Jun 22, 2009 10:37 AM
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Were you sad the U.S.S. Enterprise was such a sausage-fest in the most recent Star Trek? Then there's good news: co-writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman tell io9 the next film could feature one of Trek's most iconic women.
Yeoman Janice Rand, with her imposing blonde beehive, only appeared in a handful of Trek episodes before disappearing (reportedly because star William Shatner wanted Kirk to have more the opportunity to mack on different women every week.) But since she has a fairly major role in "Charlie X" and "The Enemy Within," she's always stood out as one of the most significant female characters on the show, up there with Uhura and Nurse Chapel.
Talking to Orci and Kurtzman about Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen, we asked them about strong female characters. The first movie featured Rachael Taylor as Maggie Madsen, the hacker who figures out what's going on with those alien robots before everyone else does. We were sad that Maggie doesn't turn up in the new movie, and Orci explained why:
We ended up going to a whole new set of characters, and Maggie's replacement starts to feel like it was organic given the theme of this new story. We always [want to have strong female characters]. Going back to movies like Aliens, Ripley was the original ass-kicker. And that goes back to Westerns, even. So we felt like we always like to have a strong woman at the center of the movie.
Kurtzman adds:
Having made our bones on Xena and Alias... that's why it leads to decisions, like in the first movie, Sam wants to get the cute girl. But she can't just be that, so she's actually going to know more about cars than Sam. She's the one who knows that stuff, not him. That's why we had Maggie. She's the one who figures that stuff out, and not the uniformed men at the Pentagon. That always makes it more interesting for us.
So on that note, we asked if it's possible that more of the original female characters from Trek might turn up in the sequel. Could we see Yeoman Rand in Trek 2? Kurtzman says:
It's possible, for sure... We're going back and watching the shows again, just getting a refresher course and training before we jump back in.
Here's hoping the sequel does feature more resourceful, interesting women characters — and Uhura gets to be more than a love interest for Spock. And an appearance by Rand, maybe as an ensign this time around, would be terrific — even though her main function in the original series was to be hit on by horny super-teens and bestial Kirk-twins, she always seemed to have a core of strength and integrity inside of her. She's certainly not afraid to claw your face off if you get out of line. It would be great to see that brought out more. The recent movie had no problem reimagining characters like Scotty and Chekov somewhat, so there's no reason we couldn't see a slightly different Janice Rand. Here's hoping!
Send an email to Charlie Jane Anders, the author of this post, at charliejane@io9.com.
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