paired with Abrams, but Orci, who self-identifies as a Trekkie, may have engendered some ill when he lashed out at Into Darkness haters back in 2013. For his part, Kurtzman has continued to shepherd the franchise on TV, bringing it more into the melodrama realm with Star Trek: Discovery .

It's not a surprise that some would see it as a relief when Orci and Kurtzman's next script was abandoned and Simon Pegg stepped in to co-write Star Trek Beyond. Pegg, too, was clearly conscious of the dissatisfaction with Into Darkness , and by that point, he already had some experience running around in character as Scotty, trying to save an imperiled starship, saying, "I'm givin' her all she's got, Captain!"

"UNDER CONSTRUCTION" … IN HOLLYWOOD

The screenplay for Star Trek, it should be noted, isn't brain-dead. On the contrary, its humor is rather witty in places and the emotional beats are rousing, as well. Tell me you don't get a chuckle out of moments like Bones mouthing the phrase, "Green-blooded hobgoblin." You'd almost have to be a hobgoblin not to get a lump in your throat when Kirk's father is on his collision course with the Romulan ship, and he and Kirk's mother are naming their baby right as the acting captain is about to die.

"Whatever our lives might have been, if the time continuum was disrupted, our destinies have changed," Spock says. Moments like this and the above-mentioned one plug the film into universal themes of fate and familial love. That's the kind of story this movie is trying is tell. Star Trek 's screenwriters were aiming at a wider audience; they needed to liberate their story from decades of franchise baggage, but they also needed to anchor it to the existing Trek mythology so as not to just flippantly disregard everything that came before it. By incorporating time travel and alternate realities into the narrative, they were able to spin Trek off into the quadrant where nothing is written, nothing is known, and the pleasure lies not only in the discovery of new things, but the rediscovery of old things.

Maybe it's not space that's the final frontier; maybe it's time. Either way, the makers of the 2009 Star Trek reboot admirably fulfilled the mission of seeking out new life in the universe, of boldly going where no Star Trek movie had gone before.

Abrams' overuse of lens flares may have become a joke, but the ones in this movie, coupled with the camera's perspective tilts, do give it the visual quality of a mind-bending journey. At the same time, the fact that Star Trek is not overindulgent in computer-generated imagery, the fact that Abrams and his crew used real locations and sets, adds a layer of realism to the film. When you're in Iowa with the young Kirk, and there are those huge hazy towers in the background, and the android-cop comes along on his hoverbike, it all feels like part of the real world.

On television, Star Trek , was, at its best, always thought-provoking in a way that allowed the viewer to tie it back to what was going on in the real world. The reboot's most thought-provoking moments come from its meta treatment of Trek. Maybe that makes it a hollow Hollywood construct, one whose inner workings lay exposed like those of the Enterprise itself in the film's enigmatic first teaser —which offered glimpses of welders building the ship up close, followed by the words, "Under Construction."

In the actual movie, Kirk sees the construction happening outside the ship yard on the ground in Iowa. The camera moves in behind him , letting us gaze a t that ship, which holds the promise of so much destiny. Yet if Trek 's destiny going forward is merely to cannibalize past highlights, and if our d estiny as viewers is merely to get lost inside the looping dream of this fictional world, how is that ship any different from the deceptive Talosian illusions that caged Captain Pike in the pilot episode of The Original Series?

Star Trek: Discovery recently revisited Talosian territory , so i t's worth remembering the pilot and its line: "When dreams become more important than reality, you give up travel, building, creating." Coming as it did in the very first episode of the series, that line could almost be read as a warning to the elaborate web of fandom that would spring up around Star Trek in the decades to come. Maybe we should all take a step back before we get too caught up in the fictional mythology of Trek and its alien worlds.

That said, if the reboot is, in some sense, a cage for the franchise and for the viewer, then it's as pleasant a prison as the IP zookeepers in Tinseltown ever constructed. Keep in mind, Pike was aware of his predicament, and some illusions can serve as a wake-up call, renewing one's appreciation for what one has back in the main reality (if not the real world, then at least the wide world of Trek on TV).

Flipping back through the 2009 film yearbook, cinephiles may recall that Star Trek was released the same summer as Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, a movie that landed squarely on the opposite end of the quality spectrum. Orci and Kurtzman also made up two-thirds of the writing team for that movie. Between it, X-Men Origins: Wolverine , Terminator Salvation , and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra , 2009 was a tough year for summer popcorn flicks.

The point is, anyone who thinks this Star Trek is bad maybe needs to go back and do a little comparative rewatching. Drawing as it does from cartoon toy mythology, Revenge of the Fallen is much less convincing on the plot level. Next to a nonsensical MacGuffin like the Matrix of Leadership , Star Trek 's red matter at least sounds more plausible.

Unfortunately, the film brings back the late great Leonard Nimoy as Spock, only to saddle him with an info dump in the midst of a mind meld. It's sad to hear his frail voice become a puppet for plot exposition; and unless you believe in the gleeful serendipity of Lost Connections , it's criminally convenient that Kirk, the marooned mutineer, stumbles upon the elder Spock in a random cave on a random ice planet (#NotHoth). On that same planet, Scotty is also conveniently waiting for them in a Starfleet outpost, ready to be fed the deus ex machina equation that will allow him to invent trans-warp beaming right at the moment when Kirk most needs it to get back on the Enterprise.

These wonky plot mechanisms aside, it's all okay, really, because this Star Trek is superluminal. It distills the inherent optimism of the franchise down into the can of a quick energy drink that we can all slam back together at Quark's Bar on DS9. Shouldn't sci-fi nerds, by their nature, prefer quarks to qualms? What is a qualm, anyway? I've forgotten the definition of the word because it holds no meaning for me when I watch Star Trek ... a movie that doesn't have time for your concerns about plot holes ... not when it's busy conjuring that big black hole to eat the Vulcan planet.

With his home world destroyed, it starts to feel like Spock, the mythic "child of two worlds," is getting a new Superman-like origin whereby he'll become something akin to the last son of Vulcan instead of the last son of Krypton. That's alright: he's still got a single parent, as does Kirk. His human mother, played by Winona Ryder — then the biggest celebrity face in the movie (this side of Romulan Eric Bana and Starfleet Admiral Tyler Perry, that is) — dies simply because Bambi's mother died. It's tradition: one parent per hero. That's what happens in Disneyfied fairy tales.

It wouldn't be the last time Abrams directed one of those. If it pains you to see Kirk and Spock become the live-action Paramount Pictures equivalent of lion princes in a Disney animated feature, just know that there's probably some moviegoer out there who got drawn into the universe of Star Trek through the instant accessibility of this film. The movie is gateway Trek for neophytes, courtesy of Bad Robot Productions.

THE JOY OF J.J.

Coming at the tail end of the 2000s, Star Trek put Abrams at the forefront of a new generation of fans turned filmmakers who would, in the 2010s, set about remaking, remixing, and rebooting the well-known movies they grew up on. No longer would homages be confined to the underground gems and obscure foreign films that Quentin Tarantino had been stealthily repackaging for years.

Hollywood's ( still-going ) reboot-o-tron had already fired up with great success in the mid-2000s, courtesy of Batman Begins and Casino Royale. Star Trek is where the machine settled into a new groove. A few years down the road, in among all the other franchise wannabes with colons in their titles, even the good tentpoles would start to resemble each other, with The Avengers , Skyfall , and yes, Star Trek Into Darkness, all being faintly derivative of The Dark Knight— that movie where the villain plans to get caught all along just so he can stare out from a cell and then escape.

With Star Trek , you certainly could make the case — as others have — that Abrams, as director and field marshal, is the delinquent juvenile Kirk, cranking up the song "Sabotage" and driving the franchise over a cliff while trying to outrace some paternal shadow. Instead of his father, George Kirk, it's the legacy of his blockbuster forerunners, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, that has chased Abrams through most of his film career (including the Raiders of the Lost Ark -inspired foot chase in Star Trek Into Darkness ). In his red Corvette, J.J.'s got Nokia product placement and a glove compartment full of mystery boxes. Han Solo's pair of gold dice hangs from the rearview mirror. There's also a bottle full of creative lightning that the boy furtively uncorks despite open container laws in California.

That's Abrams, or at least my perception of him. He's out there on the open road and his critics, all the Anton Egos of the world, are just bitter backseat drivers. The man has pretty much conquered Hollywood at this point. Love him or hate him, there's no denying that he's been i nstrumental in shaping American pop culture at the highest levels. Remember when M. Night Shyamalan was supposed to be the next Spielberg? With his nostalgia-driven forays into populist filmmaking (especially Super 8 ), Abrams consciously strives toward the same ideal.

He may have jumped starships to the galaxy far, far away, but first, Abrams had to make the jump from television to film. Like David Fincher, he started with a random franchise threequel. Mission: Impossible III put him on the movie director map, but Star Trek solidified him as one to watch, a filmmaker with a whole new pseudo-auteur cred.

The movie is an announcement: with it, Abrams let us know that he had truly arrived and would be an important force in the film industry. As reboots go, this one was monumental, the kind that shifted the earth beneath the feet of general moviegoers and made them realize that this thing called Star Trek was cool, not just something for Trekkies.

What really irks some fans, I think, is that Abrams gave Star Trek a space fantasy facelift. Then he had the temerity to abandon his dubious cosmetic procedure, flinging it aside at the first sign of Star Wars , as if, all along, the Enterprise was just keeping his butt warm for the Millennium Falcon.

Full disclosure: i n addition to Star Trek , I'm a Star Wars fan from way, way back, which may go a long way toward explaining my irrational love for this iteration of Trek , if you're of the mind that this is Trek , by way of Wars . Nevertheless, as a child of these two worlds (much like Spock himself), what I'd like to know is ... w hy can't a toy model of the Starship Enterprise occupy the same shelf as a toy model of the Millennium Falcon? I'm genuinely asking because I have this feng shui problem in my entertainment room and the geomancy of J.J. is the only thing that seems to solve it.

Listen, we've established that J.J. is Kirk, so if Kirk's too busy munching on an apple to play by the rules of the Kobayashi Maru test, do you really think J.J.'s going to play by the rules of a no-win situation or even a win-lose situation? Oh, sure, the Western mind has been trained to see the world in those dichotomous terms. This or that. Win or lose. The Beatles vs. Elvis Presley. Star Trek vs. Star Wars . Either-or.

Abrams don't play that game. The question, "Save or kill?" is too limited for him. He's too nice a guy, or at least that's what his public persona conveys, and so he can only answer demurely, "Save, save." If you reject the notion of that, you won't like Abrams because he's a remix artist who's taken up the self-appointed impossible mission of curating as many film franchises as he can. Remember, he's the one who got Ethan Hunt's adventures back on track in 2006. The Mission: Impossible franchise suffered from the sophomore slump but it's gotten progressively better since Abrams came on board (he's produced every installment since then, including the phenomenal Fallout .)

Look, I get it: people have valid complaints about the Star Trek reboot. The Abrams brand isn't everyone's cup of tea, but it knows that , don't you see? With its alternate-reality setup, the 2009 Trek bends over backwards to say, "Hey, this is its own thing." Unlike most reboots, it doesn't erase franchise history or pretend as though it never happened. Rather, it shows us a vision of alternate history, one where the characters, their connections, and their backstories are different, but the core of humanity is the same. This time, the "strange new world" explored, per the famous captain's speech, just so happens to be a different timeline: the Kelvin Timeline, as it's now known.

