Star Trek (original films)

Abrams recast Kirk, Spock, McCoy and the rest, and told the origin again for a new audience. The interesting part is the mechanism. Rather than declaring the older films void, the 2009 film writes a time-travel incursion that splits the timeline, so both continuities stay canon and the original is left undisturbed. Leonard Nimoy plays the original Spock inside the new film to make the join explicit: a remake that argues, in story, that it is not replacing anything.

Nicholas Meyer wrote Khan in The Wrath of Khan as Ahab, and put the novel on his shelf to say so.

• Khan's last words are Ahab's: "From hell's heart I stab at thee"
• A captain destroys himself and his crew chasing one enemy across space
• Meyer has discussed the Melville model in interviews and in his memoir

Filed LOW because it shapes one film of six.

Star Trek VI takes its title from Hamlet's soliloquy, "the undiscovered country", which the film repurposes to mean the future after the Cold War rather than death. Its Klingon general Chang quotes Shakespeare throughout, and the dinner scene has the Klingons claim the plays read better "in the original Klingon". One film of six, hence LOW.