Star Trek is about as complex as a fictional world gets; it’s been around for 50 years, there are 723 episodes and 12 movies to keep straight, and that’s before you get into the novels and the fact that J.J. Abrams soft-rebooted the history of the franchise back in 2009. It’s a lot to keep straight, but fortunately for Simon Pegg, the internet is there for him.
Pegg talked a bit about how he stuck to Trek lore and it turns out he uses the Trek fan’s friend, Memory Alpha. If you’re not regularly looking up the lyrics to the original show’s theme (and yes, it has lyrics), Memory Alpha is a wiki that the Star Trek fan hive mind updates. It’s almost ridiculously detailed because, well, nerds gonna nerd, which makes it useful for writing trivia questions and, apparently, composing movie scripts.
Pegg even got them to help him out with a bit in the script. There’s a device he needed to name, but wasn’t sure what to call it, so he explained it to the Memory Alpha team, and they laid out exactly how the Federation would name such a thing, the history of it, and why. So there’s a little piece of Memory Alpha in the script, which makes thirteen years of knocking nerd skulls together over who was a redshirt in “The Squire of Gothos” worth it, we’re sure. We’ll find out July 22.
(Via Coming Soon)
