Giant Freakin Robot

“I will walk over your cold corpses.”

Well, finally! Benedict Cumberbatch’s eviller-than-shit John Harrison is at last only 80% of a mystery to the population rather than 99% of one. We’ve written a lot about Star Trek Into Darkness here on Giant Freakin’ Robot over the past few years or so (estimation), but this is one of the first times where I actually felt almost as excited as I would be in a theater. Am I a five-year-old boy obsessed with brooding villains and explosions? Apparently.

The new international trailer for Abrams’ Trek sequel has arrived, and boy does it contain a spoiler or two about Cumberbatch’s role. So if you’re interested in going into the film knowing nothing about it, as Damon Lindelof would have you do, then just skip this trailer altogether, and stop reading. For the rest of you, ready yourself for a lot of falling ships, falling people, and lens flares a plenty.

Whether you love or hate J.J. Abrams’ take on the Star Trek universe, the new timeline offers plenty of narrative potential simply by allowing a fresh take on familiar events and characters. Abrams’ first film didn’t really live up to that potential, but the upcoming Star Trek Into Darkness looks like it might just get it right. If nothing else, it should give us a larger view of the new timeline’s Trek universe, a prospect that can also be said for the upcoming video game spin-off.

Set between Abrams’ two Trek films, the game is an in-canon adventure that lets players take the role of Kirk and/or Spock as they get wrapped up in an adventure involving the surviving Vulcans and some classic Trek baddies: the lizard-like Gorn. Unsurprisingly, game developer Digital Extremes took the opportunity to reenvision the Gorn as a foe more impressive than the Original Series’ dude-in-a-rubber-suit look. Now they’ve released a short behind-the-scenes look at the new-and-improved Gorn fans will be phasering the hell out of next month.

J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek movie made many changes to the original timeline, but perhaps none more drastic than the destruction of the planet Vulcan, leaving Spock and his people an endangered species. While the movie may have angered some Trekkers, it’s one of the elements I respected the most, simply because it stood behind the thesis that there was no point in redoing Trek if you were going to do the same things all over again. (We’ll see if Star Trek Into Darkness stays true to that, namely in whether Benedict Cumberbatch proves to be playing Khan or not). Now it’s been revealed that the upcoming, in-canon Trek video game will be further exploring the plight of the surviving Vulcan people.

The game stars Kirk and Spock, allowing gamers to play co-coperatively as the two, or letting a single player switch back and forth. We’ve also known for a while that the game is set between the two movies, and that the lizard-like Gorn are involved as primary antagonists, but other story details have been few. Now Coming Soon has landed some new details about the game, including that some of the surviving Vulcans will play a role.

With the Internet and Twitter, we take it for granted these days that it’s easy to interact with the writers, directors, actors, etc. behind our favorite movies and shows and books and games. You’re a lot more likely to get a response, too, since responding doesn’t require that much of an investment, especially if it’s just a few short sentences via Twitter. But it wasn’t all that long ago when contacting your creative idols meant sitting down and writing an actual letter, and who knew whether you’d ever hear back. In 1968, a teenage biracial girl wrote a letter to Spock, a heartbreaking letter about how she didn’t fit in and was afraid she’d never have any friends. Her letter appeared in the magazine FaVE, and eventually Spock — or rather actor Leonard Nimoy — wrote her back.

The girl, who identified herself only as “F.C.” felt a connection to Spock. After all, Spock was half-Vulcan and half-Human, and often felt separated from both of his “halves,” not fully welcomed by either. So surely he would understand the fears of a scared girl whose mother was black and father white, in a time when that was far from accepted by society at large.

Nimoy responded, in part:

[Spock] said to himself: ‘Not everyone will like me. But there will be those who will accept me just for what I am. I will develop myself to such a point of excellence, intelligence and brilliance that I can see through any problem and deal with any crisis. I will become such a master of my own abilities and career that there will be a place for me. People of all races will need me and not be able to do without me.’ And that’s just what he did. And when I see him standing there on the bridge of the Enterprise, facing danger and life-and-death problems so cooly and with so much intelligence, I’m sure he made the right decision.