The Best Marvel Movie Surprisingly Links Two Star Trek Icons
While it didn’t exactly blow fans away, one of the most exciting things about Star Trek: Generations was that it brought the franchise’s two most famous captains together. Patrick Stewart and William Shatner teamed up in order to save millions, but Kirk’s sudden death seemingly put the kibosh on seeing these characters together again.
While it wasn’t part of this franchise, the best Marvel movie surprisingly brought these Star Trek icons back together: in X-Men: Days of Future Past, The Original Series episode “The Naked Time” is playing, allowing William Shatner to appear in the same film as Patrick Stewart.
Star Trek Featured In Days Of Future Past
As a fanboy, it’s cool to see a Marvel movie featuring two of my favorite Star Trek icons, but it’s worth noting that the clip from The Original Series is most likely there to reinforce the film’s strange plot.
Taking its cue from the comic storyline of the same name, Days of Future Past begins in a dystopian future where the surviving mutants live in fear of being hunted down by the Sentinels.
Unlike in Star Trek, Patrick Stewart’s Charles Xavier doesn’t have to abide by a temporal Prime Directive, so he goes along with a plan to alter the past in order to save the future.
Sending Wolverine Back
Unlike in the original comic (which focused on Kitty Pryde rather than Logan), the plan involves sending the consciousness of the future Wolverine into his body in the past…specifically, 1973.
There, he interacts with the characters from X-Men: First Class, providing a great narrative excuse to bring the cast of both X-Men franchises together into a single film. The movie still makes for one of Marvel’s most ambitious crossovers, and (fittingly enough) its time-travel shenanigans explain the choice of which Star Trek episode appears onscreen.
Star Trek Episode The Naked Time
The episode in question is “The Naked Time,” which we see Hank McCoy watching in the film (it should surprise literally nobody, by the way, that this brainy Beast is a Star Trek fan).
The episode only involves time travel at the very end when Kirk orders an experimental warp core procedure to keep the Enterprise (which has been ravaged by an infection that dramatically alters crew behavior) from crashing into a planet.
This inexplicably causes the ship to go back in time 71 hours, with Sulu noting that the ship’s chronometer moved backward during their travel.
Star Trek There Because Of Time Travel
Long story not very short, it seems likely that Marvel included this Star Trek: The Original Series episode because it very nominally mentioned time travel.
It does make the plot a bit more plausible, though: Beast and Xavier are the two characters Wolverine has to convince of his tale that he has come to them through the future. They end up believing him, of course, but knowing that one-half of this duo is a Star Trek fan helps explain why Beast would be willing to believe such a crazy story.
Believable Use Of Star Trek
Speaking of Beast, this iconic Marvel character being a Star Trek fan in 1973 is one of the most believable elements of Days of Future Past.
Thanks to a fan campaign that got Star Trek a third season, the show became a staple of syndication and accordingly exploded in popularity when college students began tuning in. It’s always tough to pin down ages in these films, but Beast appears to be in his early twenties, making him the perfect age to be “boldly going” in the early ‘70s.
For Fans Of Both Franchises
As Marvel crossovers with Star Trek go, this example is pretty mild…certainly milder than the insane novel where the mutants and Captain Picard’s crew must team up.
Still, as a fan of both franchises, I always smile when I see Beast watching one of the stranger episodes of The Original Series. Since he was doomed to turn blue and scary from time to time, it’s too bad Wolverine never had time to ask Beast the most important question: how does he feel about the Andorians?
