Star Trek Needs Sequels, Not Prequels

Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers present for Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Picard.

Alright, let’s talk about some troubling Star Trek news, I guess.

First of all, I want to say that more Star Trek on our screens is a good thing. I always like to give that caveat before I say anything even remotely negative about announcements and rumours because I know I can be misinterpreted. Given Paramount’s dire financial situation, recent Star Trek cancellations on the small screen, and the repeated failures of big-screen Star Trek projects in recent years, the fact that we’re getting announcements about new Star Trek content at all is a positive development. The franchise isn’t dead and doesn’t seem to be going away in the immediate term – and that is good news.

But – and you knew there had to be a “but” after all of that – recent Star Trek film announcements are not only not what I’d hoped to see, but I think they really represent how out-of-touch Paramount is and how far removed its executives have become from the Star Trek fan community. The kinds of projects Paramount wants to greenlight seem to be poised to repeat recent and not-so-recent mistakes, and also appear to be based on a total misread of where Trekkies – and a more casual wider audience – are right now.

Earlier in the year we talked about the announcement of a Kelvin timeline prequel film, as well as the prospects of a sequel to 2016’s Beyond. It’s recently been reported that the so-called “origin story” is moving ahead, with talks ongoing to sign Simon Kinberg – who previously worked on films like Deadpool, The Martian, and the X-Men series – as a producer. Kinberg may also have a role in guiding or producing future Star Trek films after that.

This prequel is not the kind of project I’d choose to make if I were in charge of the franchise over at Paramount – and it seems to me that Paramount is repeating and doubling-down on the same mistake that the Star Trek franchise has been making for almost a quarter of a century. Going all the way back to the announcement of Enterprise around the turn of the millennium, prequels are just not what most fans have wanted to see. You can see that from Enterprise’s lacklustre viewing figures during its original run, leading to its premature cancellation.

Moreover, Discovery had the same problem when it was announced in 2016 – and that show’s place in the Star Trek timeline caused it a plethora of issues. As I said when I took a longer look at Discovery’s creation and its status as a prequel – which you can read for yourself by clicking or tapping here – the show’s writers taking Burnham and the crew out of the 23rd Century in the Season 2 finale seems to be a tacit admission of the fact that it should never have been set in that time period to begin with.

Most of Paramount’s executives and key investors are old. They’re of the baby boomer generation, and while I doubt whether any of them are or ever were Star Trek fans, when they think of the franchise their thoughts naturally turn to The Original Series – to Kirk, Spock, and Dr McCoy, and the adventures of the original Enterprise. When they consider pitches for new Star Trek projects and think about where to spend their money, that unconscious bias is present – and I would argue that it’s leading to them pushing the Star Trek franchise in very much the wrong direction.

Discovery would have always been a controversial production, I suspect, but one of the biggest problems fans had with the show was its place in the timeline. Very little about Discovery in its first two seasons would’ve needed to change if the series had been set a decade after Nemesis instead of ten years before Kirk’s voyages aboard the Enterprise. Some character details would need to be different, but the fundamentals of the show would have worked the same – and it wouldn’t have picked up the controversy and bad feelings that came with being a prequel.

The biggest request from Star Trek fans over the past year-and-a-bit has been a Picard spin-off. Originally pitched by Terry Matalas, Picard’s showrunner during its second and third seasons, the series tentatively titled Star Trek: Legacy has proven incredibly enticing to Trekkies. However, with Matalas recently being tapped by Marvel and Disney to work on new projects for them, Legacy as originally envisioned seems not to be going ahead. That was always a possibility – and for all we know, the original pitch might’ve been crap. But the point remains: if Paramount was listening to Star Trek fans, a sequel, not a prequel, would surely be the next Star Trek project.

Let’s assume that this “origin story” film goes ahead. A dangerous assumption given Paramount’s breathtaking incompetence, perhaps, but for the sake of argument we’ll entertain it for a moment. What would a film like that realistically do for Star Trek? It could connect with the Kelvin films, perhaps, and call back to Enterprise in some capacity. It could perhaps harken back to First Contact, which continues to be a pretty popular film, or maybe even scrape the barrel by making reference to some of the events in Picard’s awful second season. But beyond that? What could a film in this era explore that we don’t already know or can’t reasonably infer from other Star Trek projects?

There are events in Star Trek that we’ve never seen on screen but that shows or films have made reference to. Some of these might actually be interesting to explore in more detail one day – but not as a flagship big-screen project. These are the kinds of incidental stories that might work as one-off episodes in longer seasons, or perhaps as standalone episodes of Short Treks. Committing movie-level money to a prequel set in between Star Trek’s least successful series and most controversial series… it just feels idiotic. It’s indicative of a corporation and group of executives who are too far removed from the fan community.

