It’s worth lingering a bit on the way the Comic-Con announcement steps on Star Trek Beyond, because it’s only the latest in Paramount’s missteps in promoting the film. Now, all of a sudden, the Reboot Universe is the one that’s a cul-de-sac, a dead end it’s the one that doesn’t have a future. Nimoy’s Spock was the strongest link between the Old Star Trek and the New Star Trek, which itself has suddenly been transformed into the Old Star Trek with this weekend’s Comic-Con confirmation that the television series launching in January 2017, Star Trek: Discovery, will be set back in the original, or “Prime,” universe. But it’s all happening faster now, somehow, not only through the backward-looking glance of a reboot franchise that has never, despite its many self-conscious attempts to brand itself as new and hip, been able to move beyond pale replication of the adventures of the original crew, but also in events that are external to the Abramsverse franchise, most notably the death of Leonard Nimoy in 2015. The six movies with the original crew (and the first movie with the Next Generation crew, in which Kirk also appears) were each, in their own way, ruminations on the strange longevity of the franchise: Original Recipe Kirk and crew had to confront their age over and over again in ways big and small, from Kirk’s unhappiness with his promotion to admiral in The Motion Picture (1979) to the drama of death and rebirth in movies II-IV (1982–1986) to the confrontation with eternity in The Final Frontier (1989) to the march of history moving on past the original crew altogether in the peace with the hated Klingons that is announced in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991) to Kirk’s regrets and final death in Generations (1994). Carol Marcus (remember her?), who joined the crew at the end of the last movie, must have gotten bored too, somewhere along the way she’s been gone so long that when the movie starts there’s no sign of her, and certainly no one mentions her. Spock is planning on quitting too, we find out with the death of his older self, Leonard Nimoy’s Ambassador Spock, he feels his talents are needed on the New Vulcan colony where the last of his people have resettled. ![]() He’s applied for a desk job, a vice admiralcy at a cutting-edge deep space station, Yorktown Base, which looks like a giant suburban outdoor mall after one last mission saving the crew of a downed ship on Random Planet in the Mysterious Nebula, where sensors and radios don’t work right, he’s hanging up those yellow captain’s shirts (which he somehow keeps ripping open) for good. ![]() About three seasons - er, years - into the five-year mission launched at the end of the last movie, Kirk tells us that the once-promising frontier of strange new worlds, new life, and new civilizations has proved “episodic” - the best joke in the film - and now he wants out. AT THE START of Star Trek Beyond, directed by Fast & Furious’s Justin Lin from a script by Simon Pegg and Doug Jung, even Captain Kirk is sick of Star Trek.
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