Star Trek Beyond Theory.

Film Saw Star Trek Beyond at lunch time unfortunately in my second to least favourite screen in an otherwise good cinema, shunting to one side by the Ryance thing. The screening began with subtitles on the screen, but unlike The Motion Picture, it's because the projectionist had pressed the wrong button. Yes, I did spend many seconds saying I wasn't going to be the one who went out to complain. 

Fortunately someone else did, presumably thinking "Why is it always me?" and it was fixed pretty quickly after restarting the film and fastforwarding to the scene we were on. Apart from screen size, watching a film at the cinema has now officially become indivisible to Netflix. Yes, I did complain about all this at the end. Yes, I did get a complimentary ticket.

All of which biography is to leave a decent paragraph or two so that you can have fair warning that I'm about to say some spoilery things about the film. Stop now if you've not seen it.

Stop now.

Now.

You have been warned.

Right, one of the more interesting choices in the film is the extent to which it draws upon the Enterprise TV series for its background mythology. This really useful blog post goes into some detail in uncovering what there but it's actually to a quite startling degree, far beyond the references to Admiral Archer's beagle in the first nuTrek (paid off hilariously in the ensuing comics series).

Having decided that Enterprise is a pre-cursor to both the Prime universe and this offshoot it's now quite correctly drawing on it, even if some of the mythology doesn't quite match.  The approach to the Klingon empire in Star Trek (the movie) in which its still a relatively alien place is markedly different to Enterprise were they're very much a known quantity.

In Beyond, we're now handed a ton of new Enterprise era mythology notably in relation the origins of the film's antagonist.  Here's the question then.  If all of this "happened" in the Enterprise era, doesn't this mean that the Farragut and its captain and that planet also exist in the Prime era but it's just that they didn't happen to be bumped into because for some reason the Yorktown space station as is doesn't exist in the Prime universe?

Isn't that lucky given what they're capable of?  Given that he's utilising technology which is keeping him alive, isn't there the potential for some other version of Star Trek, perhaps set in the future to do a Prime universe version of the same story?  Perhaps it'll be in comics form or as a novel but at some point in the future there has to be some potentiality for this.  I wonder how the 1701-D crew might deal with him.  Hmm.

That's all there was.  I just didn't want to smear this all over Twitter in case there's someone who hasn't seen the film yet.  Feel free to DM me comments if you can't get stupid Disqus to work.  Yes, I know.  It's on the list ...