I can just about see the case for a Beyond sequel – a fourth Kelvin timeline film. I still don’t agree that it would be the best way for Paramount to spend money on Star Trek, but given the relative financial success of the Kelvin films and the alternate reality setting that’s a step away from the prime timeline, I can at least understand why a return to that cast and series would be appealing. But that doesn’t apply to a different prequel, one set before the events of 2009’s Star Trek and basically everything else in the franchise.

Since its inception in the ’60s – and even more so since The Next Generation premiered – Star Trek has been a franchise that looked forward and moved forward. The core of Star Trek is about the future, and representing a positive, optimistic vision of the 23rd and 24th Centuries that can be inspiring to people today. Creating a prequel that looks back at Star Trek’s own fictional history felt wrong when Enterprise did it, re-telling the stories of Kirk and co. felt strange when the Kelvin films did it, and creating yet another prequel didn’t go to plan when Discovery did it, either. Star Trek is not a franchise well-suited to prequels and it never has been. If there is to be more Star Trek in the months and years ahead – and I hope that there will be – it should continue to move the timeline forward.

I don’t know what might be in the script for this supposed “origin film” that sparked all of this discussion. But based on everything I’ve seen as a viewer from Enterprise through the Kelvin films to Discovery, Strange New Worlds, and beyond, I can’t imagine that it could only ever work as a prequel. With some tweaks and adaptations, I would bet the farm that this new story would work just as well – perhaps even better – if it was set in the Picard era or beyond. Making it a sequel, not a prequel, would not only give Trekkies what we’ve been asking for more of for a long time, but it would probably make for a better, more solid standalone film – and perhaps even create something that could serve as a launchpad for new films and TV shows.

If Paramount wants to set a Star Trek project in an era with few direct connections to the rest of the franchise, that option exists as well. Shooting beyond Discovery’s 32nd Century could be a possibility, but I would also advocate for a film or show set in the 26th or 27th Centuries – far removed from the events of The Next Generation era. If new characters aboard a new ship are going to have a new, disconnected adventure, why not go down that route? There would be far fewer pitfalls as there’d be basically no need to worry about the integrity of “canon” or having to avoid using certain storylines or factions.

I really hope that Paramount’s executives will listen to feedback. I’m sure I won’t be the only one sighing dejectedly at the announcement of another prequel and trying to make the case for more Star Trek set further along the timeline instead. I’m not asking for everything to be a direct sequel to everything else – look at the problems that approach is causing for Marvel and, to a lesser extent, Star Wars. Not everything in Star Trek has to be connected. But if you gave me a choice between a film set fifty years before The Original Series or fifty years after Picard, I wouldn’t even hesitate. And I would argue that a plurality of the fan community, if not an outright majority, is also longing to see the next Star Trek project set somewhere in the 25th Century or beyond.

Now that I’ve had my say, I’ll return to something I mentioned at the beginning. More Star Trek is always a good thing, and if it’s a choice between cancellation and this “origin story” film, well… I’ll take the origin story. I won’t support it wholeheartedly – I simply can’t do that right now. But if this film does end up going ahead in its currently-envisioned form, I will watch it, review it, and do my best to be supportive of it as the next part of Star Trek. There’s precedent here, in a sense: while I wasn’t a big fan of Enterprise during its original run and wasn’t the biggest supporter of the Kelvin films, they all had standout moments. Perhaps more importantly, Enterprise, the Kelvin films, and Discovery all carried the flag for the Star Trek franchise and eventually led to the expansion that we’ve seen in the first half of the 2020s. Better things came out of all of those projects, and without their existence Star Trek would be in a very different place today.

Paramount continues to surprise me with some of these moves. I’m not sure that there’s much oversight or management of the Star Trek franchise at the moment, and there’s certainly no readily apparent picture of longer-term goals or ambitions emerging. Cinema and streaming projects remain totally disconnected from one another – despite Paramount’s reunification several years ago bringing them back together. I will keep my ear to the ground about this “origin story” idea, the Beyond sequel, and any other Star Trek projects… but I don’t have high hopes for any of them right now, and I remain disappointed that Legacy doesn’t seem to have been seriously considered.

Regardless, if there’s news, further announcements, or anything else about an upcoming Star Trek film, I’ll do my best to cover it and share my thoughts with you here on the website! And if any of these films ever actually enter production and end up being released – which I have my doubts about – I’ll certainly be previewing them and reviewing them as well. I hope this has been interesting – and not too depressing – as we look ahead to one possible vision of Star Trek’s future.

---

The Star Trek franchise – including all films, shows, and properties discussed above – is the copyright of Paramount Global. No release dates have been set for the sequel to Star Trek Beyond, the “origin story” film, or any other Star Trek film. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.