Space … the Final Frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: To explore strange new worlds; To seek out new life and new civilizations; To boldly go where no man has gone before!

Star Trek: The Original Series, started in 1966, and ended its run in 1969. That’s only three years out of its intended “five-year mission”. Here in the real world, the space race was well underway, but no one had set foot on the Moon just yet.

For the films that followed the original series run, as well as the Next Generation, Voyager, Deep Space Nine and all the attendant films since, the duration of the series has been left open-ended. The Next Generation announced a “continuing mission”, and ran from 1987 to 1994, a full seven seasons. Voyager started with the understanding that it could take 75 years for the crew to get back home. It, too, ran seven seasons.

But the notion of that “five-year mission” is still part of the Star Trek lore. And now, with the Star Trek reboot movies, we just may be visiting that mission once more, with Kirk, Spock, Bones, Uhura, Scotty, Sulu, Chekhov, and a handful of redshirts to round out the away team.

Actor Zachary Quinto, who plays the role of Spock in the new movies, told attendees at the Television Critics Press Tour:

“I think the five-year mission will be a part of this next film in some way. We’re coming up on the 50th anniversary of one of the most iconic sci-fi series in entertainment history, so it’s inherently an ongoing story. But I do think that we’ll feel some sense of evolution in these characters that’s been building through the first few films.”

Since the conceit behind Star Trek (2009) and Into Darkness (2013) is that this Trek universe is an alternate timeline to the original, the construct of a five-year mission could easily be filled with old, familiar characters and species (e.g. Klingons, Romulans, etc.), as well as things that weren’t encountered until the Next Generation (Borg, Bajorans, etc.). And, of course, there is always the possibility of all-new encounters.

“The script is being tightened and polished and finished,” Quinto said, “and I imagine that the phone will be ringing in the next few months to see when we’ll go back into production.”

Robert Orci is set to direct.

Image via YouTube