'Star Trek' Movie 'The Undiscovered Country' A 'Touchstone' For New CBS 'Trek' Producer

Nicholas Meyer, a writer and consulting producer for the new, untitled Star Trek show, says the new show will be partly inspired by his movie, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.

Meyer, who also wrote and directed Trek classic Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, told Den of Geek, “the one thing that I can relate to you is that The Undiscovered Country, according to Bryan [Fuller], is a real sort of taking off point or touchstone for how I guess he’s thinking about the direction of the new show.”

When a new Star Trek show was announced for the CBS All Access streaming service, many trekkies assumed the show wouldn’t be much more than a trumped up webseries, doomed to the same irrelevance as Community Season 6 or Other Space (both funny!).

Then Bryan Fuller, creator of network masterpiece Hannibal, was put in charge. Not only did Fuller create one of the best genre shows in recent memory, but he had a Star Trek background, with writing credits on both Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

Fuller soon announced he’d be adding Nicholas Meyer to the writers’ room. While Meyers couldn’t share much with Den of Geek, he did say, “I think it’s going to be a different Star Trek. It will go in a different direction. And I think that is probably good. Because the thing that mainly troubles me about Star Trek is the fear of it being maybe re-treads of itself.”

So what are we to make of Fuller’s fondness for The Undiscovered Country? Star Trek VI is the final movie starring solely The Original Series Enterprise crew (the less said about The Next Generation crossover movie Star Trek Generations the better). The plot revolves around a conspiracy to sabotage peace talks between the Klingon Empire and the United Federation of Planets.

The peace created by the Khitomer Accords of 2293 is one of the most pivotal events in Star Trek galactic history. Without peace between the Klingons and the Federation, Worf would not have served on the Enterprise or DS9. Nor would the Federation been united enough to stand up to later threats like the Cardassians and the Dominion.

So will the new Star Trek be set during this period? It would probably be a mistake to take Meyer’s words quite so literally. Instead, The Undiscovered Country could prove a major influence on the tone of the new Trek show. Star Trek VI is both adventurous and political, combining the action vibe of the 2009 Star Trek reboot and the various council chambers, negotiations, and heated diplomatic conversations that came to define the series in The Next Generation era.

We’ll learn just how much The Undiscovered Country influenced the new Star Trek series when it premieres on CBS in January 2017. But regardless of the looming Trek legacy, Meyer promises we can expect something fresh, saying, “I like to go boldly where people haven’t gone before.”