They're on a starship powered by a warp drive, but it's the sublime characters and the perpetual pep in their step that give this movie its tremendous propulsion through outer space. You'll never see as much sprinting, relentless running, Tom-Cruise-level running, on board the Enterprise as you'll see in this movie. That's its M.O: it's the running Star Trek movie (not to be confused with that other one we've referenced, the motorcycling Star Trek movie).

If you think Gene Roddenberry is rolling over in his grave at the state of Star Trek post-2009 , well, maybe you're right. Maybe you know him better than I do. Then again, maybe Star Trek 's creator wore a progressive outlook . It's like that scene in La-La Land where John Legend's character, the progressive one in the conversation, asks, "How are you going to be a revolutionary if you're such a traditionalist? You're holding onto the past, but jazz is about the future."

History might very well determine that Star Trek was J.J. Abrams' best film. You probably think I smoked some crack before typing that. I'm probably digging myself a hole with these kinds of loose-lipped, life-affirming, Trek -adoring statements ... but hear me out, one last time, as we near the end of this long love letter to the final frontier.

Star Trek was more of a sugar-rush shock to the system than The Force Awakens (which I love, by the way). It offered a fresher take, one less caged by reverence or rhyming with past episodes. While it may have strayed too far from the franchise's roots for the tastes of some, perhaps it is precisely "that instinct to leap without looking" (as Greenwood's Captain Pike would call it), that gives the movie such raw, unbridled kinetic energy.

Trek confession: I grew up thinking Star Trek meant The Next Generation . My first captain was Jean-Luc Picard. The Original Series was before my time. It was the stuff of old reruns. I was aware of it; I had watched some of the episodes and some of the later movies , but I had never gone back and watched the whole series until this film reboot set me down that path. Only then would I learn to luxuriate in all those early space-faring adventures, punctuated by Kirk's piercing eyes, Spock's inquisitive looks, and the romanticized faces of women in soft focus .

This movie made me rediscover my love of Star Trek and ultimately connect to the franchise in a deeper way than I ever had as a kid. I love it because of how it was so sure-handedly able to recapture the sense of wonder, the sense of pure exhilarating joy, that I felt as a kid watching movies. It beamed me back aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise, where I would stay for good this time. I know I can't be the only fan who had that kind of experience.

BLESSED ARE THE GEEKS

Star Trek began life as a cult phenomenon. This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the untimely cancellation of The Original Series. The show went off the air after a mere three seasons, only to find a second life in reruns. Despite its dated flourishes, it still holds up after all these years ... but now it's become something more, expanding into a thriving multimedia empire full of widely recognized pop-culture icons. Klingon is a legit language and the split-finger Vulcan salute is as good as International Sign Language.

Much has changed since the airing of that old Saturday Night Live sketch with Shatner at a Star Trek convention, telling a room full of geeks, "Get a life!" I don't know about you, Trekkers, but I always found that sketch to be funny and spot-on, an incisive little satire of geekdom. It hit close to home for me in a way that made me realize we probably shouldn't take any of this make-believe stuff too seriously. My favorite part — a bit that feels very 2019 — is how Shatner is forced to immediately retcon his own stage appearance, telling the assembled fanboys, "That speech was a recreation of the evil Captain Kirk."

A few years before he passed away, I once saw James Doohan, the original Scotty, in a basement convention hall in Manhattan, not that far from Rockafeller Center, where SNL is filmed. It was a far cry from Hall H at Comic-Con. That wasn't even a thing yet, because this was circa 2000-2001.

Somewhere along the way (the mid-to-late 2000s, by my estimate), geek became chic. In 2019, we're now apparently at peak geek, with Avengers: Endgame , the final season of Game of Thrones , and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker all rolling over us the same year. To paraphrase an old biblical quote, "Blessed are the geeks: for they have inherited the earth."

Abrams' Star Trek is a fleet-footed, funny, at times fumbling expression of geek love for one of the most important media franchises on the planet. The beautiful people run ubiquitous through his film and television projects, and this one is no exception, but if you think of them as glamorous spokespersons for science, it's hard to fault them for baring their torsos. Kirk and Uhura parade around in their underwear, trading snappy patter because they're young and alive, as much so as Uhura's green-skinned roommate or the original Green Girl, Susan Oliver . That's the audience for this movie: people who are young, or young at heart, and maybe a little green, but most importantly, still alive and not so jaded that they're unable to enjoy the verve of the occasional ace summer blockbuster.

Star Trek wants the franchise out in the streets, not in some insular basement. Maybe, just maybe, what the series needed at this particular point in time was a non-fan, or casual fan — someone with an outsider's perspective like Abrams — to come in and shake it up, just to remind it that characters come first and big science fiction ideas are nothing without them.

That's a lesson the franchise seemingly learned between Star Trek: The Motion Picture and The Wrath of Khan. It's a lesson that's reinforced by the disparity between the pilot episode for The Original Series and its first few broadcast episodes. Compare the cast when it was only Pike and the pointy-eared Spock, surrounded by vanilla faces, to the cast when it was Nichelle Nichols and George Takei and all these other diverse actors.

What a difference a Deforest Kelley makes. In the first season premiere, "The Man Trap," Shatner and Kelley, the real McCoy, you might say, exude immediate charisma and chemistry with each other, and there's more of a personal stake in the plot for McCoy because it involves an old flame of his. The show came alive when it put its characters front and center and let the audience, too, have a personal stake in them. This film reboot is an electric reminder of that character-based approach to storytelling.

In 2009, J.J. Abrams and his cast and crew set out on a fun, freewheeling voyage. Their continuing mission over the course of two hours? To make people care about Star Trek again, so that it can "live long and prosper." Mission accomplished.

Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, vulcan survivor's guilt: why j.j. abrams should make mr. spock the hero of the new "star trek" franchise.

In J.J. Abrams’ reboot of the “ Star Trek ” universe, Spock is a burdened soul. As in Gene Roddenberry ’s original series, he is the only child of a human mother and Vulcan father — by birth, a man of two worlds and an outcast. But Abrams and his co-writers give him a fascinating additional burden: Midway through the first movie , Spock’s home planet of Vulcan is destroyed by a Romulan villain, Nero. The enormous implosion claims the lives of the planet’s indigenous population as well as Spock’s mother. Cosmic and personal tragedies converge: not only does Spock lose his mom — his heretofore beacon of humanity — he and his Vulcan kinsmen become stateless nomads. Even at his most vulnerable, though, Spock controls his emotions, and lets logic dictate his actions, declaring his race to be an endangered species.

The destruction of Vulcan, one of the most crucial planets in the "Star Trek" legendarium, should be at the core of J.J. Abrams’ films. It is the single development that most distinguishes the original TV and movie series from Abrams’ reboot, an event so boldly imagined that it marks the filmmakers’ new, blank canvas with a hideous dark stain. And yet for the most part, the new films draw around the stain, not treating it quite as an afterthought, but not engaging with it as fully as they ought to.

I believe they should engage with it — that in fact they should put it at the heart of the new franchise. It has an imaginative power comparable to the destruction of Alderaan in " Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope ," which gave 1970s children apocalyptic nightmares, though not intentionally: " Star Wars " creator George Lucas treated the Death Star's annihilation of a world as the cause of space-nausea and never mentioned it again, much less weighed down the adopted Alderaanian Leia Organa with the psychological freight of its absence.

In contrast, Abrams and his collaborators have woven mentions of Vulcan’s death into the plot of the second film, " Star Trek Into Darkness ," in ways that, however tossed-off and limited, reinforce the superiority of "Star Trek" to "Star Wars" as popular art; they could, and should, build these references out and embellish them, because they're solid enough to give the entire franchise an a narrative anchor that it thus far has lacked.

"As if millions of voices cried out in terror..."

That present-tense experience of grief is palpable even though the new "Star Trek" series hasn’t placed it at the heart of its stories. Why not formalize the focus, and see what results? I believe the new “Star Trek” franchise would be a greater, more powerful, more moving accomplishment if it stopped obsessing over the maturation of the impetuous James T. Kirk — an amusing but too-familiar arc, one that many adventure series have already portrayed — and redirected its energy toward exploring the psychology of the post-Vulcan Mr. Spock, the rightful lead in this rebooted franchise. That Abrams seems already to be headed in that direction, however fitfully, suggests that on some level he has already accepted this truth, although he hasn’t yet embraced it as enthusiastically as I believe he should.

At the end of “ The Wrath of Khan ,” the second film in the original “Star Trek” series, Captain Kirk eulogizes Spock by declaring, “Of all the souls I have encountered in my travels, his was the most human.”

This anthropocentrism has always been evident in “Star Trek,” and, even though it betrays a superficially Earth-bound and reactionary nature, the statement echoes the deeper, secular, Bertrand Russell-style humanism of "Star Trek." As such, the “human soul” of Spock that Kirk laments is that of a universal adherent of the Golden Rule. This maxim has always governed Spock, whose strict dedication to Aristotelian logic was, for all intents and purposes, a gimmick. Given the choice, the character always opted for doing the Right Thing, even if it led to self-sacrifice.

In the reboot universe, J.J. Abrams could have amplified these central tenets of the character. With their planet gone, Spock and the remaining Vulcans are left without a home. “Star Trek” has built up this race as wise and philosophical, a people whose existence is based around knowledge, around reading and thinking and remembering. The total obliteration of the Vulcans’ home planet is the razing of the Great Library of Alexandria, the Fall of Babylon, the Sack of Rome and the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all rolled into one.

How would a catastrophe this immense affect the Federation? Are there tenets of the Vulcan culture that are irredeemably lost in time? What sort of effect does this have in the Federation’s balance of power?

There is a more immediate analogue, too, namely the destruction of Vulcan as the “Star Trek” equivalent of the Holocaust. The event turns the Vulcan race into an intergalactic Jewish diaspora consisting entirely of survivors.

This is powerful stuff, and potentially fruitful. Abrams’ “Trek” films have been criticized for shifting the original series’ focus away from exploration and onto political and military intrigue, but this needn’t necessarily represent a betrayal of what the original stood for. The destruction of Vulcan could let Abrams formalize an interest that’s already evident to anyone who’s seen “Star Trek” and “Star Trek Into Darkness,” and let the new series look at many of the classic "Star Trek" philosophical and moral issues through a fresh prism.

Among the questions such a refocused series could explore: Who preserves the memory of Vulcan? Would a new, post-Vulcan society of Vulcan survivors have fascist overtones, defending the racially “pure” against the unwanted attentions of the mixed-blood portion of society? Perhaps the surviving Vulcans have split into political factions akin to those seen within so many majority-minority societies. They may also be squabbling about how best to relate to the "majority" society they've been forced to become a part of; their arguments could echo the ones that happened within Native American and African-American society in the 1960s and '70s, which were torn between trying to change the United States' majority culture to make it more hospitable, versus standing apart from it or actively attacking it. The aftershocks of Vulcan's end also raise the question of whether a civilization can be a proper civilization without a homeland, or a home world. That there's a fleeting reference in "Star Trek Into Darkness" to New Vulcan -- presumably this universe's Vulcan version of Israel? -- suggests that Abrams and his cowriters have already been thinking about it.

It's all quite fraught -- a powderkeg of identity politics that people would avoid at cocktail parties for fear of ruining the evening. Where would Spock, a racially “impure” Vulcan, find himself in all of this? He would probably be an assimilationist, committed to integrating Vulcan identity into the patchwork of galactic civilization, otherwise why would he have committed himself to Starfleet, or the Federation itself? This commitment would already be present given what we know about Spock's "half-breed" psychology, but the destruction of Vulcan would magnify those feelings and give his actions even greater urgency.

