Noah Hawley Says His 'Star Trek' Film Will Have A Direct Connection To Franchise Canon (If It Ever Gets Made)

While Star Trek is thriving on television again, Paramount can't quite figure out what to do with the property when it comes to new movies. Fargo and Legion creator Noah Hawley was hired to develop a Trek movie that's since been put on hold, which would have featured a new cast of characters separate from the ones that appeared in the recent trilogy of Bad Robot movies. Now, in a new interview, Hawley explains that his film will have a direct connection to the established franchise's canon – assuming, of course, that it ever actually receives a greenlight at the studio.

In a new profile about the acclaimed showrunner in advance of Fargo's fourth season premiere on FX, Variety reports that Paramount's Noah Hawley Star Trek movie already had a completed script and designers hired when it was put on ice last month. Not much was known about the film beyond the fact that it involved "a virus that wipes out vast parts of the known universe," and that virus connection to our current pandemic reality may be part of the reason that Paramount's Emma Watts decided to press pause and assess the best course of action for the Trek film franchise.

But now Hawley is teasing an additional detail about his proposed movie: if it gets made in its current form, it will feature a direct connection to the existing films in a way that's similar to a connection between the first season of Fargo and the Coen Brothers movie of the same name. Fargo season 1 spoilers ahead, but after following a roster of brand new characters on an adventure that's seemingly unconnected from the events of the film, there's a moment in which we learn that Oliver Platt's Stavros Milos has found the money that Steve Buscemi's Carl Showalter buried in the snow at the end of the movie.

"We're not doing Kirk and we're not doing Picard," Hawley says of his Trek film. "It's a start from scratch that then allows us to do what we did with Fargo, where for the first three hours you go, 'Oh, it really has nothing to do with the movie,' and then you find the money. So you reward the audience with a thing that they love."

That obvious thing would be to create a connection to the recent Chris Pine/Zachary Quinto/Zoe Saldana trilogy. But Hawley's history of crafting unexpected moments leaves me wondering if he might connect to a totally different era of Trek lore. Maybe these new characters stumble across V'ger from the original movie, or make a discovery that reframes what we think we know about where they fall on the franchise's timeline. Feel free to speculate wildly in the comments below – I'd love to hear your guesses.