‘Star Trek 3’ Plot May Focus On Prime Directive, Release Date Confirmed For 2016

The Star Trek 3 plot details are starting to come out now that the Star Trek 3 release date has officially been set for 2016.

In a related report by The Inquisitr, a Star Trek teleportation device and even Star Trek medical technology is being proven to be possible, including the medical tricorder and the suspended animation that was used in the second Star Trek movie to save Captain Kirk’s life. Back on the fictional side, fans of the original Star Trek TV series may be encouraged to hear the continuing adventures of Kirk in the original universe will be released by a project calling itself Star Trek: Phase 2.

Now that director Roberto Orci took the helm away from J.J. Abrams, it is hoped that Star Trek 3 may return to its more cerebral roots. When Orci spoke with the Humans from Earth podcast, he gave us some more information on the Star Trek 3 plot:

“In [‘Into Darkness’] they set out finally where the original series started. The first two films — especially the 2009 [‘Star Trek’] — was an origin story. It was about them coming together. So they weren’t the characters they were in the original series. They were growing into them and that continues on in the second movie. So in this movie they are closer than they are to the original series characters that you have ever seen. They have set off on their five-year mission. So their adventure is going to be in deep space.”

So while it’s not surprising to hear that the Star Trek 3 plot will take Kirk, Spock, and Bones into deep space, the questions for how that will be portrayed. At the beginning of Into Darkness, the United Federation of Planets’ rule of the Prime Directive was briefly touched upon as the reason why the U.S.S. Enterprise was briefly taken away from Captain Kirk. To summarize, the Prime Directive basically is a conceptual law that says the supposedly “advanced” starship crews are not supposed to interfere with the development of alien species which are deemed to be “inferior” solely due to their technological level.

So when script co-writer J.D. Payne revealed that the Star Trek 3 will revolve around “moral relativism,” it seems likely that Star Trek’s Prime Directive may somehow come into play:

“We’re trying to set up a kind of situation where you really could — and not in just an ‘everything’s relative’ sort of moral relativism — you could be a good person of any creed or philosophical background and come down on both sides of how you should respond to this opportunity that the crew has…. that also has some pitfalls to it. Where you could argue very, very, very compellingly that ‘this’ is what you should do, and if you’re advocating ‘this’ then it’s actually evil.”

Of course, there’s also the possibility of a conflict with the Klingons, but I’m not sure how that would work with the moral relativism angle.

If the Star Trek 3 plot focuses on the Prime Directive, how do you think it should be handled? What Star Trek villain should be the focus to bring out this moral quandary?