But not every Vulcan would agree with Spock. There would probably be separatist elements, perhaps with a militant mentality. Some would have dedicated themselves to wiping out the Romulans as revenge for Vulcan’s death, notwithstanding counter-arguments that Nero, the man responsible for Vulcan's destruction, was just a "bad apple," not representative of the Romulans as a race. And of course the Vulcans that wanted revenge against the Romulans wouldn’t call it “revenge.” They’d come up with some “logical” euphemism. But that would be their true motivation, and it’s something Spock would have to contend with in his role as a half-Vulcan Starfleet officer, a man who’s under constant pressure to be A Credit to his Race.

Mr. Spock, your destiny is calling

Isn’t it plausible that by giving his younger self information that he would otherwise not be privy to, old Spock actually changes the future? We know that the universe of "Star Trek" has a relativist approach to time, not determinist. By implying a future friendship, could the old Spock be actually affecting — perhaps even dooming — that bond? Heisenberg’s uncertainty principal would suggest so. How would Spock, now the true hero of "Star Trek," deal with such a dilemma?

This line of argument also suggests a more fundamental difference between classic "Trek" and the reboot. In the original version, destiny does not play a part. The ship is called Enterprise, and is the vessel to uncover hitherto unknown possibilities. The reboot errs strictly on the side of destiny. The crew of the Enterprise is destined to be together; Kirk and Spock are destined to be best friends; the Enterprise is destined to encounter Khan. But if all these conceits, previously established in the original Trek universe, are destined to happen, how, then, would they be affected by the destruction of Vulcan? And how would Spock, as the real hero of this incarnation of "Star Trek," surmount these personal, philosophical, and physical challenges?

These are logical questions with potentially fascinating answers.

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All Access Star Trek podcast episode 186 with Lisa Klink - TrekMovie - Star Trek: Discovery "Lagrange Point"

| May 24, 2024 | By: All Access Star Trek Pod Team 28 comments so far

[ Discovery 509 review with Lisa Klink starts at 25:59]

There’s big news this week! Anthony and Laurie talk about the announcement that Oscar winner Holly Hunter will lead the Starfleet Academy series and reports that Simon Kinberg is in talks to oversee a new era of Star Trek feature films. They discuss the news that Picard ‘s Terry Matalas is showrunning for Marvel, note that Strange New Worlds season 3 is about to wrap, and try to be patient like the Hageman brothers about when to expect Prodigy on Netflix.

After listening to some of Tony’s interview with Discovery ‘s Blu del Barrio (Adira), Tony and Laurie are joined by Voyager/Deep Space Nine writer Lisa Klink to review the penultimate episode of Star Trek: Discovery , “Lagrange Point.”

They wrap up with a fan-led stream-a-thon to save Lower Decks and a lovely article from Discovery ‘s Patrick Kwok-Choon about becoming a dad and captaining the Discovery on the same day.

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In regards to potential TNG cameos in the final episode, why not Salome Jens as the Progenitor?

Also a good option!

Well, considering we saw both Mol and Burnham disappear into the warm white glow of the Celestial Temple…..

Gonna go out on a limb here…perhaps the reason Paramount announced Holly Hunter’s casting this week is because she shows up in the finale as a set-up for Academy, kind of like Paul Wesley in SNW’s S1 finale.

Hey you won, congratulations!

So is Anthony thinking that the Star Trek origin movie will be a whole new Trek universe like Ultimate Marvel rebooted a new Marvel Universe in the comics (while the classic Marvel continued on also)?

That’s what I inferred, with the RDM BSG reference. Done right (again, with Ron Moore’s BSG as the template) I’d watch.

Thanks again for a great discussion! About Academy: since this is the establishment of a new, post-Burn Academy at its original San Francisco location, I wonder if the “new enemy” is a movement, as we saw toward the end of Enterprise, that is isolationist, “Earth First,” and opposes Earth’s rejoining the Federation and the restoration of the Academy (and presumably Starfleet superseding the autonomous Earth security force that existed after The Burn). That certainly would speak to our times.

I’m kind hoping someone shakes off the brain fart of needing yet another enemy to amp up the tension. Maybe we can tell interesting stories for three or four short seasons without having to worry about saving the galaxy. Again. And again…..

Fair enough, though to split hairs the blurb didn’t say anything about the galaxy being imperiled.

….true that, just the Academy and the Federation, which isn’t quite what it used to be.

I agree with that!

Look at that, Phil agreeing with Phil :)) LOL

As a Linux user I feel obliged to point out that Phil != phil ;-)

Lets see they used the Gorn, the Romulans, The Breen, the Borg, the Changelings,the klingons, at this point they used nearly all the big bads. I think its about them they change their approach to the bad guys and stop recycling what came before. Academy show is the perfect opportunity for this.

I could not agree more. Time for something new!

Where Species 8472 is still out there somewhere.

JUST SAYING! 😂

But yeah I agree, it’s time to do something different for a change.

They could do that, but wasn’t that already done with the Earth storyline in Discovery season 3 when they jump to the future and find the Federation shattered?

Yes, and eventually all the founding worlds rejoined the reinvigorated Federation. I was just thinking about who would have issues with the restoration of the Academy.

Yeah, seems a bit moustache twirly. Imagine a foreign adversary wanting to conquer the Americans, and to it, they will attack UCLA.

But seriously, the Academy has always been loosely defined. It’s a huge suspension of disbelief that anyone from across the vastness of Federation space who wanted to join Starfleet packed up and headed off to San Francisco.

No it’s not! They get to ride the cable cars!

I wasn’t thinking about alien foes but homegrown “Earther” (as the Klingons called humans in TOS) NIMBYs.

Yeah, having the Academy in SanFran was a symptom of the human desire to put Earth at the center of everything syndrome, not to mention the Fed HQ in Paris.

I actually love the idea that aliens all over the Alpha Quadrant are coming to Earth to study and just hanging out in the Height Ashbury district (where I used to live) between classes lol.

But I always imagined Starfleet would’ve just built extension schools on other important Federation worlds; at least by the 24th century when Starfleet and the Federation had really expanded by then.

Just listened to the podcast and as usual really great and informative discussion. And per usual agree with Laurie 100% of all of it.

A few random thoughts about the discussions.

First off, for the new movie, yes count me as skeptical it will ever happen but would love to be proven wrong. But listening to the discussion I guess I would be happy if it is a reboot because they could just go an entirely different direction and do some interesting things with it. Like Laurie l didn’t really want a TOS reboot ever and was very ho hum about the first Kelvin movie…. until I heard it was going to be an alternate universe story and oddly I got very excited over it. Unfortunately they didn’t really take advantage of their premise as fully as they should have but it was still a great idea IMO.

If the new movie is a complete reboot and starting fresh with new characters it could be interesting even if it is another tired prequel. But since it’s based on a time period we know very little about if we’re talking between First Contact and Enterprise then that’s about 90 years they can play with and why I don’t think it’s a reboot; unless they plan to do something radically different that just breaks canon. But I guess we’d see.

As for Discovery and the interview discussing Adira wow Anthony hit it right on the head when he asked how come we have never heard of her life on Earth…like ever??

It’s so bizarre. They have a character that’s literally the only one who lived on Earth in the 32nd century and has a very old Trill symbiote inside her and preceded to do nothing with either of those elements. I completely forgot she even came from Earth until this interview.

Why not tell us something about her life living there? Some insight into what Earth is like or how different it is since the Burn? It would’ve been interesting if we ran into a relative of hers or something. Does she actually have real parents??? I don’t remember if any of that has been touched upon.

And also why not use the Tal symbiote more? Maybe because she’s human it’s different but it’s funny they gave her this very unique backstory and then basically forgot about it once they used it to get them to Federation headquarters in season 3 when they could’ve built a very interesting arc around it for the character.

Instead it’s just been three seasons of being with her boyfriend and doubting herself on the ship; typical Discovery melodrama stuff instead of real character introspection and development but I digress.

Lastly I am very happy for Terry Matalas getting a Marvel show but also don’t think it’s a nail in the coffin for the Legacy show idea or just being involved in Star Trek again in general. And as Anthony said I said myself most Marvel shows are really miniseries vs full on TV shows. It could go multiple seasons but so far only Loki only got two seasons basically. And it’s not an exclusive deal so he could still work on things outside of Marvel anyway.

I always have to cite yes I’m fully aware there is no Legacy show on the table right now nor there might not ever be one but we call it faith for a reason. 😉

And I did love hearing Lisa Klink thoughts on the episode. I liked hearing her thoughts about Voyager on the Delta Flyers as well.

Great job as usual guys!

I remember when they introduced Adira and I kept thinking we were going to get a deep dive into what it’s like to wake up with no memories of your own, just a lifetime of Trill ones. Such a great story idea! Thanks for all your thorough and thoughtful comments. Means a lot! (And I also love hearing Lisa on the Delta Flyers.)

Exactly they could’ve done so much more with the character. It’s really disappointing. I do like Adira but it’s amazing how little the writers done every season speaks to the MANY issues Discovery has.

And thank you for saying that! 🙂

Yes and absolutely love Lisa Klink!

Adira’s pronouns are they/them. It’s been more than three years. Is it really that hard to get it right for a pedant like you?

I’m just shocked I can even remember Adiras name at this point. 😉

You sound like such a lovely person. Take it easy.

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Published Jan 18, 2022

The Star Trek Universe Celebrates 2022 with New Premiere Dates, Season Pickups

The franchise is boldly growing

StarTrek.com

Paramount+, the streaming service from ViacomCBS, today announced new season premiere dates and additional 10-episode-long season pickup orders across the service’s Star Trek Universe live-action series:

In addition to the live action series within the Star Trek Universe on Paramount+, there is more animated Star Trek on the horizon:

“Four years ago, we made a promise to grow Star Trek into something it had never been before, and thanks to the incredibly hard work done by our many talented showrunners, writers, and directors, along with the extraordinary support of CBS Studios and Paramount+, we’re keeping our word,” said Alex Kurtzman, architect and executive producer, Star Trek franchise. “Now our current shows are set up for the future as we work to build Trek ’s next phase of programming for years to come.”

Starfleet's Hope for 2022

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Star Trek: Discovery Seasons 1-4 are streaming exclusively on Paramount+ in the U.S., the UK, Canada, Switzerland, South Korea, Latin America, Germany, France, Italy, Australia and Austria. Seasons 2 and 3 also are available on the Pluto TV “Star Trek” channel in Switzerland, Germany and Austria. The series streams on Super Drama in Japan, TVNZ in New Zealand, and SkyShowtime in Spain, Portugal, Poland, The Nordics, The Netherlands, and Central and Eastern Europe and also airs on Cosmote TV in Greece. The series is distributed by Paramount Global Content Distribution.

In addition to streaming on Paramount+ , Star Trek: Picard also streams on Prime Video outside of the U.S. and Canada, and in Canada can be seen on Bell Media's CTV Sci-Fi Channel and streams on Crave. Star Trek: Picard is distributed by Paramount Global Content Distribution.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds streams exclusively on Paramount+ in the U.S., U.K., Australia, Latin America, Brazil, South Korea, France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland and Austria. In addition, the series airs on Bell Media’s CTV Sci-Fi Channel and streams on Crave in Canada and on SkyShowtime in the Nordics, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal and Central and Eastern Europe. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is distributed by Paramount Global Content Distribution.

Star Trek: Lower Decks streams exclusively on Paramount+ in the U.S. and is distributed by Paramount Global Content Distribution. In Canada, it airs on Bell Media’s CTV Sci-Fi Channel. The series will also be available to stream on Paramount+ in the UK, Canada, Latin America, Australia, Italy, France, the Caribbean, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Ireland and South Korea.

