Star Trek news

Last week we reported that principal photography production for the Star Trek sequel had wrapped, but it appears there is still some filming to do. TrekMovie has confirmed that the Star Trek sequel is headed to Iceland for some 2nd unit shooting. Exclusive details below.   Star Trek Sequel To Shoot In Iceland News that the Star Trek [...]

A new episode Fresh Hell, the comedy webseries from Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Brent Spiner, has just gone online. This time another guest star from the popular web series The Guild is along for the ride. Watch it below.   Can Brent’s career return? An eccentric billionaire (played by The Guild’s Sandeep Parikh) has a [...]

Last month we reported that all five of Star Trek’s TV captains will gather for the first time ever at Destination Star Trek London in October. However, with the addition of Patrick Stewart to their line-up it turns out that Wizard World Philadelphia Comic Con being held May 31 – June 3rd will get the [...]

What might a modern day Enterpsie look like? This week we take a look at some up and coming technologies that draw some intriguing parallels to 23rd century Star Trek. The line up: Google’s Knowledge Graph as the Enterprise computer; New military translation tech as the ship’s UT; Antimatter engines to fuel the Enterprise; Pulsar [...]

FedCon, Europe’s biggest sci-fi and Star Trek con, is in full swing in Dusseldorf, Germany. This year’s Trek guests: William Shatner, Walter Koenig, Jonathan Frakes, Gates McFadden, Robert O’Reilly, J. G. Hertzler and Eddie Paskey. See below for report from the first two days.   FEDCON XXI THURSDAY & FRIDAY Gates McFadden reminisces on Beverly Crusher Gates [...]

Yesterday we reported the exciting news that La-La Land Records is going to release a complete 3-CD set from Jerry Goldsmith’s Oscar-nominated score for Star Trek: The Motion Picture in early June. Today TrekMovie can exclusively reveal the track listing details from the set. Check those out below, plus a behind the scenes video showing [...]

Tomorrow is a historic day in space flight, with the launch of the first commercial supply vehicle for the International Space Station. The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blasts off Saturday morning and it has just been revealed that part of the cargo includes cremated remains of Star Trek’s original Scotty James Doohan, who passed away [...]

TNT has just announced their summer schedule which includes a new show called Perception from veteran Star Trek writer/producers Kenneth Biller and Mike Sussman. Starring Eric McCormack, Perception is a different kind of procedural  and it will feature Star Trek: The Next Generation’s LeVar Burton in a recurring role. See video previews of the show [...]

Star Trek’s new Uhura Zoe Saldana’s next film is a romantic drama with Bradley Cooper coming out this fall. The Words tell he story of a writer (Cooper) who goes to the extremes for his career, with Saldana playing his wife. The first trailer has just been released. Watch it below.   Trailer: Zoe Saldana’s Next [...]

The steady stream of extended soundtrack releases from the Star Trek movies continues, this time with a 3-CD set for Jerry Goldsmith’s Oscar-nominated score for Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The new set comes out on June 5th, with a special launch event and TMP screening in Hollywood the night before. More details on the [...]

This weekend Star Trek legend  Leonard Nimoy will receive an honorary doctorate from Boston University. He will also be giving the convocation address at the BU College of Fine Arts. In advance of the event Nimoy spoke to the college’s newspaper about growing up in Boston, and a bit about Star Trek as well. See [...]

As reported earlier this week, Star Trek’s Chris Pine is attending the 2012 Cannes International Film Festival in France. Chris is there to sell his new film Mantivities and to promote the upcoming release of the animated film Rise of the Guardians. See below for video and pictures of Chris at Cannes 2012. [UPDATED: Video [...]

Today’s video to share comes from the Magic Smoking Monkey Theatre (what a name!) in St. Louis, MO who are currently performing live versions of the classic Star Trek episodes "The Gamesters of Triskelion" and "Journey to Babel." And to promote the shows they put together a Trek-ified music video parody of Beyonce’s "Single Ladies [...]

In Star Trek V: The Final Frontier we learned that Spock had a half-brother. The fully Vulcan Sybok was played by actor Laurence Luckinbill who has revealed that things were a bit icy between him and Leonard Nimoy. Apparently Nimoy wanted to play both Spock and his brother. Details below.   Luckinbill: Nimoy Wanted To Play [...]

Dr. Mora, the Bajoran scientist who first recognized Odo’s sentience, comes to the station to track the shapeshifter’s origins.

