Today... pic.twitter.com/XJ31AmYprg
— Pegg News (@simonpegg) December 6, 2016
Simon Pegg tweeted Tuesday a photo of the “Star Trek Beyond” screenwriting team – Pegg and Doug Jung – staring into laptops with a Bad Robot action figure lurking nearby. Lest we surmise this is a 3-year-old image, Pegg added the message “Today …”
Does this mean Pegg and Jung are writing the next Star Trek movie?
In July Paramount announced the sequel to “Star Trek Beyond” would be written by J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay, who (with “Star Trek Into Darkness” screenwriter Roberto Orci) wrote a sequel to “Star Trek Into Darkness” that was scrapped and replaced by Pegg & Jung’s script for what became “Star Trek Beyond.”
But maybe the Trek movie franchise is trapped in a time-loop with Pegg & Jung replacing Payne & McKay AGAIN – this time as screenwriters on Chis Pine’s upcoming fourth voyage as Capt. Kirk?
The July announcement indicated James T. Kirk will “cross paths” with his father George, who died the day James was born.
Chris Hemsworth will reprise the role of George, whom he first played in 2009’s “Star Trek” when the pre-"Thor" Hemsworth was still a big nobody.
The sequel to “Star Trek Beyond” will be the second time-travel Star Trek movie since Chris Pine took over the role of James Kirk, and the fifth time-travel Star Trek movie overall, following “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home,” “Star Trek: Generations,” “Star Trek: First Contact” and 2009’s “Star Trek.”
A number of episodes of the 1960s “Star Trek” series took Kirk and Spock back through time, including “The Naked Time,” “Tomorrow is Yesterday,” “The City on the Edge of Forever,” “Assignment: Earth” and “All Our Yesterdays.” Spock leapt through the Guardian of Forever a second time in the 1973 animated episode “Yesteryear.”
Each of the subsequent Trek TV series featured loads of time-travel episodes, and in the 1996 “Deep Space Nine” episode “Trials and Tribble-ations” we learn that time travel had grown so commonplace that the Federation had to set up a Department of Temporal Investigations to make certain no one fucked up history too badly. Time travel was an enormous component of the prequel series “Enterprise,” which featured agents from Kathryn Janeway’s future dragooning pre-Kirk Enterprise captain Jonathan Archer into a "temporal cold war."
No title or release date has been revealed for the “Beyond” sequel, which I am secretly calling “Star Trek Beyond Beyond” until a real title surfaces.
