It was announced yesterday that Paramount has decided to adapt the 1999 Star Trek parody/modern comedy classic Galaxy Quest for the small screen. For those few of you who haven’t seen the film yet[1] Galaxy Quest is about the washed-up cast of a Star Trek-esque show being brought on a real replication of their ship by aliens who mistake their program for “historical documents”. The movie has the unlikely perfect comedy cast of Tim Allen, Sigourney Weaver, Alan Rickman, Tony Shalhoub, Sam Rockwell, and Daryl Mitchell as the crew members and none have been funnier in anything before or since. Galaxy Quest is so well regarded that George Takei himself once called it “a chillingly realistic documentary” of his time working on the original Trek. To say it was a successful parody would be an understatement in the least.

Paramount hasn’t announced what it plans to do exactly in adapting Galaxy Quest but there are a number of avenues they could take in bringing the brilliant comedy to television. They could do a remake of the movie’s plot, casting television-level actors to recreate the story of the Galaxy Quest cast getting caught up in an intergalactic conflict. They could riff on gritty Sci-Fi reboots such as Battlestar Galactica taking once silly concepts and making them acceptable for a modern age. What they’re most likely to do is do a sequel to the series starring whichever cast members they can find at their budget and recycle the best jokes until the show meets an early end. What is common to those three options is that they are all terrible and wouldn’t make for a worthy successor to the film. Luckily I have thought of a solution that could solve all of those problems.

Many people were wary when LOST producer JJ Abrams began his hipper and sexier reboot of the Star Trek series. Though longtime fans of the original series felt that Abrams had stripped everything away from Star Trek that made it great the film[2] was a huge success both critically and commercially and went on to start a new Star Trek timeline. The major way in which Abrams rebooted Star Trek without throwing everything else away was explained by having the original Leonard Nimoy Spock accidentally travel into the past and create a new timeline with the early death of Kirk’s father.

Galaxy Quest was such a success because it so lovingly mocked the tropes of the original Star Trek and the idiosyncrasies of its fans. Tim Allen was the Shatner-esque leader of the group who constantly put his own fame and ego above his castmates, Alan Rickman was the Shakespearean-level actor stuck in a thankless role similar to Leonard Nimoy, and Sigourney Weaver played the perennial bridge bunny whose only job was to relay the already verbal messages given by the ship’s computer. Perhaps most scathing was Sam Rockwell as a redshirt defined only by his appearance on a single episode in the series much like the countless science fiction extras who make a career doing convention appearances despite their ephemeral impact on whatever show they appeared on years ago. It was all covered up with a wink and heartwarming feeling, however as it’s the show’s fans who save the day in the end and use their seemingly useless knowledge of the construction of the show’s ship to safely guide the heroes through its insides.

All of these character-types and storytelling techniques were unique to the original Star Trek timeline that had been in the public consciousness for decades and was still going strong with The Next Generation. To redo these same types of jokes centering on the original Gene Rodenberry’s series wouldn’t resonate with modern audiences, most of whom have never seen an episode of Star Trek. The modern Star Trek films have been seen by millions of people so it would be best to utilize their familiarity while also taking the film’s original premise of having actors forced to recreate their roles on the original series.

And that means a time loop.

For those of you who’ve seen Galaxy Quest[3] you’ll know that a majority of the film’s plot deals with the question over what exactly the Omega-13 device is and what it does exactly. At the end of the film it is revealed that the Omega-13 is a time travel device that allows a user to travel thirteen seconds into the past to fix a single mistake. We would begin our new series with a younger and hipper cast all meeting each other on the set of Galaxy Quest. Much like the Star Trek reboot these actors would meet each other in ways that are familiar to the history of how we know the film but different enough that it shows their characters to be somewhat different than their main counterparts. That’s when Rickman’s Alexander Dane[4] travels back into time and warns the young Jason Nesmith as originally played by Tim Allen that time has been altered and the cast of Galaxy Quest is needed to put it back into place.

Now you could still have the actors be out of their element by serving on the alien-made ship by having the Thermians receiving their “historical documents” early through the time loop and causing the original discrepancies. Showing the new actors trying to film the new series while also fixing the timeline problems caused in the loop would give us a look into both making a new “not your dad’s” Star Trek while also having the high jinx of dumb actors in space. So while you’ve still got jokes that carried over from original series to film like redshirts dying first you can also thrown in Abrams’ particular spin such as the increased emphasis on action and blinding lens-flares. With this method you’re reaching fans of the original Star Trek wanting to take a shot at the reboot films, fans of the reboot wanting their version lovingly poked at, and us Questers who just want to see some more actors-in-space humor.

By Grabthar’s Hammer, this needs to happen.

[1] This will be the first time I say this, but stop reading this article right now and go watch Galaxy Quest. It’s on Netflix, nerds.

[2] Of course it did this by basically turning it into Star Wars. As someone who firmly sided with George Lucas on the Wars/Trek geekdom war I enjoyed the Abrams reboot but can understand how the longtime fans would be upset.

[3] And that would be all of you since I told you to see the movie before coming back to read this….

[4] Of course despite being the best choice Rickman would never do this so we’d probably have to settle for Tony Shalhoub’s perennially stoned Fred Kwan or Sam Rockwell’s meta redshirt Guy Fleegman on a long shot, both of whom would be amazing. I just want to see Rickman wearing his alien headdress again.