The development and production of Star Trek Beyond was a rushed one, as Simon Pegg and Doug Jung were tasked with penning an entirely new script just months before filming was to begin. Indeed, after Paramount parted ways with director Roberto Orci and instead signed Fast & Furious 6 helmer Justin Lin to direct, they still had a release date to meet, and so Pegg and Jung bunkered down and put pen to paper, resulting in the film we see today. Luckily, the rushed schedule didn’t negatively impact the film, as Beyond has been garnering solid reviews—especially from the Trek faithful—and is performing quite well at the box office having accumulated $169 million worldwide after two weeks in release.

However, when Beyond hit theaters, one piece of the puzzle was missing. Star Trek Into Darkness, director J.J. Abrams’ follow-up to the swell ’09 reboot Star Trek, made a big to-do of introducing the character of Carol Marcus, played by Alice Eve. The Trek canon character played a pivotal role in that film’s plot, and was at the end of the film set up as a new family member of the Enterprise crew. However, when Beyond rolled around, Marcus was nowhere to be seen.

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Image via Paramount

Appearing on the official Star Trek Podcast (via The Playlist), Pegg explained why they made the decision not to include Marcus as part of the Star Trek Beyond mission:

“With this it felt like we would under-serve her if we included her, she might end up feeling like she hadn’t been given the amount of screen-time she deserves, so rather than bring her in and just have her be a supporting role, like, have her not be in this one, and when the time comes [bring her back]. The worst thing to do would be to have her in the film and have that character be killed, and that felt like a cynical thing to do. We thought rather than have Carol Marcus not be used to a reasonable capacity, let’s just not include her, have her be alive, in canon, and ready to come back at any time.”

That’s totally fair, and makes a great deal of sense. In fact, plenty of other franchises could take a lesson from this line of thinking. Too often characters with potential are either backburnered or killed off prematurely simply because the story of the film in question was too big to correctly service them. By sidelining Marcus, Pegg and Jung have ensured that the character can return further down the line when she can be given a full, satisfying character arc. And with the Enterprise crew scattered to the winds for much of Beyond, no doubt Pegg and Jung already had their hands full trying to service the characters that did make it into the film.

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Image via Paramount Pictures