New Details Emerge Of a Star Trek 4 That Might Have Been
Chris Pine (Kirk), Simon Pegg (Scott), Karl Urban (McCoy), John Cho (Sulu), and Zoe Saldaña (Uhura). Image: Paamount.
OCTOBER 17, 2022 - In 2009 The Star Trek franchise was rebooted by JJ Abrams and Bad Robot with a new movie simply titled Star Trek. With new, young actors reprising the roles of our beloved TOS characters. In 2016 they went Beyond Star Trek with their third movie which was not only a 50th-anniversary tribute to the franchise but what has now become the final movie (to date) in the motion picture end of the franchise.
Not that they haven’t tried. As reported here last month, the most recently announced fourth movie in the new franchise has been scrubbed. But that was only one of a few that had (tried) to come before to bring our crew back to the big screen.
The writing team of J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay had been attached to a movie in 2018, with a story in mind that they were very excited about, but delays for various reasons pushed the production back and they eventually moved on. They’re currently working on a little project for Amazon Prime video. You may have heard of it: The Lord of The Rings: Rings of Power.
However, when they were the team getting ready to make the movie, we heard that Chris Hemsworth had been attached to it, reprising his role as George Kirk, the presumed deceased father of James T. Kirk. We all started scratching our heads wondering how it could possibly be unless we did yet another time travel movie. Well, as it turns out, they had thought of that too and rejected the idea. Yet, even this fell apart as they could not agree on salaries with Chris Pine and Chris Hemsworth.
Now they are opening up to tell us what the plot would have been.
Patrick McKay: The conceit was that through a cosmic quirk in the STAR TREK world, [Pine and Hemsworth’s characters] were the same age. It was going to be a father-son space adventure— We were really thrilled about it. We had an original villain and a really cool 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY-esque sci-fi idea at the core. The adventure is that Chris Pine and the crew of the USS Enterprise have to seek out the wreckage of the ship that his father died on because of a mystery and a new villain. In the ship, they stumble across his father’s pattern. They beam him out and he has no idea that time has passed, and that he’s looking at his son. Then the adventure goes from there.
J.D. Payne: There’s an episode of STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION called “Relics” where they find Scotty, who’s been trapped a transporter for a couple of decades, and they’re able to have a cool adventure with him. Our conceit was, “What if right before the Kelvin impacted with that huge mining ship, George Kirk had tried to beam himself over to his wife’s shuttle where his son, Jim Kirk, had just been born? And what if the ship hadn’t completely exploded—what if it left some space junk?” Think about when you send a text message and you’ve typed it out, but you haven’t quite hit send. On the other side, they see those three little dots that someone has typed. It’s like the transporter had absorbed his pattern up into the pattern buffer, but hadn’t spit him out on the other side. It was actually a saved copy of him that was in the computer.
Now we have a small snippet of what could have been for the movie if it had come to fruition. What do you think of the concept? Love it? Hate it? Whatever you might think, it would have been great for James to get his father back. We saw the emotional turmoil he faced when Spock Prime told him that in the non-modified reality, Kirk’s father had not died and had seen him graduate from the academy. It would have been great for us the audience to see him get his father back, and how their being very close in age would have played out. But we’ll not get this version… unless we all get our pens out and start writing letters. It’s worked for the franchise in the past!
For the whole story and a few more thrilling tidbits, warp on over to TrekMovie.com and check out the article.
Thaddeus Tuffentsamer is an internationally selling author. His books have been sold in the US, the UK, Sweden, Germany, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, Italy, and France. He has a series of young reader novels, a satirical self-help book, (which, according to reviews, actually has some pretty solid counsel), and has joined the list of professional Sherlock Holmes authors.
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