In an interview with IGN, Star Trek Beyond cast member Karl Urban revealed a moment from the second Beyond trailer came from the movie’s ending.
Urban spoke at length about his love of Star Trek, especially of the first movie, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, usually seen as an ambitious snooze of a film, trying too hard for the slow-moving majesty of space travel as portrayed in 2001: A Space Odyssey over a decade earlier.
Still, Urban mounted an impressive defense of the first Star Trek film, saying:
“For the longest time I felt that it was too slow, but with age I've come to a great appreciation of it. I really love it. It's still, you know, the essence of exploring the unknown. There's great character dynamics, with Kirk being a little rusty, being out of the chair, feeling threatened by Decker, and McCoy really calling Kirk on his insecurity. You know, Spock returning from Vulcan not having achieved the Kolinahr and coming back to his calling and his friends, and also having an agenda that's outside of the mission, his own personal agenda. I mean, there was a lot of interesting stuff in there. And then V'ger itself, the concept of something, an Earth probe, that was sent out and has become self-aware. I just think it was a really fantastic Star Trek story.”
Urban loves the first Trek movie enough to have insisted on an easter egg nod to Leonard “Bones” McCoy’s appearance in the film. Returning to crew the Enterprise, Bones (DeForest Kelley) first appears in The Motion Picture with a big, bushy beard and a low-cut shirt revealing an immense medallion.
“I love that!” Urban said. “I actually put a nod to that in Star Trek Beyond. You'll see at the end of the film, I'm wearing an open shirt, and I've got a medallion on. Like, not a big one, but it's there, and it's a direct nod to DeForest.”
The medallion outfit appears in the trailer at :54 (above), as Dr. McCoy says, “You really want to head back out there, huh?”
While the all white architecture might suggest McCoy, Kirk and Spock are on the Yorktown space station (an outpost visited in Beyond), the buildings in the far distance suggest instead that they’ve returned to Earth. It seems the confrontation with Krall has left the Enterprise irretrievable, or at least so damaged that the five-year mission has been aborted.
Really, nothing about this spoiler for Star Trek Beyond is all that surprising. Of course the crew is going to get back up on that horse and head back out into the galaxy. But Urban’s little medallion does offer some new context for a movie we’ve seen surprisingly little from, considering Star Trek Beyond will be in theaters on July 22.
