Next Star Trek Could Feature Yeoman Rand

Were you sad the U.S.S. Enterprise was such a sausage-fest in the most recent Star Trek? Then there's good news: co-writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman tell io9 the next film could feature one of Trek's most iconic women.

Yeoman Janice Rand, with her imposing blonde beehive, only appeared in a handful of Trek episodes before disappearing (reportedly because star William Shatner wanted Kirk to have more the opportunity to mack on different women every week.) But since she has a fairly major role in "Charlie X" and "The Enemy Within," she's always stood out as one of the most significant female characters on the show, up there with Uhura and Nurse Chapel.

Talking to Orci and Kurtzman about Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen, we asked them about strong female characters. The first movie featured Rachael Taylor as Maggie Madsen, the hacker who figures out what's going on with those alien robots before everyone else does. We were sad that Maggie doesn't turn up in the new movie, and Orci explained why:

We ended up going to a whole new set of characters, and Maggie's replacement starts to feel like it was organic given the theme of this new story. We always [want to have strong female characters]. Going back to movies like Aliens, Ripley was the original ass-kicker. And that goes back to Westerns, even. So we felt like we always like to have a strong woman at the center of the movie.

http://io9.com/5299914/next-star-trek-could-feature-yeoman-rand