Howiya, Commanders!
Paul here from the Star Trek Fleet Command Narrative team! You might remember me from such written content as the ship flavor text you probably didn’t know was there, or the missions that give you that sweet, sweet Dilithium you crave.

You don’t really hear from us Narrative Designers very often, mostly because Bek very rarely lets us out of our writing cave. Luckily, I stole the keys while she wasn’t looking, so now I’ve got an opportunity to talk to you about something that’s been very near and dear to my heart since I was a wee boy… Galaxy Quest!

Narrative Trek and the Challenge of Galaxy Quest

Of course, all of us on the Narrative team are enthusiastic Trekkies. Writing for Star Trek Fleet Command involves a huge amount of watching classic and new Trek, as well as painstaking research into the incredibly deep lore of the universe. I’ve learned more about Tribble reproduction than I’m comfortable admitting, and I could probably name more Romulan senators than Irish presidents. 

It’s not a stretch, then, to imagine that I was drawn to Galaxy Quest early on as well. To this day, I adore what that movie represents. A parody of Trek, but not one written with spite or ill intentions. It pokes fun at the tropes while being a soulful love letter to history’s greatest science-fiction series. It points out the shortcomings of the era’s writing while highlighting its cultural impact. You can see that most within its iconic main trio, played to perfection by Tim Allen, Sigourney Weaver, and the eternal Alan Rickman, who just threw themselves into the role and seemed like they had a great time doing it.

God, I freaking love this movie, you guys.

And, I’ll admit, that made it incredibly daunting to write for. Comedy is a really, really hard thing to pull off. Stephen King once said that making people laugh and making people scared are the two greatest challenges a writer can face, and that is most definitely true. We proved with Lower Decks that we can tackle comedy, but Galaxy Quest is a different beast entirely. We’re crossing over with a movie written as an express parody of the world we write in! How on Earth am I supposed to make that story work?

The Story Board

We started by throwing away the idea that this would just be a Galaxy Quest re-hash. We didn’t want to just re-tread the same ground as the OG, we wanted to do something transformative, to say something like the original movie set out to do. 

Now, what tools did we have in our space-belt to do that? Well, we had the whole Star Trek universe, didn’t we?
So that gave us an idea. The entirety of Galaxy Quest is a Hero’s Journey but it’s one in which the heroes are only ever really compared against their villains. What happens if we take the Galaxy Quest crew, put them into a universe with radically different power scaling, and paired them up with some real powerhouse heroes?

That in itself would have been funny, but we didn’t just want it to be a cavalcade of references and “Hey, this is a thing from Star Trek, isn’t that hilarious!?”. 

The best comedies have, at their very core, a sense of emotion and soul. We wanted an emotional throughline that would guide our story and give our characters depth. 

Piecing The Story Together

And so, we settled on our core concept… Jason Nesmith teaming up with the character he was written to parody, James Tiberius Kirk! We wanted to tell the story of a man who spent his whole life pretending to be a hero, suddenly meeting someone who is one, and being forced to compare himself with that hero.

That emotional throughline of Nesmith seeking Kirk’s approval and eventually proving to himself that he is capable of true heroism is what our whole story is about. Everything else, Sarris’ return, his team-up with the Klingons, every joke and wisecrack, needed to come back and reinforce that emotional throughline. If it didn’t advance Nesmith’s development or his relationship with his crew, it was scrapped (unless it was really funny).

We also wanted to tie in directly with the awesome Invasion feature that the team put a ton of work into! That was what led us to our Klingon/Fatu-Kray alliance story beat, which also helped to solidify the parallels between Kirk and Nesmith, as their longtime enemies teamed up to conquer the galaxy. 

The work didn’t stop there, though. We wanted every facet of this arc to feel like Galaxy Quest. Every piece of flavor text, every name, every hostile, and every event was designed and written to evoke the same sense of wonder and tongue-in-cheek humor that so delighted us all in the movie.

All in all, this was probably the most fun we’ve had working on a tentpole in a long time and I genuinely can’t wait to see all of your reactions to the Galaxy Quest missions.

So with that, I’ll leave you to enjoy the first crossover in STFC’s history. We truly hope it is as wonderful for you to play as it was for us to make.

Talk to you again soon, Commanders, and until next time, remember…

Never give up! Never Surrender!