Leonard McCoy payment for his appearance. In the "" episode "", McCoy mentions he has a daughter, Joanna. Although Chekov's friend Irina in the original series episode "The Way to Eden" was originally written as McCoy's daughter, it was changed before the episode was shot. In the 2009 "Star Trek" film, which takes place in an "alternate, parallel" reality, McCoy and Kirk become friends at Starfleet Academy, which McCoy joins after a divorce that he says "left [him] nothing but [his] bones." This line, improvised by Urban, explains how McCoy earned the nickname "Bones". McCoy later helps get Kirk posted aboard the
Cultural influence of Star Trek timeline, was developed with the partial hope to resurrect the franchise. Jeff Jensen of "Entertainment Weekly", in reviewing the new film states that the "Star Trek" franchise had "devolved into a near-irrelevant cultural joke, likely to inspire giggles and unprintable curses from even its most ardent supporters." Leonard Nimoy wondered in 2003 whether or not the franchise "had run its course". Director J. J. Abrams argued "people [may not] even understand what "Star Trek" means anymore", and joked that a parody like "Galaxy Quest" which "mocks the paradigm" made the task of producing a credible "Star Trek" film that much