Plot Summary: While Odo is taunting Quark about a shady business deal, they are interrupted by Dr. Mora Pel, the Bajoran scientist who first realized that he was a sentient being. Mora has found DNA samples that resemble Odo’s and believes that he can now find Odo’s origins, but Odo, who resented being a prisoner in Mora’s lab, is not fully enthusiastic about having to work with Mora again, though he asks Sisko to borrow a runabout so that he and Mora can be taken by Dax to the Gamma Quadrant for further study. On the planet where the DNA was discovered, the group finds a small life form with similar DNA to Odo’s. As they prepare to leave with a carved stone among the ruins, an earthquake hits and volcanic gas knocks out the humanoids, who Odo rescues. Back on the station, O’Brien has trouble pinning down the life form’s patterns, and later, an intruder destroys nearly everything in the science lab, leaving no trace of the alien. O’Brien suspects the life form itself must have broken out of the lab and a search begins. O’Brien finds the dead remains of the life form, but while performing a necroscopy, Bashir is attacked by a creature he can’t identify. Dax realizes that the being from the planet is not the same being affecting the station’s people and power, and Mora determines that the attacker’s DNA is in fact Odo’s. He warns Odo, who says that he was regenerating during the attacks and is furious at Mora’s interference, believing that Mora is once again infringing on his own right to determine his destiny. Though Mora believes the volcanic gas and not Odo’s psyche is to blame for the attacks, he insists that Odo return to the lab with him, which makes Odo so angry that he becomes the violent creature that attacked Bashir. With Mora’s help, Sisko lures Odo to the Promenade, where the crew is able to capture him and restore him to his usual form. Once Bashir has purged the gas from Odo’s cellular structure, Mora apologizes for his meddling and Odo agrees that they can remain in touch as equals.

Analysis: I’m a bit ambivalent about “The Alternate,” which provides some much-needed and much-appreciated information about Odo’s background and introduces us to the fascinating, flawed character who raised him, but which doesn’t seem to know what to do with the rest of the crew as it becomes ever more obvious just how different Odo really is from the humanoids with whom he works and lives. The speed with which Sisko decides to use lethal force before looking for other alternatives – beaming the violent Odo into a containment field, setting up stasis chambers, or some medical solution – is troubling, and I find it impossible to swallow that Kira would voice a single “Commander!” in objection, then go along with setting phasers to kill. It’s equally strange that Mora really never talks to Kira, considering that she’s Odo’s best friend on the station, and that Dax is so out of the loop scientifically, letting O’Brien fill her shoes as a researcher while she’s in sickbay, then failing to see what Mora sees at once about the link between the attacks and Odo’s DNA. I really dislike it when regular characters are used as plot devices rather than behaving like the people we know and care about, which happens quite a bit in this episode to bring Odo and Mora’s relationship to the forefront, with the result that it starts to seem like after two years of working together, perhaps his colleagues really don’t know or trust Odo, nor he them, as Mora keeps insisting. There’s enough scientific and Oedipal drama going on that we don’t need Sisko abruptly giving orders to fire away.

Now that I have that off my chest, let me acknowledge the many things “The Alternate” does well. The relationship between Odo and Mora is poignant and nuanced. We’ve mostly heard nightmare tales about Odo’s past – the fact that he was made to perform neck tricks for the Cardassians, for instance – so we’re inclined to distrust Mora from the start, and Odo’s hostile reaction reinforces that impression. Yet Mora seems at first to be an affable father figure sort, someone who believes his mistakes were made in love rather than stemming from some niggling jealousy or lack of boundaries. Mora lets Odo start to tell Dax how he first proved his sentience, only to interrupt and finish the story himself, with joking references at Odo’s expense. He is condescending, overly involved, even downright creepy when he starts shouting about how he gave Odo education, attention, more time than he ever devoted to anyone else in his life. Is it any wonder that Odo fled, even if he hadn’t been imprisoned in a laboratory and subjected to experiments? Yet Odo is at the core so completely alone that when Mora arrives with the possibility of finding other shapeshifters on offer, Odo can’t resist following him. He’s willing to risk exposing his history to Dax, to Sisko, even to Quark, because it’s the only way to find out where he really came from. In some ways it’s like watching an adopted child with a domineering adoptive parent from whom the child wants distance yet on whom the child is dependent if he wants to be able to track his biological family. Mora’s surprise that Odo is good at his job is rather sad, like a parent or teacher who was always too critical to see a child’s ultimate potential.

Considering that it’s a horror story of sorts, director David Carson wisely focuses on the normalcy of the station rather than shock effects and alien goo. We see only flashes of Odo transforming into his monstrous self, not an extended awful morphing sequence, and our view of the results of the first attack in a damaged lab is more unnerving than watching a pillar of goo breaking things could have been. The early shapeshifting scenes on DS9 were often in danger of becoming cartoonish – arms turned into swords, legs into slingshots – but what happens here is more reminiscent of The Incredible Hulk, a transformation utterly out of Odo’s control, painfully reminding him that he isn’t humanoid no matter how hard he practices to get the ears right. To be fair to Dr. Pol, he’s looking in the right place for Odo’s origins…that monolith on the planet with what may be a baby shapeshifter looks just like the one on the Founders’ planet, which Odo doesn’t know about yet. This is a character with humor and a broad view of the foibles of others, not only because he does detective work but because he’s exposed to so many cultures (his mocking of the Ferengi tradition of selling body parts becomes hilarious when we learn that Quark is selling “parts” of a living Ferengi). It’s poignant to see the violence of his monsters from the id, and the structural similarities to Oedipus Rex – a man investigating a crisis for which he himself turned out to be responsible – reinforce the psychological complexity of the shapeshifter. Yet he proves, in the end, that he truly has matured beyond his mentor.

