Alex Kurtzman recently inked a five-year deal to become the new chief of Star Trek on television, with a mandate to create a large swath of new content. Speculation about what new projects will emerge has been rampant. One persistent rumour involved the return of Patrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard. Over the weekend, Stewart himself appeared at the annual Star Trek Las Vegas convention to confirm that the rumours are true: Picard is back.
Details are sparse at this stage. Stewart has suggested that the show will follow Picard twenty years on from his last onscreen adventure in Star Trek Nemesis but offered no specifics. Even with such sketchy details, however, there is a lot to unpack regarding the future of the franchise.
Finally Moving Forward in Time
If Stewart is correct about the show’s place in the timeline, it will be set around the year 2400. For context, the ending of Voyager (the last Star Trek show set in the 24th century) is in 2378, Nemesis takes place in 2379, and the destruction of Romulus (from the backstory of the 2009 reboot) occurs in 2387. Outside of a few alternate timelines in time-travel episodes, the turn of the 25th century has never been depicted in Star Trek before.
This should satisfy fans who have been unhappy with the franchise’s penchant for prequels. It signals a new willingness on the part of creators to explore the new and unfamiliar future of the franchise’s timeline. It also represents a potentially massive shift in how CBS and its licensing partners have treated the post-Nemesis era.
Throwing Out Non-Canon Stories
Casual Star Trek fans mostly ignore the licensed tie-in books that accompany the film and TV productions in the franchise. None of them are canon, and they only exist because there is a niche market of die-hard fans who are eager for more adventures with old characters. In particular, the books set in the post-Nemesis era have created enough of their own mythology to fill several TV shows. Picard and Beverly Crusher get married and have a son. A Borg invasion lays waste to the Alpha Quadrant and ends with the total annihilation of the cyborg race. Deep Space Nine is destroyed. The list goes on.
The writers of these books have been free to take significant liberties with stories and characters because CBS had no plans to contradict them onscreen. Now, however, they are likely to be swept aside like the “Legends” of Disney-era Star Wars. It is possible that elements of the non-canon mythology will inform the new status quo, but the details are certainly too esoteric for casual audiences. This will probably lead to a soft relaunch of the novels, with more direct oversight from Kurtzman and his writers.
Tying Up Loose Ends
On the canon side of things, this also marks a shift in terms of what content the writers are willing to deal with. No TV show or movie has addressed the massive political shifts implied by Shinzon’s unsuccessful coup or the destruction of Romulus. Likewise, the aftermath of the Dominion War has not been explored in depth. It is also unclear what impact the events of Voyager’s finale had on the Borg.
The new show may ignore all of this in favour of a different story. However, the fact that we are getting a non-prequel series at all suggests that the writers are willing to take on these questions at some point. If more productions set post-Nemesis occur, they will be forced to provide answers eventually.
A New Golden Age of Televised Trek
The announcement of the new show, and subsequent remarks by CBS execs that they want new Star Trek “all the time,” tells us one thing: Discovery is the new TNG. The Next Generation kicked off eighteen straight years of Trek on TV, from its debut in 1987 to the end of Enterprise in 2005. Now Discovery has been such a runaway success that CBS is exploring every possible avenue to create as much new content as possible. Between the recently-announced Short Treks, the rumoured animated series, and the long-gestating Khan project, Stewart’s new show is the first of this new phase of the franchise to emerge — but it is unlikely to be the last.
Make it so.
Season 2 of Star Trek: Discovery arrives in 2019. The Patrick Stewart-starring show is in development.