Star Trek: Prodigy Season 1 is available to stream on Netflix outside of markets including Canada where it is available on CTV.ca and the CTV App, France on France Televisions channels and Okoo, in Iceland on Sjonvarp Simans Premium, as well as on SkyShowtime in the Nordics, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and Central and Eastern Europe. Star Trek: Prodigy is distributed by Paramount Global Content Distribution.

Discovery 's connection to the reboot Star Trek movies just got stronger

From Tilly's promotion to a very special starship name, to the fate of Spock, the Kelvin Universe is making a comeback.

The Kelvin Universe and the Prime Universe are blending. Well, if not literally, then they certainly are inching closer spiritually. In the latest episode of Star Trek: Discovery , there are at least three overt references to the sideways alternate Trek dimension that exists right alongside the "regular" canon of Trek. And while critics of the J.J. Abrams -produced "trilogy" of Trek films might find these connections to be superficial, there are actually some signs that the 32nd Century of Discovery Season 3 is cozier than ever with the world of Chris Pine's Captain Kirk.

Here's how Discovery's big Vulcan episode — "Unification III" — didn't just reference The Next Generation , but the reboot movies, too.

First, as most fans are probably aware, although all the new Trek shows since 2017 take place in the "Prime" canon, none of it would be possible without the reboot films. The current Star Trek boss — who oversees all the new CBS shows — is Alex Kurtzman, probably better known to Trek fans a decade ago as the guy who co-wrote both Star Trek 2009 and Star Trek Into Darkness . Regardless of what fans think of those films, or Benedict Cumberbatch's version of Khan , without any of these movies, the era of Discovery wouldn't have happened. Obviously, the continuities are very different. In the Prime Universe, Burnham left the year 2258 and emerged in 3188. But the Star Trek 2009 reboot actually occurs in an alternate 2258, and that's the year that Old Spock arrived from 2387. Basically, Spock and his human sister, Michael Burnham, were more than ships passing in the night: They were time travelers going in opposite directions, stopping over in the same year, but in totally different universes.

That said, Spock is actually the focal point of the basic existence of the Kelvin Universe in the first place. And, in "Unification III," this fact is vaguely referred to in one quick scene.

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Spock (Leonard Nimoy) falls into a black hole in Star Trek (2009).

Spock's "death" references the Star Trek 2009 reboot

At the beginning of Discovery's "Unification III," Admiral Vance mentions that Spock worked to help unify the Vulcans and Romulans up until his "death." What Vance didn't say was that part of that work also involved Spock trying to slow-down a supernova that eventually destroyed the Romulan Homeworld. Vance also didn't mention that Spock didn't die in the 24th century, but instead, fell into a Black Hole, and traveled back in time to the Chris Pine-version of 2258. Vance didn't mention this, because there's no way he could know about it. But we do! This small nod to the reboot movies is interesting, if only because it's a reminder that although the Prime Universe and Kelvin Universes have different continuities, they're both real-deal Star Trek canon.

Tilly (Mary Wiseman) gets a new job from Saru (Doug Jones)

Tilly's promotion references Kirk in Star Trek 2009

Although it's not the main plot of "Unification III," the fact that Tilly is promoted to First Officer of the USS Discovery is fairly significant. Not only does this put her one step closer to becoming Captain, but it's also the exact path Kirk (Chris Pine) took to becoming the Enterprise Captain in Star Trek 2009. The technical detail is all about how although Tilly doesn't outrank several crewmembers, she could be granted a position that gives her greater authority. In Trek 2009 Captain Pike makes Kirk "acting first officer," even though he's technically only a cadet at the time. When Spock is relieved of command for freaking out and going off the rails, Kirk becomes captain by default, even though most everyone on the ship has a higher "earned" rank than him. By making Tilly the new "Number One" of DISCO, Captain Saru has done the same thing Pike did with Kirk. (Which is funny, since Saru used to be the First Officer to the Prime Universe Captain Pike.)

Tilly kind of comments on this idea when she tells Stamets that she would have authority "not in rank, but in position," and also tells Saru, "I'm an ensign!" Interestingly enough, Tilly has a higher rank and more experience than Kirk did when he was in a similar spot in the first Trek reboot. Still think Tilly won't be the Captain eventually?

Chekov (Anton Yelchin) and Kirk (Chris Pine) in 'Star Trek Beyond'

Discovery tipped its hat to Anton Yelchin

Perhaps the sweetest reference to the reboot films came in a quick Easter egg, uttered by Tilly early in the episode. One of the Starfleet "black boxes" that Michael has been trying to track down, apparently, belonged to the USS Yelchin . This is clearly a reference to the actor Anton Yelchin, who played Chekov in all three reboot Trek movies. As many fans know, Yelchin was killed in a tragic car accident in 2016, shortly before the release of Star Trek Beyond .

The fact that Discovery is honoring Yelchin in this way is not only endearing, it's also telling. Even across different dimensions, it's all Star Trek. If Discovery has a starship named after Anton Yelchin, and Tilly can get promoted the same way as Chris Pine's Kirk it seems like the possibilities for a real crossover might not be so far-fetched.

Star Trek: Discovery is streaming now on CBS All Access.

This article was originally published on November 30, 2020

Science Fiction

Star Trek Characters Who Look Completely Different In Real Life

When the crew of the starship Enterprise first embarked on their twenty-year mission, the goal was to "seek out new life and new civilizations." As it turns out, most of the planets in most of the galaxies across the universe are inhabited by beings that look remarkably similar to Earth's humans. Apparently evolution ends up happening in almost the exact same way on any planet that can support life.

But in all seriousness, the fact that the different alien races in the "Star Trek" universe either look indistinguishable from humans — or like a human but with an unusual skin color or some slightly exaggerated facial feature — likely originally stemmed from it being a network TV show from the 1960s and not having the makeup or VFX budget for much else, which for a time was one of the worst things about the franchise .

Luckily, as time has gone on, new alien races have been introduced, with some actually getting much further from humans visually. Some even require the use of extensive prosthetics or special effects, making the characters look very different than the actors portraying them. Here are some of the more extreme examples of that, mostly sticking to either fairly significant characters or more well-known actors.

Marc Alaimo as Dukat

Often making lists of not only the best "Star Trek" villains but also of fan-favorite "Star Trek" characters in general, Gul Dukat is the franchise's most prominent member of the Cardassian race. Though the Cardassians made their debut on an episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation," Dukat was a recurring character on "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" where he took turns being both friend and foe to Captain Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks).

Dukat was portrayed by actor Marc Alaimo, who not only looks different in real life but helped to originate the Caradassians as a whole. This is because Alaimo had also played another Caradassian, Macet, in the species' first appearance on "The Next Generation." Additionally, he played four other non-Cardassian characters across the run of "The Next Generation." Among his more noteworthy roles in which he doesn't appear under intricate prosthetics that completely transform his face are Mars Security Force Captain Everett in the original "Total Recall," and eight episodes as Gene Scapizzi on the 1980s police procedural "Hill Street Blues."

Alaimo told a crowd at a 2015 convention that, while he wasn't officially retired from acting, he was no longer actively seeking roles (though the official "Star Trek" X account tweeted that he was retired back in 2013). His most recent screen credit is a 2010 episode of "Family Guy."

Doug Jones as Saru

When prequel series "Star Trek: Discovery" debuted on streaming service CBS All Access — which would eventually evolve into Paramount+ — in 2017, it served as the launching point for one of the most active periods in "Star Trek" history. Since then, there have been two more live-action series as well as two animated ones, plus a slew of new characters that have been added to the "Star Trek" universe debuting in those shows.

Among those debuts is Saru, who also introduced the entire Kelpien race to the "Star Trek" franchise. A first officer of the titular starship who also serves as captain for a time, Saru is played by Doug Jones — an actor who has built his entire career out of completely disappearing behind makeup and prosthetics. Even if you wouldn't recognize Jones if he passed you on the street out of costume, you're most certainly familiar with his work.

His breakout role was as wisecracking zombie Billy Butcherson in the Halloween classic "Hocus Pocus," a character he revisited for "Hocus Pocus 2." He later became a frequent collaborator of filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, playing Abe Sabien in "Hellboy" and "Hellboy II: The Golden Army," the Faun and terrifying Pale Man in "Pan's Labyrinth," and the unnamed amphibian man in "The Shape of Water." As for roles where he actually shows his face, Jones was Baron Afanas in 10 episodes of "What We Do in the Shadows" and played the Arrowverse's Jake Simmons aka Deathbolt.

Paul Winfield as Dathon

The Children of Tama — also known as the Tamarians — have thus far had the strongest screen presence on the animated series "Star Trek: Lower Decks." Beyond showing up in a couple of novels connected to "Star Trek: Voyager," Tamarians have almost no prior history in the "Trek" universe — with the notable exception of their original debut. Once again, that happened on an episode of "The Next Generation," in Season 5's "Darmok." That episode not only introduces the Tamarian race but also its most prominent live-action ambassador thus far — Captain Dathon.

"Darmok" is often considered one of the best "The Next Generations" episodes of all time, as well as one of Patrick Stewart's greatest performances as Jean-Luc Picard in the series. But respect must also be paid to actor Paul Winfield, whose portrayal of Dathon went a long way in making the episode — and the character — so memorable. Winfield, who was an Emmy winner and Academy Award nominee, had previously played Captain Terrell in the film "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan."

Other career highlights include "The Terminator" and recurring roles on the series "227" and "Touched by an Angel," plus the "Picket Fences" guest appearance that earned him his Emmy. Winfield remained active in both film and television right up until his death in 2004.

Eric Bana as Nero

After the disappointing critical and commercial performance of "Star Trek: Nemesis," the "Star Trek" film series needed a break. With none of the subsequent TV series having enough cultural cache to justify building big-budget theatrical movies around them, the only choice was to go the big-budget soft reboot route — which is how we got to J.J. Abrams' 2009 release, simply titled "Star Trek." Providing a new origin story for the crew of the Enterprise, while conveniently having it set in an alternate timeline so the original canon could still be returned to if need be, "Star Trek '09," as its often called, successfully breathed new life into the flailing franchise.

Much of the plot of the "Star Trek" reboot revolves around a new character named Nero, a Romulan captain who travels back in time to destroy Vulcan in an act of revenge — inadvertently creating the two branching timelines in the process. Both actor Eric Bana and the movie's makeup team did such a convincing job of transforming Bana into Nero that even Bana's own agent failed to recognize the actor when he was on set in his full Nero makeup and costume.

Prior to becoming a Romulan, Bana had portrayed Bruce Banner in Ang Lee's "Hulk," Trojan prince Hector in the action epic "Troy," and lead character Avner Kaufman in Steven Spielberg's historical drama "Munich."

Armin Shimerman as Quark

When the Ferengis were conceptualized by "Star Trek" creator Gene Rodenberry and "The Next Generation" writer Herbert J. Wright, they were originally meant to be a dark and menacing villain presence. But that didn't pan out, and they very quickly became comic relief instead. Quark was the standout member of the Ferengi race, to the point that he became one of the main cast members on "Deep Space Nine" as the station's bartender for all seven seasons of the show.

In both his original "The Next Generation" appearances as well as on "Deep Space Nine," Quark was portrayed by actor Armin Shimerman. The geek-minded might better recognize Shimerman — sans the extensive prosthetics used to transform him into a Ferengi — as Principal Snyder on the "Buffy, the Vampire Slayer" TV series. Shimerman is also a prolific voice actor, playing General Skarr in "The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy" and Dr. Nefarious across the entire "Ratchet & Clank" video game franchise. When he's not acting, Shimerman occasionally moonlights as a writer, even penning a Quark-focused "Deep Space Nine" novel called "The 34th Rule" with David R. George III. He's also open to returning as Quark, but on one condition : that it not be anything more than a recurring role, noting the difficulty of wearing the prosthetics that the role requires.