The previously teased new project "Space Command" has now launched their KickStarter campaign. The envisioned series of sci-fi films feature a number of Star Trek vets behind the camera and they have also announced a number of Trek actors who are also involved, including Armin Shimerman, George Takei, Ethan Phillips and Robert Picardo. Watch the [...]

A new line of Star Trek insignia bracelets has been released.

The bracelets, designed and created by Jennifer Bunt of Magic Dog Studios, are available from Vulcan Tourism of Vulcan, Alberta, Canada.

The Star Trek insignia part of the bracelet is made from one hundred percent recycled sterling silver, and the suede wristbands come in three colors to match the insignias; red, blue and gold.

“It was very exciting to create the Star Trek Insignia Bracelets,” said Bunt. “Having my work out there, representing Star Trek, a show that has become a global icon, a show that I remember watching as a child, has been an honor.”

The bracelets, which sell for $55 each, can be ordered here.

The list of IDW Publishing Star Trek comic titles for August 2012 has been released.

Three comics will hit newsstands this August; Star Trek 100-Page Spectacular Summer 2012, Star Trek TNG/Doctor Who: Assimilation 2: #4, and Star Trek #12.

Star Trek 100-Page Spectacular Summer 2012 will feature two Star Trek adventures: Embrace the Wolf and False Colors. In Embrace the Wolf, “Captain Picard and his Enterprise crew find themselves in a particularly unusual setting, while in False Colors, Captain Janeway leads the Voyager and her crew through a very close encounter with the Borg.”

Written by Nathan Archer, Christopher Golder and Tom Sniegoski, with art by Dave Hoover and Jeff Moy, and cover by Travis Charest, Star Trek 100-Page Spectacular Summer 2012 will sell for $7.99.

Next up is Star Trek TNG/Doctor Who: Assimilation 2: #4, which continues the Star Trek/Doctor Who crossover. In this latest issue, “with the CyberBorg wreaking more havoc on the galaxy, the Federation must consider making an unholy alliance in order to prevail.”

Written by Scott and David Tipton and Tony Lee, with art by J.K. Woodward and covers by Woodward and Francesco Francavilla, Star Trek TNG/Doctor Who: Assimilation 2: #4 is thirty-two pages in length and will sell for $3.99.

Finally, Star Trek #12 will conclude the re-imagined The Trouble with Tribbles. Written by Mike Johnson, with art by Claudia Balboni and a cover by Tim Bradstreet, Star Trek #12 has been overseen by Star Trek 2‘s Roberto Orci. The thirty-two page issue will sell for $3.99.

For Star Trek 2′s Roberto Orci, his work on Ender’s Game differs from his work on other projects in one major way.

In Ender’s Game, Andrew “Ender” Wiggin is a young boy who has been sent away to Battle School to hone his military skills in hopes of saving the world from an impending alien invasion.

Orci explained why working on Ender’s Game was different than working on other projects, including Star Trek. “Let’s see,” said Orci. “Well first, though I have had some experience with bringing beloved stories to the screen that had intelligent and rabid fan bases like Mission Impossible 3, Transformers and Star Trek; this is the first movie with a pre-existing fan base I have worked on that I didn’t write.

“This means I that got the chance to evaluate the material merely as a fan.  Gavin [Hood]‘s script made me jealous, but it was also a relief that he had satisfied what I would want as a fan from a difficult adaptation.”

Although his experience on Ender’s Game is a little different for Orci, one thing is familiar, working with congenial actors. “I have never worked with so many talented young actors who became friends so fast under such amazing circumstances,” said Orci. “Seeing Asa [Butterfield], who plays Ender, and Hailee [Steinfeld], who plays Petra, floating high above the set and getting the giggles was amazing and frightening all at once.  They laughed for like twenty minutes, which as a producer on a clock eager to finish your shooting day can give you a heart attack.  But soon we all had the giggles, and the joy of it overcame the panic.”

Ender’s Game will be released November 1, 2013.

In March we reported on the launch of ByeByeRobot, a new fine art Star trek licensee, which is giving MondoPrints competition in the cool Trek poster and art world. The company has announced a new fun poster promoting "Shuttle Service" on planet Cestus III. Check it out below.   Cool Stuff: Cestus II Shuttle Service Poster Bye [...]