No, not the one with the whales...

Star Trek 4 is back on again and we should probably talk about it, so buckle up those nerd belts. In fact, no, wait, full power to the structural nerd-tegrity field because that's how in the weeds we're going to get, so if that's not your space jam, better bail out now.

No, like if it's not your jam, but in space because Star Trek is set in-look,
I think that line was doomed from the beginning, so I'm just going to cut
my loses and walk away from it now. That ok with you? Super.

But here we are...

So this week, a writer for Deadline announced that writer and producer Noah Hawley would be directing a new Star Trek movie in collaboration with J. J. Abrams. The fact that J. J. Abrams is producing suggests that this would be a fourth movie in sorta-reboot series, following on from Star Trek Beyond. Which, I'm not a film industry person, but I gather that the general sense was that the series was dead because Beyond didn't do well financially. That perhaps the studio would be better off from a business perspective doing something safe and guaranteed to make money like another Mission Impossible or letting The Fast and the Furious present something. Huh? No, I don't know how a movie can present another movie either.

To be clear, this Star Trek 4 is not the same as Star Trek IV: The One With The Whales and is also evidently not the Star Trek 4 we heard about last year with Chris Hemsworth reprising his role as Chris Pine's father and it's not-huh? Time travel I guess, the actors are like the same age. That one was sunk by some kind of salary dispute with the two Chrises.

I feel like there's a joke there about similar looking-white male
actors named Chris...Oh! Plenty of Chrises left in the sea?

If you need visual aides to explain
your continuity, you're doing it wrong.

It's also not the R-rated Quintin Tarantino has been threatening to make for a couple of years either. This is instead a whole new thing Hawley-who also created Legion and writes Fargo-is writing himself. And I say a whole new thing, but I mean, it's a whole new sequel to an alternate universe reboot of a TV show that itself already had like six or seven spin-offs and a bunch of more or less unrelated movies already. Still with me? Of course you're not. It's confusing and kind of unnecessary. Yeah, you heard me, unnecessary.

I know this is nerd blasphemy as conventional nerd wisdom is that more Star Trek is, by definition, a good thing, but holy shit enough's enough. There are going to be, I'm not kidding you, three Star Trek series on CBS's streaming service in 2020 with more promised to be coming down the pike and that's fine. Huh? Yeah, down the pike. No, I'm not better than that.

Seriously though, like five Star Trek shows and none
of them are about Pike and Number One? C'mon.

How many different versions of the
same character will audiences accept
at the same ti-goddamnit CW...

I mean, I think it's a bit much, but then I'm not trying to convince people to order a streaming service that's ninety percent NCIS and Big Bang Theory. But whatever, the point is that Discovery is great and Picard looks like it'll be fun and Star Trek is a thing again and that's super. So why go back and do another Abrams-verse movie? That series kind of wrapped up nicely-if not super-successfully-with Star Trek Beyond and between Chekov actor Anton Yelchin's sudden death and Discovery casting their own Mr. Spock, it seems like maybe it's time to let that series go.

And to answer your next question, yes, I'll totally go see Star Trek 4 or whatever it's called. You see despite all this, I'm still a fan and they had my ten bucks the minute they said it was back in production. Still though, there comes a moment in any long running-ugh, I hate this word but-franchise, when you have to look forward.

Ok, obviously I'm not talking about these two.
I mean, I'm only human. Here CBS, take my money.