This week on the Shuttle Pod, your podcast crew discuss what’s on the horizon for the Star Trek franchise. And, a lot is brewing.
Oh Captain, My Captain (and Discovery Season 2)
Earlier this week, CBS announced the casting of a well-known Star Trek character for Season 2 of Star Trek: Discovery sure to have the fan base buzzing. Anson Mount is set to play the determined Captain Pike of the USS Enterprise, a ship whose redesign we got a glimpse of at the tail end of the Season 1 finale. He certainly looks the part, but he’s got some piercing eyes to fill (have I stretched that metaphor too far?).
The news comes after a deluge of cryptic clues about the next season of Discovery gleaned from panel appearances and interviews at last month’s WonderCon. Matt, Brian, and Kayla break down all we learned, with just a light dusting of pithy commentary.
Oh Captain, My Captain! Those eyes…
A Script Too Far For The Kelvinverse?
While still not much more has come to light since we last spoke about the next Trek movie back in December (check out our podcast about that). There are some little bits of information that have come out as the Kelvin cast are out and about promoting other projects.
Perhaps the biggest bit of information that’s come to light is that there are at least 2 possible pitches for the next movie: the Patrick McKay & JD Payne script JJ Abrams hyped during Beyond’s press junkets; and the Quentin Tarantino/Mark L. Smith project. We had suspected Pegg and Jung were asked for a sequel idea. In December 2016 Simon Pegg tweeted a tease of Simon and Doug sitting in the Bad Robot offices, but of course no context and no follow up. Pegg has now clarified that his tweet was not about Trek, saying:
“Doug [Jung] and I were never going to write the fourth [Star Trek]. That was never the deal. Doug and I are doing something together at Bad Robot, which I probably can’t talk about just yet.”
Star Trek’s Real Life Parallel Universe: CBS/Paramount
Many Trek fans know that Star Trek is a split franchise. CBS holds all of the television and merchandising rights, while Paramount makes the feature films. The companies have had a long and complicated history, and it seems they may be getting the family back together. CBS and Viacom (Paramount’s parent company and previous parent company to all of Star Trek) are currently in talks to merge back together. What does this mean for the franchise?
