The Only Way Star Trek’s Upcoming Reboot Can Work

By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 2 minutes ago

After years of trying to get this project out of dry dock, Paramount finally confirmed that we’ll be getting a new Star Trek movie. The fandom is generally divided on this announcement. Some are happy that we’ll finally get Trek on the big screen again, and the fact that it will be written by Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley (the duo who wrote the excellent Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves) is just icing on the cake. Others are quite unhappy that we are bidding a definitive goodbye to Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, and the rest of the Kelvinverse cast in favor of a new continuity. 

That new continuity is actually what worries me the most about this upcoming film. It’s weird enough that Star Trek is getting its third, brand-new timeline, which will inevitably make things weird for casual audiences. But so far, Paramount hasn’t commented on how this new movie will affect plans for future Trek TV shows. As a lifelong fan of the franchise, I’ve got some friendly advice for Paramount: unless the TV shows retain the continuity that began with Star Trek: The Original Series, this franchise is doomed.

Set Your Phaser To “Reboot”

The franchise got its first real reboot with JJ Abrams’ Star Trek in 2009. At the time, Paramount worried that Star Trek’s decades of tangled lore would be too much for casual moviegoers to keep up with. The solution was a time travel plot that ended up rebooting the entire universe, and this resulted in something of a creative compromise. The Trek films would take place in the new timeline known as the Kelvinverse. Meanwhile, future shows (including Discovery, Strange New Worlds, and Picard) would take place in the same timeline as shows like The Original Series, The Next Generation, and Voyager.

Now, ironically, Paramount finds itself in the exact same position. Those Kelvinverse movies did a good job of reviving the franchise, but it’s been the better part of two decades since the first one came out. Nervous that audiences might have trouble keeping up with the lore of this not-so-new continuity, the powers that be have decided to reboot the franchise yet again. While there is no firm release date or story details, we do know that the upcoming movie will be set in a continuity that is different from both the TV shows and the Kelvinverse films.

Making Audiences Sick

What is even less clear is what the future of Star Trek television looks like. By the numbers, NuTrek has been a failure: every single show except for Picard (which was planned as a three-season show) ended up getting prematurely canceled. Furthermore, Starfleet Academy’s streaming numbers were so underwhelming (one unconfirmed report claimed it only averaged 40,000 views per episode) that the show ended up getting canceled after one season. This, combined with Paramount’s upcoming acquisition of Warner Bros., may tempt executives to ditch everything that came before and set future shows in the same continuity as the upcoming movie.

Despite NuTrek’s many failings, this would be a huge mistake. If there’s one thing Star Trek fans are, well, fanatic about, it’s the franchise’s continuity. Old timers find it endlessly rewarding to see how newer episodes callback to other ones. For example, even Starfleet Academy’s biggest haters mostly enjoyed the show’s tribute to Deep Space Nine’s Captain Sisko. Similarly, Discovery’s harshest critics generally enjoyed how the entire final season was a follow-up to a mostly forgotten Star Trek: The Next Generation episode. Clearly, if any new iteration of Star Trek is to retain its legion of older fans, it simply must continue to build on the continuity begun back in 1966 with Star Trek: The Original Series. Done right, this will give Paramount the best of both worlds: new timeline movies to hook newer fans and old timeline shows to keep the older fans.

Done wrong, however, and the studio may very well doom this franchise. What if audiences reject the latest movie, only after Paramount has planned multiple TV series around it? Keeping timelines different for the films and the shows allows execs to hedge their bets rather than going all-in on a single continuity. Plus, it’s an olive branch to the legacy fans who form the core of the fandom. Keep those fans happy, and you keep the franchise alive. Drive those fans away, though, and it will die even quicker than Starfleet Academy.