Thirteen movies and forty two years later...

After more than forty years and just in time for the death rattle of cinema, Paramount Studios has announced that they've hired a woman to write a Star Trek movie. 

Above: Kalina Vazquez will be the first woman to write a
Star Trek movie which, wait, that can't be right, can it?

"In our defense, women writers are usually too 
busy getting pregnant and buying shoes."

-Executive Producer Rick Berman*

On the one hand this is shocking because this will be the fourteenth film in the series and you'd have thought that by now they'd have had at least one woman screenwriter. But I guess on the other hand this is not at all shocking because America. I mean, for a...sigh...franchise that has historically presented itself as inclusive and progressive and ahead of its time, Star Trek hasn't always put it's gold-pressed latinum where it's mouth is when it comes to production. Until its revival in 2017 with Discovery, it's had a dismal record when it comes to women writing and directing installments.

Pictured: Kalinda, seen here in
humanoid form because budget reasons.

Writer Kalina Vazquez has genre credentials having written for Runaways (a TV adaptation of the comic), Fear the Walking Dead, and the current run of the comic series America Chavez. Also she's already worked on Star Trek having written one of the best season 3 episodes of Discovery as well as one of the Short Treks shorts. Oh, and get this: she's apparently named after Kalinda, an immense, extra-galactic, multi-limbed tentacle monster from the Original Series Star Trek episode By Any Other Name. Not a qualification per se, but, you know, neat.

Alternate title: Doctor Franchise and
The Multi-Verse of What Even is This?

Anyway, it's all very exciting, but if you're anything like me, you want to know where in the increasingly vast--some might say exhaustingly so--Star Trek MCU this movie is going to be set? Nobody knows. The announcement also mentioned that J. J. Abrams and his company, Bad Robot are producing again, so this might be the Star Trek Beyond sequel that's been off and on again for years. But with the success of the prime-timeline-set Discovery and Picard series it might make more sense to stick with that world and avoid that confusing DC CW crisis on infinite crossover nonsense. 

It's also unclear where Vazquez's movie fits in the crowded room full of Star Trek movies already "in production." There was supposed to be a sequel to Star Trek Beyond, and movie about a space pandemic by Fargo writer Noah Hawley, and an R-rated Quentin Tarantino joint about that planet from original Star Trek that was run by 1930's gangsters. But it kind of sounds like those are off now and Vazquez is in so, fingers crossed.

And I think I speak for all Star Trek fans when I say that no one,
literally no one, was asking for an ultra-violent Star Trek gangster movie. 

*Ok, not an actual quote from Rick Berman, but I mean, it might as well be.