Pancho Demmings as Kradin soldier

Resembling the Predator alien species from the franchise of the same name, the Kradin are one of the scarier-looking species to ever make an appearance in any "Star Trek" media. Apart from a few quick glimpses elsewhere, they only played a significant role in the franchise in just a single episode of "Voyager" — the Season 4 episode titled "Nemesis." Even so, the Kradin left a lasting impression among "Trek" fans, not only for their gruesome appearance but for the episode itself being a favorite among fans of the series.

The performers that brought Kradin to life in that episode include Peter Vogt, Chuck Borden, and Louis Ortiz, though the most well-known actor among all the Kradin soldiers is likely Pancho Demmings. Demmings also played Gerald Jackson, assistant to Ducky Mallard (David McCallum), on 15 episodes of "NCIS." He's appeared on shows like "Bones," "CSI: NY," "24," and "Alias," and he most frequently plays police officers or members of the medical profession. Demmings also played a character named Alpha 7 in the "Babylon 5" TV movie "In the Beginning."

Hannah Cheesman as Airiam

While cyborgs are no strangers to the crews of various Federation starships — most notably, Voyager's former Borg drone, Seven of Nine — Airiam was still special in that regard. She rose all the way to the rank of lieutenant commander on the Discovery, though she was ultimately killed when she had to be ejected from the ship for fear that the entity that corrupted her would jeopardize the entire crew. Her sacrifice was at the center of one of the saddest "Star Trek" episodes ever , though some fans complained that it was too little too late for a character that never got the development she deserved.

In the first season of "Star Trek: Discovery," Airiam was played by Sara Mitich. In Season 2, Mitich switched to playing operations officer Nilsson, while actor Hannah Cheesman was brought in to take over as Airiam for the remainder of the series. It has never been officially revealed why the swap happened, with a popular (but as of yet unsubstantiated) rumor suggesting it had something to do with Mitich having an allergic reaction to the prosthetics. Either way, Cheesman held the role the longest and saw it through to not only Airiam's demise but one last appearance in the show's final season. Cheesman's biggest part outside of the "Star Trek" universe so far was a recurring role on the Nickelodeon series "Max & Shred."

Jeffrey Combs as Shran

Shran is an Andorian who was a recurring character on "Enterprise." He spent the first few seasons as one of the show's more prominent villains, eventually flipping sides and allying with the crew towards the end of the show's run. Though Shran himself hasn't appeared on screen since "Enterprise," he was referenced years later when a ship called the USS Shran was used during the Battle of the Binary Stars that occurred during Season 2 of "Discovery." A high honor, indeed.

It was actor Jeffrey Combs underneath Shran's blue skin, white hair, and heavily textured forehead. Before playing Shran, Combs had also portrayed the characters of Weyoun, Brunt, Officer Mulkahey, and Tiron across 32 episodes of "Deep Space Nine." Prior to "Enterprise," Combs also played Penk in an episode of "Voyager." And he wasn't done with "Trek" even after playing Shran, having most recently voiced AGIMUS in "Lower Decks."

With all that being said, Combs isn't even best known for his "Star Trek" work — that distinction likely belongs to his portrayal of scientist Herbert West in all three installments of the "Re-Animator" film series, as well as his work in many other cult classic horror films.

Ethan Philips as Neelix

Though he was introduced in the series premiere of "Voyager" and was a main cast member for all seven seasons of the show, Neelix has never been one of the better-liked "Star Trek" characters, particularly among those who have been series regulars. Of course, he has also occasionally found himself brought up in discussions about the most underrated "Star Trek" characters — so perhaps the most accurate way to refer to him is divisive. As for the character himself, his main job on the ship was its cook and also its morale officer, serving a similar role to previous "Trek" characters like Guinan (Whoopi Goldberg) and Quark as food service workers and also de facto therapists for the crew of their respective ships.

Whether you love or hate Neelix, you can't fault the actor who portrayed him. Ethan Philips definitely made the best of a character that was perhaps intentionally designed to be unlikable — which he honed after having been a working actor for 15 years at that point. He was no stranger to television, playing recurring character Pete Downey on the classic sitcom "Benson." He also played Ferengi Dr. Farek in an episode of "The Next Generation" and another one-off Ferengi in "Enterprise." More recently, Philips has made multi-episode appearances on "Girls," "Better Call Saul," and "Veep."

Michael Dorn as Worf

OG "Star Trek" fans remember the Klingons as one of the deadliest antagonists groups in the franchise, with several of the "The Original Series" movies in particular featuring them as the primary antagonists. But at this point, Klingons as a whole have been allies to the Federation far longer than they've been adversaries — and Worf played a pivotal role in that initial changeover. Not only was he the first Klingon to be a main character in a "Star Trek" show, but he was such an integral part of the universe that he appeared in all seven seasons of "The Next Generation" and was a series regular for Seasons 4 through 7 of "Deep Space Nine," the highest number of total seasons (11) as a main character of any character in "Star Trek" history." And that's to say nothing of his recurring role in Season 3 of "Picard."

Actor Michael Dorn played Worf in varying degrees for 36 years. He clearly doesn't have issues with Worf being his legacy. But it's not the only character the seasoned actor has played. Dorn played Dr. Carver Burke across six episodes of "Castle," as well as portraying the magical being Sandman in two of the three "Santa Clause" movies plus the Disney+ series "The Santa Clauses." However, the bulk of Dorn's non-Worf roles over the past few decades have been voice performances, lending his distinctive baritone to a number of animated series and video games.

Heather Langenkamp as Moto

The second installment of the rebooted "Star Trek" movie series was "Star Trek Into Darkness," which loosely retells the story of "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan" with Benedict Cumberbatch as the iconic villain originally immortalized by Ricardo Montalbán. Also in that movie in a minor role is a being known as Moto, which has a much more exaggerated extraterrestrial look than a typical "Star Trek" character and really put the movie's makeup artists to the test. In fact, it was a member of the makeup team that is underneath Mojo's very elaborate prosthetics — but not just any member.

The makeup work of "Into Darkness" was done by AFX Studio, which is owned by David Leroy Anderson and his wife, Heather Langenkamp. Of course, before Langenkamp was working behind the camera, she was in front of it — most notably as Nancy Thompson in three of the "A Nightmare on Elm Street" films. Langenkamp said she had fond memories of watching Robert Englund sit in the makeup chair as he was transformed into Freddy Krueger, and always wanted the chance to experience that sort of transformation herself. So when a few alien extras were needed to fill out a scene in "Into Darkness," Langenkamp jumped at the chance, and she was put into an alien prosthetic that was created for a different project but never used.

Alice Krige as Borg Queen

Several actors have portrayed Borg queens over the years, include Alison Pill, Susanna Thompson, Jane Edwina Seymour, and the late Annie Wersching. And each brought their own unique spin to the character, undoubtedly one of the biggest bads in the entire "Star Trek" franchise. But if any one actor gets to claim herself as the "definitive" Borg queen, it's definitely Alice Krige. Not only was she the originator of the role in the character's first appearance in the film "Star Trek: First Contact," but she also portrayed her in episodes of "Voyager," "Lower Decks," and took over to voice her in her final "Picard" appearance after Wersching passed away — making her the actor who has played the Borg Queen the longest and in the most different projects. But what does the Borg Queen look like today , and what else has Krige been up to?

Krige is a veteran actor whose screen credits go back to the 1970s. Her first big role was portraying real-life singer and actor Sybil Gordon in the Oscar-winning 1981 film "Chariots of Fire." Today, she's more recognizable for her recent roles as Eir in "Thor: The Dark World," Holda the witch in "Gretel & Hansel," and Nancy in Netflix's "The OA." She also played Queen Helena in all three installments of the holiday-based rom-com series "A Christmas Prince."

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10 years ago, J.J. Abrams' Star Trek reboot fueled the modern geek universe

Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto as Kirk and Spock in Star Trek (2009)

Credit: Paramount Pictures

This year, Ethan Peck and Anson Mount took on the roles of Spock and Captain Pike, respectively, in Star Trek: Discovery . Not too long ago, the idea of recasting Pike, Spock, Kirk, or even Spock’s dad was a tremendous gamble — would hardcore Trekkies, many of whom would have preferred these beloved characters preserved in amber, accept a new cast playing characters from the '60s? A decade ago, that question was answered in the affirmative when J.J. Abrams' movie Star Trek premiered to rave reviews, which not only saved the Trek franchise but helped shape the larger geek universe we’re living in today.

Directed by Abrams and written by Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, the 2009 film was technically the 11th feature film in the franchise, and the first new official Trek release since the prequel series Star Trek: Enterprise had been canceled in 2005. At this point in time, the fledgling Marvel Cinematic Universe only consisted of one movie people actually liked (2008's Iron Man ), Game of Thrones was still a fantasy novel from the '90s, the Harry Potter book series had only concluded a year prior, and the Star Wars prequels from 10 years before seemed to have ended that saga forever. Other than Doctor Who , which saw a revival in 2005, most established geeky fandoms weren’t expanding.

It might not have seemed like it at the time, but in many ways — at least when it comes to mainstream sci-fi — the 2009 Star Trek was like striking a match in a room full of nerdy gasoline.

In this version, the first time you see the good Captain Kirk onscreen (not as an infant) is as a bleach-blond child careening down a dirt road in his stepfather's stolen car to the tune of "Sabotage" by the Beastie Boys. It's appropriate, as Abrams' Star Trek feels like a car chase that lasts two hours and never slows down. For haters who thought Abrams played it safe with Star Wars: The Force Awakens in 2015, the 2009 Star Trek will seem like punk rock.

Fairly or not, before 2009 the Trek franchise had gained a reputation for being stodgy and perhaps a bit detached. In Ed Gross and Mark Altman's Fifty Year Mission Trek oral history books, Abrams is quoted saying, "as [ Star Trek movies] went on and on ... they were less and less relatable." And so Abrams, Kurtzman, and Orci set out to make perhaps the most mainstream and relatable version of Star Trek ever. In several interviews (and also in The Fifty Year Mission ) Orci said that the code word for the approach to writing the movie was “rock 'n' roll.”

Purists will tell you that because of this rock 'n' roll attitude, the 2009 Star Trek is all action shlock, that it actually guts the intellectual ruminations inherent to what supposedly makes Star Trek what it is. The problem with this criticism is that it ignores the fact that almost nothing about the 2009 Star Trek should work — because on paper it’s an absolutely absurd proposition.

How does a film satisfy the passing curiosity of the moviegoer uninterested in sci-fi and Star Trek but also make hardcore devotees happy, too? On top of that, how could such a movie also introduce new audiences to the entire universe and characters of Star Trek without a mountain of exposition? At least with Star Wars movies, people like Abrams and Rian Johnson have the help of that opening text crawl to fill the audience in on the relevant information and what's happened in previous installments. But with Star Trek , Abrams took a different approach: Make the movie an origin story. And, on top of that, make it an alternate universe origin story, just in case the purists get upset about canon problems.

And, 10 years later, all of these decisions still stand up. If you start watching the first five minutes of the movie, you’ll want to watch the whole thing. Every. Single. Time.

For longtime fans, perhaps the strangest thing about watching the 2009 Star Trek in 2019, and only a few weeks after the nostalgia-laden Season 2 finale of Star Trek: Discovery , is that, if you squint, it almost doesn’t feel like a reboot at all. If you were to ignore the fact that the USS Enterprise is supposedly a brand-new starship in this film, and that most of the movie happens in 2258, which puts it a few years earlier than the “real” original series, the entire film could scan as a passable sequel to the last scene of the Discovery Season 2 finale.

