Star Trek

The original series ended inauspiciously with a controversial production tagged onto the start of a rerun.

It doesn’t look like we’ll ever get another Chris Pine Zachary Quinto Star Trek movie.

‘Star Trek: Discovery’ has found it’s new Spock in Gregory Peck’s grandson.

Just as earlier today brought our first Star Trek: Discovery photo, the first trailer is out of this world. Yes, literally and figuratively. See for yourself, along with the latest details on the 15 (!) episode series!.

Long before Bryan Fuller was officially announced to lead a new CBS Star Trek series, the franchise alum spoke openly of his interest in a more diverse Trek, even naming Angela Bassett as an ideal actor for Captain. Fuller’s vision is now one-step closer, as Star Trek: Discovery will indeed have a female lead, operating in a pre-Kirk setting, among other new details.

It is interesting that, given a reboot could theoretically go off in any direction it chooses, that the relaunched Star Trek has begun to repeat events from the first Star Trek movie series. Star Trek Into Darkness was essentially a revisitation of The Wrath of Khan; the movie not only reintroduced the title character, it also flip-flopped the famous end of Wrath of Khan where Spock dies saving the Enterprise. (This time around it was Captain Kirk who made the ultimate sacrifice ... for about 8 minutes, and then he got better.) Certainly the circumstances of the film are very different, but Star Trek Beyond shares one crucial ingredient with Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, namely the destruction of the Starship Enterprise, and the shipwrecking of its crew on a distant alien planet.

The tough thing about using someone else’s ideas to make money is that it’s not entirely legal. This lesson had to be learned the hard way this past weekend by Alec Peters, producer of an independent film titled Prelude to Axanar. The Star Trek fan film drew quite a bit of ire from copyright holders Paramount after a crowdfunding effort on Indiegogo brought this grassroots DIY production over half a million dollars last summer. The promise to make a “studio-quality” film including characters, settings, and other elements from the heavily-licensed Star Trek franchise with no engagement from the relevant studio spelled doom for the Axanar team, and now the chickens have come home to roost.