Star Trek looks pretty fast and furious in the debut trailer for Beyond

By Rick Marshall Published December 14, 2015

The crew of the Enterprise is back in action again in the first trailer for Star Trek Beyond, and this time around they appear to be boldly going to some far-off — and apparently, very dangerous — places in space.

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Directed by four-time Fast & Furious director Justin Lin, Star Trek Beyond features the return of the core cast of the rebooted Star Trek franchise, with Chris Pine reprising his role as Captain James T. Kirk alongside Zachary Quinto as Spock, Zoe Saldana as Uhura, Karl Urban as “Bones” McCoy, Simon Pegg as Montgomery “Scotty” Scott, Anton Yelchin as Chekov, and John Cho as Sulu.

Little is known about the plot of the 2016 film, and the trailer doesn’t provide much in the way of spoilers — unless you consider the use of the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” as the preview’s soundtrack a potential clue as to what awaits Kirk and his crew. Oh, and apparently the Enterprise gets destroyed … again.

Along with all the returning franchise cast members, Star Trek Beyond also features some newcomers to the cast, including Luther star Idris Elba, Kingsman: The Secret Service actress Sofia Boutella, and The Raid: Redemption actor Joe Taslim. Boutella in particular features prominently in the trailer as a white-skinned alien with some serious martial-arts skills, and can be seen punching, kicking, and otherwise showing off the talents that made her one of the standout actors in last year’s Kingsman.

Directed by Lin from a script penned by Pegg and Doug Jung (Dark Blue, Banshee), Star Trek Beyond will arrive in standard and Imax theaters July 22, 2016 — just in time for the franchise’s 50th anniversary. (The first episode of the original Star Trek television series — titled “The Man Trap” — was broadcast September 8, 1966.) The release of Star Trek Beyond is expected to accompanied by a long list of anniversary-related events celebrating the popular sci-fi franchise’s 50 years of pop-culture prominence.

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For more than 50 years, Star Trek has been an institution, especially among the nerds of America. The original Star Trek series has spawned various movies and additional shows in the years since it aired, and those shows have been met with various levels of acclaim and criticism.

Alongside all of these more faithful series, though, there have also been a number of parodies of Star Trek, its tropes, and the world it's set in. We've gathered seven of the very best of those parodies for this list, which range from TV episodes to entire movies.
7. Star Trek: Lower Decks
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Every Star Trek series is someone’s favorite (Star Trek: The Animated Series stans, we see you), but when it comes to the 18-year Golden Age of Trek between 1987 and 2005, the prequel series Enterprise is easily the least beloved. Airing on UPN for an abbreviated four-season run, Enterprise was meant to shake things up after three consecutive series set in the late 24th century.
Imagined as a sort of origin story for Star Trek in the style of The Right Stuff, creators Rick Berman and Brannon Braga wanted to capture the danger and excitement of United Earth’s early interstellar space program, even planning to spend the entire first season on Earth preparing for the launch of Starfleet’s very first Starship Enterprise. The network, however, had other ideas, insisting that Berman and Braga not meddle with the consistently successful Star Trek formula. Thus, despite taking place two centuries earlier, Enterprise became, essentially, “more Voyager,” which in turn had been “more Next Generation,” a once-great sci-fi procedural that was nearly a decade past its peak.
That’s not to say that the series didn’t improve throughout its four-season run. After two years of struggling to justify the show’s very existence, Berman and Braga swung for the fences with a radically different third season that reinvented Enterprise (now renamed Star Trek: Enterprise) as a grim and gritty serialized drama unpacking the aftermath of a 9/11-scale attack on Earth. While immediately more compelling, the revamp failed to boost the show’s sagging ratings, and it was reworked yet again the following year, and leaned further into the “prequel to Star Trek” angle under new showrunner Manny Coto. This, many fans will argue, is where Enterprise finally found its legs, but it was too little and too late to prevent its cancellation. Still, each iteration of the troubled spinoff had its highlights and our list of the 10 strongest Enterprise episodes is spread fairly evenly throughout the run of the show.
Warning: This article contains spoilers for each listed episode.

10. Babel One/United/The Aenar (season 4, episodes 12, 13, & 14)