In Star Trek (2009), Spock (Zachary Quinto) and Pike (Bruce Greenwood) seem like they've been friends for a while, Starfleet is rebuilding its recruits after the events of the Klingon War, and for the most part, the aesthetic of the universe, more or less, feels like a natural progression of what we saw in Discovery. Fans who are overly preoccupied with these canon distinctions (and I’m one of those people, by the way) can get lost in debating all the ways in which Abrams and company’s alternate "Kelvin Timeline" doesn’t even play by its own rules, much less the rules of Star Trek in general. But numerous new directors and writers had rewritten the aesthetic of Star Trek many, many times before.

In 2017, Wrath of Khan director Nicholas Meyer compared the "text" of Star Trek to music and argued that in classical music, you see all sorts of different arrangements of established themes. " Star Trek has a text, it has an entire world. It has certain characters," Meyer said. "And that's the music. That’s all the different music. And so, my music is a little different."

So, if you think of the 2009 Star Trek reboot as Abrams reinterpreting the musicality of Star Trek and remixing it into a mashup of the Fast and the Furious franchise and Star Wars , then the movie will feel like edgy fan fiction. This fact is doubly true when you consider the fact that on some level, the 2009 Trek also feels like the one that is accessing the eroticism of Kirk and Spock the most overtly. This isn’t to say Chris Pine's Kirk and Quinto's Spock hook up in this movie, but there is a spark between the characters that was very clearly forged by the decades of fan fiction about Kirk/Spock.

In essence, because the 2009 Trek is a mainstream homage to an old franchise, it’s also paying respects to the more interesting parts of fandom — such as slash fiction — even if by accident. And, if you don’t think there’s sexual subtext between Kirk and Spock in this movie, then just try to explain nearly every Spock/Kirk scene in this film’s 2013 sequel, Star Trek Into Darkness , which was written and directed by all the same people.

But the best part of watching the 2009 Star Trek is realizing how the film seems like the beginning of a boom we're still enjoying. Famously, Chris Hemsworth plays Captain Kirk's father, George Kirk, in the opening scenes of the film, while Zoe Saldana's Uhura gives the film a much-needed female perspective in a sea of space-testosterone. Would Saldana and Hemsworth have gone on to be Avengers had they not been in Star Trek first? Would Pine have ended up in Wonder Woman as the heroic Steve Trevor? One thing is for sure: Current Star Trek executive producer Alex Kurtzman would certainly not be running the franchise now if he hadn't co-written this film.

When you rewatch the 2009 Trek , you might find yourself wondering why Abrams didn't choose the Beatie Boys' "Intergalactic" over "Sabotage." After all, the former mentions "another dimension" and even name-checks "Mr. Spock." The answer is simple: The movie is smart enough to not be that on-the-nose. This is a Star Trek movie for the masses, but it's still a Star Trek movie, meaning it's smarter than you realize.

In the in-universe story of the 2009 Trek , an alternate universe was created. But because Abrams, Kurtzman, and Orci approached Star Trek like they were the Beastie Boys remixing classic sci-fi, they created the pop culture universe we're happily still living in today.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author's, and do not necessarily reflect those of SYFY WIRE, SYFY, or NBC Universal.

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The Next ‘Star Trek’ Film Will Be a Full Reboot

G oodbye Captain Kirk. So long Chris Pine. Adios Mr. Spock. (At least Zachary Quinto’s Mr. Spock.) The next Star Trek movie appears to be a full-fledged reboot.

Puck reports that Paramount is in talks with producer Simon Kinberg to become a “a franchise shepherd à la Alex Kurtzman for Trek TV projects” for the next Star Trek movie. Although Paramount has toyed with a seemingly endless array of options for a fourth Star Trek starring Pine, Quinto, and Zoe Saldana as the “Kelvin” timeline crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise, this new film project is supposedly a reboot of the material.

THR reports that this movie “is said to be set decades before the events of the 2009 movie that was directed J.J. Abrams, likely around modern times. It is said to involve the creation of the Starfleet and humankind’s first contact with alien life.” The latter was previously the subject of the Star Trek: The Next Generation movie Star Trek: First Contact. The earliest-set Star Trek TV show, Star Trek: Enterprise , about the crew of the first and the founding of the Federation, took place in the 22nd century.

READ MORE: Chris Pine Says He’s Clueless About Star Trek ’s Future

The most recent Star Trek movie, Star Trek Beyond , was released to theaters in 2016. In the years since, the list of abandoned Star Trek 4 s Paramount announced or developed and then scrapped is about as long as a starship nacelle. They include a time travel storyline that would have starred Chris Hemsworth as Captain Kirk’s father, a film written and directed by Noah Hawley, and a movie directed by Quentin Tarantino.

At one point, Paramount made a big deal of announcing a new Star Trek movie produced by Abrams. The cast of the film reacted with shock, and said publicly that was news to them. No further updates ever materialized.

Kinberg’s previous credits include writing and producing numerous installments in the X-Men film franchise (he also directed the last movie in the series, Dark Phoenix ), plus Jumper , the Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock Holmes , The Martian , Chappie , and The 355.

Toby Haynes is currently slated to direct this reboot Trek , with Seth Grahame-Smith working on the script.

Star Trek: Reboot The Universe

Yesterday I did a couple of posts about efforts by fans and now, possibly, by J. J. Abrams, to re-cast the characters of the original Star Trek series in order to allow new stories to be told about them more easily.

I did so to build up to this:

A PROPOSAL BY JOE STRACZYNSKI AND BRYCE ZABEL FOR THEIR VISION OF HOW STAR TREK SHOULD BE REJUVENATED. (CHT to the readre who e-mailed!)

They sent this proposal to Paramount back in 2004 and . . . well . . . nothing came of it. But it’s an interesting proposal.

Basically, they propose rebooting the Star Trek universe so that the writers won’t be boxed in by all the massive continuity recent Star Trek writers have been burdened with. Giving the universe a fresh start would allow them to take the exciting, interesting things about the series that made it popular, without having to be constrained in the stories they can tell by all the material that later followed.

It would also let them re-cast the characters so that we could have new stories involving Kirk, Spock, and McCoy–the triumvirate at the heart of the original series.

The basic idea was to offer another take on the original five-year mission–this time giving it a definite story arc and retelling classic tales in a new way, while supplementing them with entirely new stories.

What they had in mind is quite interesting–putting a significant mystery at the heart of the series in a way that would tie it toghether. They write:

As noted above and as established in television history, Kirk was the youngest starship captain in the Federation…but what led to this? We know that the Enterprise was sent out to explore where no human had gone before…but if you stop and think about it for a moment, isn’t that an odd assignment…to take one of the finest ships in the fleet, give it to the youngest captain in the Federation, and tell them to just go drive around and see what they can find? It’s peculiar…until you allow for the possibility that they were looking for something specific…something they had to keep a secret even from the rest of the crew.

The series treatment gives you a pretty good idea of what Straczynski and Zabel intended the secret to be, and it would have been interesting to see them get the chance to do it.

I found reading the series treatment quite interesting from a literary perspective. Not only did they have to do a lot of salesmanship as part of their attempt to convince network execs to give them a chance, they also spent a surprising amount of time explaining the concept of a reboot and how it would work. I guess studio execs in 2004 couldn’t be expected to be familiar with such concepts and had to be given a "let me lead you by the hand" explanation. (Probably not a bad idea. JMS tells horror stories about his initial attempts to get studio execs to understand the idea of Babylon 5 having rotational gravity.) Now you could just point to Battlestar Galactica, tho.

On his blog, where Dark Skies creator Bryce Zabel posted the treatment, he indicated that they also held back a lot of what they had in mind from the treatment, indicating that they had in mind a reboot somewhat like the Battlestar Galactica reboot that Ron Moore did, which would have resulted in a much grittier, edgier, and (frankly) interesting series than the kind of clean-as-a-whistle, formal, polyester kind of series that we got in Voyager (for example).

He also mentions that he’s had a whole new set of thoughts about how Star Trek could be revived since the 2004 proposal.

So be sure to

READ THE POST.

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live." View all posts by Jimmy Akin

38 thoughts on “Star Trek: Reboot The Universe”

Don’t tell me the goal of their five year mission was to actually head off to Iscandar for the Cosmo DNA to save Earth from the deadly effects of the Gamelon planet bombs! What if they collide with the Argo (aka Yamato) along the way?

It sounds cool. I wish it had been picked up

This is a really stupid idea. Continuity is one of the greatest things Star Trek had going for it. The very term “Star Trek Universe ” bespeaks of continuity. It is a universe because it has a history, it has notable individuals living and who have lived in it, it has particular worlds, technologies, cultures, and languages. It has its own taboos, its own prejudices, its own hot vacation spots, its own political culture, fears, joys, and curiosities. It is nearly as real a universe as our own. In fact, it could be said that it is as real to us as our own universe is to God (with the notable exception that when God knows something it actually comes to be). To ‘re-boot’ the universe would be to lie, to say something doesn’t exist which does. In the minds of millions of people, this universe is real. The Battle of Wolf 359 is as much a historical event as the Battle of Gettysburg, complete with a strategy behind it, a perscript and a postscript, specifc heroes, specific tragedies, casualty statistics, a roster of ships, and even aan aftermath of political, psychological, and cultural effects which effected individuals, governments, and society alike and which changed the course of history and had a profound impact on what followed after it, just like the battle of Gettysburg or the Vietnam War. To start over would be to do violence to this universe, to rip it apart at the seems and to murder the people who live in it. On top of it all, all they did was steal the plot of one of the lamer Next Generation episodes, The Chase , and propose to turn it into an entire series.

Sounds like a cool idea. But they should wait 20 years before doing it.

Also, remember that one of the reasons it was possible to reboot Battle Star Galatica so succesfully is that there were only a small handful of episodes in the original series. BSG was never a universe, it was a small collection of episodes that were just enough for fans to say, ‘hey this could’ve been cool if it had a chance.’ It was just a small seed of what could have been, and that seed was picked up developed into a full universe. Star Trek has been a full fledged universe now for decades. It’s far beyond the point of what BSG was. It’s the difference between finding a small, unfinished snippet of what was to be Beethoven’s 10th symphony and deciding to build on the themes in it and develop a full fledged symphony out of it, and taking his 9th symphony and taking the main themes and rewriting the rest of it.

What if for a reboot they did a Crisis-of-Infinite-Enterprises type story?

