In addition to returning as Scotty, Simon Pegg also co-wrote 2016’s Star Trek Beyond, which introduced the breakout character of Jaylah, played by Sofia Boutella. At this month’s STLV: Trek To Vegas convention, Pegg revealed he worked on a plan to follow up Beyond with a movie focusing on Jaylah. He also spoke more about writing Beyond and his time with Trek.

Jaylah’s movie

As we reported earlier, Simon Pegg feels with the Skydance merger complete, now is the right time to finally follow up Beyond with a sequel. At STLV, he revealed that he has already worked on a sort of sequel, telling the Vegas crowd:

“[Beyond co-writer] Doug [Jung] and I, we were going to write a spin-off about the character of Jaylah called ‘Jaylah and the Wolf.’ Sophia [Boutella], she did such a great job with her, and she was such a great character. We had this idea that Jaylah was going to go Starfleet Academy and she was going to be put into a group of cadets who were like problem cadets, who were called ‘The Wolf Pack’ and they were sent off to a real planet called Wolf 359 and would get into an adventure on this planet. Yeah, for a while we were working on that, but in the end, it just didn’t happen.”

Beyond ended up underperforming (which Pegg attributes to bad marketing), so it’s no surprise Paramount didn’t bite at the idea of a spin-off about a new character. In fact, the studio hasn’t been able to develop any new Star Trek feature in the last decade. The new studio management is making a return to the big screen “a priority,” so we will see what that brings.

Little is known about Jaylah; we don’t even have a name for her species, making her an intriguing character. In 2017, Jaylah did end up being seen at Starfleet Academy in IDW’s (non-canon) Boldly Go comic book series set in the Kelvin Universe. If a “Star Trek 4” ever materializes, it’s possible Jaylah will be back. Pegg sees the film being set years after the Enterprise returns from its five-year mission, so it’s likely Jaylah has graduated from the Academy and could be serving as a Starfleet officer.

Putting more Trek into Beyond… but not Archer’s beagle

At STLV, moderator Scott Mantz noted that of the three Kelvin movies, Beyond had the most canon connections. Pegg explained that since it was the third entry, there was more leeway:

“It was great because we were given free rein. The thing is, I think with [Star Trek 2009] what happened was the Star Trek movies were kind of struggling a little bit to find a broader audience. And honestly, these things always boil down to economics. As much as we love the art of it, and we’re here because we love Star Trek, not the amount of money it makes. They had to find a way to try and sort of reinvigorate Star Trek for the broader audience. And so [producer/director] J.J. [Abrams] kind of injected a little Star Wars energy, and made it a bit more swashbuckling. The series was always very philosophical. It was very thoughtful. There was very little action. It was about ideas. It was about propositions.

By the time we came to Beyond it felt like, ‘Okay, so we have our audience, now, maybe we can try and marry that tradition with what has to be a more sort of spectacular version of Star Trek with special effects and action and stuff’… We had done two movies and the Enterprise hadn’t really left our solar system. And we wanted to be out on the five-year mission. And so we came up with the idea of Yorktown [station], which I’m sure all of you know, was the original name of the Enterprise.”

However, they didn’t have an entirely free rein. Earlier in the panel, Pegg talked about developing the role of Scotty for the 2009 movie, which introduced the character in a sort of exile because he tested an experimental transporter “on Admiral Archer’s prized beagle,” referring to Jonathan Archer from Enterprise, who famously had a pet beagle named Porthos (decades later, it would presumably have been a different beagle). When writing the third movie, he wanted to do a callback, but he explains why it didn’t make the cut:

“[In Star Trek 2009] he’s been exiled for making the Admiral Archer’s beagle disappear, which I always wanted to go back to. We actually spoke about this [during the writing of] Star Trek Beyond. Doug Jung and I would say: Should we just have a scene where a beagle just materializes out of nowhere? [makes ‘fzzzzz’ sound and laughs] Every film that you make, you have to kind of make it as if, and this can be problematic at times, you have to make each film as if no one’s ever seen Star Trek before, which sometimes it’s difficult for the fans, because they’re like, “Yeah, I know this stuff.” Or they would appreciate references to previous Star Treks.

With Beyond we tried to do that quite a lot. Doug and I would watch episodes the of The Original Series every night when we were writing and take down the names of certain red shirts, and details that we could put into the script that if you miss, wouldn’t matter, but if you got, you’d feel spoken to. That was our kind of aim with that.”

So that poor beagle is still out there somewhere. Maybe the fourth Kelvin movie will see Archer’s dog saved from the void.

More STLV 2025

STLV is now over, but we have much more to report from the 5-day Star Trek event. Check out our STLV tag  on social for all of our coverage so far.

Simon Pegg at STLV 2025 (Photo: TrekMovie.com/Jon Spencer)

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