“To ‘re-boot’ the universe would be to lie, to say something doesn’t exist which does. In the minds of millions of people, this universe is real.” Whoah, take a deep breath. Was J.R.R. Tolkien “lying” when he changed the text of “The Hobbit” to dovetail with “The Lord of the Rings”? Or for that matter when he issued revised editions of “The Lord of the Rings,” “The Sillmarillion” (sp?), etc? Was Sam Rami “lying” when he made Spiderman’s webs shoot out of his wrists instead of from mechanical webshooters? BESIDES… The “Star Trek” universe ISN’T a UNIverse, but a MULTIverse. Remember the “Mirror, Mirror” universe? Remember the infinite universes Whorf was falling through in that one “Next Gen” episode where everything was changing on him? Why couldn’t a “Star Trek” reboot just take place in one of those other slightly different universes? 🙂

The “Star Trek” universe ISN’T a UNIverse, but a MULTIverse. Remember the “Mirror, Mirror” universe? Remember the infinite universes Whorf was falling through in that one “Next Gen” episode where everything was changing on him? Why couldn’t a “Star Trek” reboot just take place in one of those other slightly different universes? A new series taking place in one of the OTHERverses could make for an interesting episode or two where they wormhole/warp/whatever into the universe most commonly referred to as THE Star Trek Universe. Could you imagine new Kirk seeing Shatner’s Kirk and being like, “why do I stammer in the universe, and my goodness, what’s wrong with my hair?” Jokes aside, they dealt with parallel universes before (as in the episode where Tasha Yar is still alive, but they are at war with the Klingons, and losing badly). Granted, that episode did not handle it in the best of ways, but it has been tackled before. Maybe some episodes would be an attempt to learn from their own mistakes in alternate universes, so as to not repeat them in their home universe. (Much like how we are proposing learning from the mistakes of the multiple previous ST series and novels, so as not to repeat those same mistakes in a new ST series.) Just my $0.02

“This is a really stupid idea. Continuity is one of the greatest things Star Trek had going for it.” And all of that will still be around, Jay. Nobody is proposing it should all be scuttled and “replaced” with the new version. But a re-boot and a fresh start would be an exciting project, a way to let “the next generation” have a crack at the mythos and see what happens. There are plenty of potential Star Trek universes to go around. “It is nearly as real a universe as our own.” Not really. Not even given the exception you noted. If we were to keep writing it and building it for decades, it would still be an almost infinitely tiny, cramped and prosaic universe compared to our own.

+J.M.J+ >>>Why couldn’t a “Star Trek” reboot just take place in one of those other slightly different universes? An alternate universe “reboot” might just work, but JMS’s idea would still be a deviation from Gene Roddenberry’s original vision (if that even matters to anyone anymore). The whole peaceful-future-of-cooperation-and-exploration thing that people poo-poo today as lame and simplistic came from the GBOTG himself. If you discard that, I’m sure you could make a smashing SciFi series (as B5 was), but would it really be Star Trek? In Jesu et Maria,

“Jokes aside, they dealt with parallel universes before (as in the episode where Tasha Yar is still alive, but they are at war with the Klingons, and losing badly).” Another good example. The larger point, of course, is that each universe in principle is as “real” as any of the others, and there’s no reason why only ONE universe has to be at the center of any possible Star Trek series. I think the “other universes” idea would be a good way to “reboot” Star Trek by reimagining/updating/revising the continuity we know the way that comicbooks are always doing, without even necessarily contradicting the continuity we already know.

If someone wants to create a new Star Trek mirror universe with different things and a slightly different history, say, by picking one point early on in the Star Trek chronology and branching off so that the future following that point is different from the universe we know, that’s fine. However, you can’t go calling it the Star Trek Universe anymore. It would be one portion of a multiverse. That’s not what the proposal seems to suggest.

“If someone wants to create a new Star Trek mirror universe with different things and a slightly different history, say, by picking one point early on in the Star Trek chronology and branching off so that the future following that point is different from the universe we know, that’s fine. However, you can’t go calling it the Star Trek Universe anymore. It would be one portion of a multiverse. That’s not what the proposal seems to suggest.” But ALL the Star Trek series to date have ALWAYS been set in “one portion of a multiverse.” Within the world of Star Trek , the “series universe” (for lack of a better term) that we know isn’t “THE” universe – it’s just “A” universe – one among many that the series have HAPPENED to focus on, no more “real” or valid than any of the others. To its own inhabitants – the Trek crews we know – the “series universe” may be “THE” universe, but all the other universes would just as much be “THE” universe to THEIR inhabitants. And in a series about them that universe would be just as real to them as the “series universe” is to the versions of the characters we know.

I understand your point, Jack, and I don’t disagree. What I am saying is that the proposal that these men have made does not reflect that idea.

Why do you say that, Shane? JMS and BZ’s proposal refers to the “series universe” as “Universe A.” They propose setting their new series in “Universe B.” They say that in “Universe B” they will accept many of the things that happened in “Universe A,” but change the way they happened. Why shouldn’t “Universe A” and “Universe B” all be part of the same inter-series Trek multiverse? To put it another way, assuming that the new series keeps the idea of the “multiverse,” who’s to say that “Universe A” (the series ‘verse) isn’t one of the other ‘verses out there? At the very least, I don’t see anything in the proposal that excludes or contradicts this idea.

I can still remember Sister Jean Marion telling us first-graders in 1970, “Do you know why they call it dope? Because you have to be a dope to take it.” OK, I don’t know if that was the real reason, and I know that we don’t call it “dope” anymore, but come on guys! You must be smokin’ some messed up weed there. I know we live in the Clintonian Age of simply redefining reality whenever it pleases us, but this goes too far. I knew that there was something familiar about this historical revisionism but couldn’t place my finger on it until I read this — “It’s peculiar…until you allow for the possibility that they were looking for something specific…something they had to keep a secret even from the rest of the crew.” A-ha! Star Trek Gnosticism! They are possessed of some secret knowledge that the rest of us are not privileged enough to have. And more than that, history as we know it is really all a big scam, probably created out of whole cloth in some Hollywood studio! No doubt, there will be Albinos out there pretty soon to suppress this expose. History is what it is. The Universe (that is, our Universe, not the Evil Parallel Universe, where Spock and Cartman have goatees) cannot be changed by the mere stroke of a pen.

I dont either, but reading it that isn’t the impression that comes across. I think their intention is to just reset the whole thing. If they are just making it another universe in the multiverse, they need to make that explicit.

“History is what it is. The Universe (that is, our Universe, not the Evil Parallel Universe, where Spock and Cartman have goatees) cannot be changed by the mere stroke of a pen.” But Bender, as the later series established, there were LOTS of other universes, many of them with very recognizable versions of the characters we knew, but in different situations. Eg. Tasha Yar could be dead or alive, Whorf could be married to Deanna Troi or not, etc. the Borg could be taking over the galaxy or not, etc.

Instead of “rebooting” the Universe, with the perverse idea that we are God, able to change reality by our mere word, perhaps a better idea would be to reboot the idea of centering a series around one group of characters. The Star Trek Universe is now big enough and diverse enough to allow for more of an anthology approach, where they tell a different story, with different characters, in each episode. They could go back to many old characters and see what they’re doing today, or what they did before we first encountered them. They could even use the same actors for the series, but playing different characters each time. DS9 — which was the superior version of any of the Treks (the Original aside, to suggest anything would be better than the Original would be heresy) — had the actors play different characters on a number of occasions. Or they could have characters go back to old episodes, like they did with the Tribbles in DS9. Now that was good.

They could go back to many old characters and see what they’re doing today, or what they did before we first encountered them. I’ve wondered whatever happened to Seven of Nine. I hope she snapped Chakotay’s neck for daring to defile her. (now, putting them together was a bad story turn). Or, they could go into greater depth the Hansens’ trip and Annika’s capture. A couple more episodes about Benny Russell would be interesting. I’d like to know what has happened to the Emissary in the Celestial Temple or Jake Sisko. I remember reading a book where Zarabeth (Mariette Hartley) had Spock’s child. There are a lot of interesting ideas.

“Instead of ‘rebooting’ the Universe, with the perverse idea that we are God, able to change reality by our mere word” This is getting ridiculous. You might as well say that CREATING fictional universes in the first place expresses a “perverse idea that we are God,” able to speak reality into being by our mere word. OF COURSE we can change FICTIONAL reality by our mere word! That’s what fiction is! Say, friends, anyone here ever see The Wizard of Oz ? Did you happen to know that by their mere word the filmmakers CHANGED the universe of L. Frank Baum’s book in many ways? Yes! For example, in Baum’s story Glinda and the Good Witch of the North were two different characters. Does that mean the filmmakers had a God complex?! Did you know that when Superman was first created, he couldn’t fly? Does that mean that all subsequent versions are LYING when they show Superman flying? What’s your favorite Disney fairy tale cartoon? Beauty and the Beast , Cinderella , Sleeping Beauty , Snow White , The Little Mermaid ? Not one of them is exactly like the “classical” version of the story as told by the Grimm brothers or Perrault or Hans Christian Anderson or whoever. And guess what, those guys didn’t tell the stories exactly the same way people before them had told them either. Did you know Shakespeare told old stories new ways? Yes, and CHANGED things. Compare Troilus and Cressida to The Ilyad . Same characters, different events. The Star Trek universe even has a built-in mechanism for allowing different versions of familiar stories… and people are talking about “lying” and “the perverse idea that we are God”? Why am I thinking of William Shatner on Saturday Night Live shouting “GET A LIFE!!!”?!

I find it interesting that the existing universe is regarded as “cramped.” It’s a whole UNIVERSE, for crying out loud! Why can’t people find new things to write about, especially considering that you can go as far ahead in time from the existing series as you like? This smells to me like some people just think they can do a better job with the original characters– which is certainly a fair thing to think, but it shouldn’t be sold as some kind of creative necessity.

To be honest, the parallel universe rationale is a sounder one than I had given them credit for when I first heard about JMS pitching a Trek Reboot. To me, Star Trek was always about the people, about the ability of fun, larger-than-life characters to affect the colorful world(s) around them for good or evil, and secondarily about interesting thought-experiments built around alien societies. Turning a couple of creative types who specialize in hideously awful characterization (though Zabel at least has decent casting instincts) and elaborate conspiracy theories* loose in that particular sandbox does not appeal to me. *This is the only point where Bender’s talk about Gnosticism makes any sense; Zabel and JMS are both VASTLY guilty of this in their other projects, and although it can and does make for good entertainment, it is a). not particularly Trekkian (DS9, which among the Treks prolly dealt the most in conspiracy theories, was mostly interested in the social effects of paranoia and the psychological effects of skullduggery rather than “hidden knowledge” per se) and b). does appear to be the result of an ideological bent in at least JMS’s case.

OF COURSE we can change FICTIONAL reality by our mere word! Are you suggesting that Star Trek is fiction?? HERETIC!! Next you’ll be suggesting that the Hanso Foundation is made up too. (Where can we get a good post and some firewood?)

Bender, if you have been funning me all along, you are going to get such a noogie.

Even if Bender isn’t joking, his comments could do to the aesthetic desirability of a re-boot, rather than its morality.

above, “do” should be “go.”

“Did you know that when Superman was first created, he couldn’t fly? Does that mean that all subsequent versions are LYING when they show Superman flying?” Boy, did you just open a can of worms! In fact, cleaning that sort of thing up is exactly the sort of rebooting that DC did. Rhys’s tongue-in-cheek suggestion of the Crisis on Infinite Enterprises, referring to the vast number of supposedly continuity-fixing events that have now cropped up in DC, illustrates the problem. First, we had the multiple earths to explain the existence of World War II heroes and Silver Age heroes having both been “real,” but with inconsistent backgrounds. For example, there was Kal-L on Earth-2, who started out with limited powers that developed as Kal-L matured under Earth’s lesser gravity, while on Earth-1, Kal-El’s exposure to yellow sun radiation gave him full-on super-strength and a whole complement of powers from infancy. Then there was the matter of 30th century Earth-1 having a group of kids dubbed the Legion of Super-Heroes who had a bad habit of travelling back in time to interact with 20th century folks, including the teenaged Kal-El, aka Superboy. That all started getting too ridiculous, so we had the Crisis on Infinite Earths to clean all that up. Many of the Earth-2 counterparts turned out never to have existed at all (including Kal-L and the Earth-2 Batman, who had been killed by that point). And the Legion’s history was more or less completely rewritten, with numerous pesky details regarding what had and hadn’t happened. All of these continuity glitches started to become annoying, so DC released Zero Hour to explain all of the continuity screw-ups, which involved a complete reboot of the Legion (basically, none of the old stuff ever happened). That satisifed no one, so somebody had the bright idea of introducing “hypertime” to explain how all of these real-but-not-real worlds kept interacting (in The Kingdom , for those keeping score). But people were still wondering about all these dangling problems (for example, Kal-L had survived Crisis on Infinite Earths by going to some “other place,” but where was it?). Finally, DC just gave up entirely and came up with ANOTHER massive reboot called … I kid you not … Infinite Crisis . The lesson of all this being, if you are going to do a reboot, don’t make it at all possible for the universes to interact, or you will find yourself in a continuity nightmare (see also the post- Return of the Jedi Star Wars books clashing with the later-produced prequels). If they are going to reboot, they need to format the hard drive before the reinstall. I tend to agree that it would be a shame with this franchise, but they don’t really have the same freedom to keep extending things as Doctor Who , which can always drop a new guy into the role and clean up whatever troubles might arise using some time-travel explanation.

See, this is why Star Trek stinks. Artists are usually allowed to approach scenarios and stories and give them their own twist. But you cannot do that with Star Trek. Why? Because it is not primarily a series of stories. It is commonly referred as a “franchise”. Which is exactly what it is — just like McDonald’s. Star Trek is not art, it is business. And every time I see one of those episodes now, I start smelling burger grease.

These are myths. Myth is used to portray a truth, and the myth itself, in that sense, is truth. Not literistically, but, literally, truth- truth told in the way the authors intended to. The mythical characters can take on symbolic meaning, and be presented in new stories, new places, or even as the authors of new stories, without denigrating from who they are. Even if the myth is originally rooted in historical event, the characters can become cultural symbols, and be used in other contexts. Think of Adam- used to portray truth about creation into very different, and juxtaposed creation stories in Genesis. The OT Hebrews knew that, JPII knows that, the PBC knows that, and apparently, so do about HALF the trekkies on here.

I’d like to see Star Trek: Ensigns where the focus is on all the other members of the crew, the “redshirts.” There would be a lot of episodes about the trauma they go through as their numbers thin, always dying on away missions while the officers always come back, sometimes injured but always alive.

It comes down to this: Roddenberry is dead. May God have mercy on his soul & and I hope we will meet him someday in Heaven & mercilessly rib him for his silly atheism. 🙂 That having been said, since he has now departed this world we no longer have his genius to tap into. So you are going to need somebody who knows what he is doing to write successful scifi. JMS is the logical choice. Given a free hand in this, we could certainly detect whatever Babylonisms get into his work. No doubt the Organians would take on a more Vorlon-like personality. But I could live with that because this is the bottom line: if JMS were to create a new rebooted Star Trek it would be really, really cool. As a literary hedonist, I watch scifi to be entertained. A new Star Trek would mean more entertainment & a different spin on an entertaining theme: something old & something new. I’m all for that. I can’t think of Star Trek as sacrosanct that it has to be a certain way. After all there are probably hundreds of different Star Trek novels by now & they each have their different takes on the series. If you’ve ever read the novel SPOCK’S WORLD, it portrays the Vulcans as Deists. But if you’ve ever read DREADNAUGHT, it portrays them as atheist rationalists & even has a Vulcan named Sarda(a clear ripoff of Sartra) who makes all sorts of statements that reflect atheist existentialist philosophy. So what’s one more take on the Star Trek multiverse? Especially by someone like JMS who basically knows whtat he is doing.

BTW, it may be slightly off topic but I wish JMS would help Doug Naylor make the Red Dwarf movie. There’s an example of an extremely excellent TV franchise that would make a great movie but its not going to get made because the people in Hollywood are morons(Hugh Grant as Dave Lister. I may wretch.)

In general, sci-fi, as a stand alone genre is dead. Dead as a heap. Henceforth, like murder mystery or travelogue, sci-fi is not a genre but merely an element to be subsumed into a larger, newer genre. I, StubbleSpark command it. Make it so. Agg! I mean do it!

BenYachov- Please tell me you’re bloody joking! That’s like… like… like casting Hulk Hogan as Dracula. Or Sean Connery as Dracula. It just doesn’t compute. Two cents towards this…. I like Star Trek because there is at least a hint of a “real” universe. The Klingons aren’t exactly like humans, they have a different culture. Ditto the Romulans and the Cardassians. Some folks make jokes about it, but if you have strong world-wide communication, there will probably be a dominant culture and they probably *will* all speak the same language, and if you’re meeting the military they’ll dress alike, too. There are folks that go against the main culture (Like the Romulan that took care of the Klingon prisoners– Good Samaritan, anyone?) and all kinds of traitors and prisoners of conscience. (Like the Romulan that defected because he believed that the plans the Empire had would set them at war with the Federation, and thus destroy them.) *looks at StubbleSpark* *Grins* I’d have to say that Sci-Fi is strongest as an alloy with other things. Sci-Fi is just fiction in a theoretical future. (I still hold that the first three Star Wars movies are fantasy with ray guns. The newer three are just confused.)

Paramount, or any studio, will not read a treatment sent randomly unless it’s sent by an agent. Random ones do get through, sure, but due to legal issues, most do not. If they submitted this without a resonse, they should try again with an agent.

If JMS is now pitching a Star Trek reboot that must mean that he has given up on any more B5 material. No that is a universe that would be interesting to see developed further. Too bad. Since JMS is involved with this pitch, I wonder if one of the differences between the reboot and the original will be that an actual human religion will have survived into the future in the new universe. JMS did not shy away from having his human characters actually profess a religious creed, unlike Rodenberry.

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Strange new worlds can solve star trek discovery’s biggest villain mystery.

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Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 3 Wraps Filming & Anson Mount Hangs Up His Boots [UPDATED]

Leonard doesn't need to be dead for young sheldon's penny reference to make sense, what happened to brooklynn in jurassic world: chaos theory.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds takes place after Star Trek: Discovery season 2, leaving the door open for Jason Isaacs' Captain Gabriel Lorca to potentially return. Introduced in Star Trek: Discovery season 1, Captain Lorca commanded the USS Discovery after his previous ship, the USS Buran, was destroyed in the Klingon War. For the first eleven episodes of season 1, everyone on the Discovery believed Lorca to be the Prime Universe version of himself, but the twelfth episode "Vaunting Ambition" revealed that he had been the Mirror Universe Lorca the entire time.

Though it will likely not happen in Strange New Worlds season 2 , the possibility remains that some version of Lorca could make an appearance in the future. Strange New Worlds has a much lighter tone than Discovery and focuses on episodic storytelling rather than the season-long story arcs Discovery prefers. Whether as friend or foe, Lorca could make a one-episode appearance or become a recurring character. With an actor as talented as Jason Isaacs, it seems a shame to waste the opportunity to bring back such a compelling character.

Strange New Worlds Can Solve Discovery’s Lorca Mystery

At some point before the beginning of Star Trek: Discovery, the Mirror Universe Captain Lorca switched places with his Prime Universe counterpart. While this manipulative Mirror Universe Lorca was killed by Emperor Philippa Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh) in the Discovery season 1 episode "What's Past is Prologue," the Prime Universe Lorca's status remains a mystery. Though it is assumed that the Prime version of Lorca would not have been able to survive long in the Mirror Universe, his death is never confirmed. This could open the door for the character to return at some point on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

Since the Captain Lorca introduced in Star Trek: Discovery season 1 was revealed to be from the Mirror Universe, viewers never got to know the actual Prime Universe Lorca. His appearance on Strange New Worlds would allow actor Jason Isaacs to play a different version of the character. Plus, the story of Prime Lorca's time in the Mirror Universe would be a fascinating one to tell. While Prime Lorca would likely not be as villainous as his Mirror Universe counterpart, his years in the Mirror Universe would have surely affected him. Jason Isaacs has expressed his willingness to return to the Star Trek universe, and Strange New Worlds could be the perfect show for him to make an appearance.

Lorca Would Be An Excellent Villain For Pike & Strange New Worlds

Although the Mirror Universe version of Captain Lorca was killed off, Star Trek has been known to bring characters back from the dead. Cunning, manipulative, and duplicitous, the Mirror Universe version of Lorca would make an excellent foil for Captain Christopher Pike (Anson Mount). A conflict between Pike and Mirror Lorca would make for an exciting stand-off, as the two are both smart and capable despite being near polar opposites. Where Pike remains full of hope and celebrates the achievements of his crew, Lorca looks out only for himself and uses the people around him to achieve his own ends.

One of the best villains of modern Star Trek , Jason Isaacs' Captain Lorca would be a welcome presence on any Star Trek show. Strange New Worlds has the potential to continue for many more seasons, and the introduction of a villain like Captain Lorca would be a great way to shake up the show. The optimism and idealism of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds would certainly be an interesting backdrop for either version of Captain Gabriel Lorca.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (2022)
Star Trek: Discovery (2017)

'The Munsters' Are Returning to Mockingbird Lane With a New Reboot

'1313' will be produced by horror maestro James Wan.

The Big Picture

1313, a reboot of The Munsters, is in development and will tie in with the Universal Classic Monsters brand.
The new series will be showrun by Lindsey Anderson Beer and involve James Wan's Atomic Monster production company.
The original Munsters sitcom was a satire of mid-century American suburban conformity through a family of misfit monsters.

A new reboot of The Munsters , the classic 1960s sitcom about a family of suburban monsters, is in the works. 1313 , a reference to the Munsters' address at 1313 Mockingbird Lane, is being developed by Universal Content Productions, a division of Universal. The new reboot will certainly have horror bonafides, as Deadline reports that James Wan 's Atomic Monster will be involved with the production.

1313 is said to be a reimagining of the classic sitcom, which ran for two seasons between 1964 and 1966, and made fans of generations of audiences via syndication. Additionally, it will tie in with the Universal Classic Monsters , the horror brand based on the studio's groundbreaking 1930s, 40s, and 50s horror films. The series is set to be showrun by Lindsey Anderson Beer , who wrote and directed last year's horror prequel Pet Sematary: Bloodlines - coincidentally, a film that tread on ground previously walked by original Munsters star Fred Gwynne . Beer, Wan, and Ingrid Bisu are developing the series.

What is 'The Munsters'?

The Munsters starred Gwynne as Herman Munster, a Frankenstein's monster, Yvonne De Carlo as his vampire wife Lily, Butch Patrick as their werewolf son Eddie, and Al Lewis as Lily's Dracula-like father. Beverley Owen , and later Pat Priest , played cousin Marilyn, who was a totally normal human; the rest of the Munsters considered her to be freakishly ugly. Created by the creative team behind Leave It To Beaver , The Munsters was a satire of mid-century American suburban conformity, as told through a family of misfit monsters. Throughout its two-season run, the show was often compared and contrasted with The Addams Family , a sitcom about a similarly macabre household of horrors.

Thanks to its long syndicated afterlife, there have been numerous attempts to revive and reboot The Munsters . Two movies were produced with the original cast; the theatrically-released Munster, Go Home and the 1981 TV reunion movie The Munsters' Revenge . The Munsters Today , a TV series with an all-new cast, aired in syndication from 1988 to 1991. Bryan Fuller attempted to revive the series with Mockingbird Lane , a new series starring Jerry O'Connell and Portia de Rossi , but it was canceled before it aired; its pilot was eventually shown as a TV special. Most recently, Rob Zombie , whose hit single "Dragula" was inspired by Grandpa Munster's coffin-shaped car, directed a 2022 Munsters film that starred Sheri Moon Zombie and Jeff Daniel Phillips .

1313 , a new reboot of The Munsters , is in development. Stay tuned to Collider for future updates.

The Munsters

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Event One: Nero Travels Through Time

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