Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers ahead for Star Trek: Picard Seasons 1-3, Star Trek: Lower Decks Seasons 1-3, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Seasons 1-2, and for other iterations of the Star Trek franchise – including upcoming and unreleased projects.
This year’s San Diego Comic-Con is winding down – and we got a lot of Star Trek news to process over the weekend! I didn’t attend Comic-Con myself, but I’ve been following the event online, and there were several big announcements, a big surprise, teasers and trailers, and comments from Star Trek stars past and present to dive into. I’ll do my best to take a look at all of the major points today!
I’m actually a little surprised that there was so much news coming out of Comic-Con; a Lower Decks trailer and something about Picard felt like certainties, but beyond that I was wondering if Paramount might hold things back and put together a repeat of last year’s “Star Trek Day” broadcast event where the franchise could be centre-stage.
An event like Comic-Con is a double-edged sword in some ways for corporations like Paramount. On the one hand, there’s a lot of attention directed at Comic-Con even from mainstream news outlets, which can be good for promotional purposes. But on the other, Star Trek has to compete for that attention with the likes of Marvel, Star Wars, Amazon’s Lord of the Rings series, and many others.
So I hope it was a success from Paramount’s point of view and managed to bring at least some new eyes to the Star Trek franchise. It feels as though Paramount put a significant amount of investment into this weekend’s events and promotional materials, so as someone who hopes to see Star Trek continuing to be a success, I’d like to think it paid off!
So let’s start with Star Trek: Picard. We didn’t get to see a proper trailer, instead getting another teaser that showed off the main cast of Season 3. I’m still quite disappointed with how the casting situation has been handled, and the fact that we aren’t going to get to spend more time with characters like Elnor and Soji feels like a backwards step – at least in some respects – for a franchise that should be moving forward. But that decision has long ago been taken, so let’s consider what we did see instead of what we didn’t!
First of all, Seven of Nine’s field commission seems to have been made permanent, and she’s seen in uniform for the first time. That was neat, and seems to further her wonderful arc from both seasons of the show so far. The design of Worf was perhaps the most interesting to me; after the Klingons had undergone a major redesign for both the Kelvin films and Discovery, the design of Worf shown off in the Picard Season 3 teaser is much closer to the post-Motion Picture Klingon look that Worf had during The Next Generation’s run.
Absent from the teaser was Brent Spiner – so we still don’t know who he may be portraying. It’s tempting to suggest that his absence may be hiding some major design secret (such as a reimagined Data, Lore, or B4) but I’m not convinced of that yet. Altan Inigo Soong (from Picard Season 1) feels like the most obvious choice for Spiner to portray, but we don’t know that for certain.
At the panel, Sir Patrick Stewart indicated that a visit to “more than one” USS Enterprise could be on the cards in Season 3, which could imply anything from travelling through time to a Search for Spock-inspired starship theft! Precisely which Enterprise(s) Picard and the crew may visit wasn’t stated – so could it be Pike’s Enterprise, perhaps?
There’s actually not much else to say about Picard right now. The teaser didn’t give much away, and aside from design choices like several characters wearing leather jackets, we don’t actually know a whole lot more about the show’s final season than we did before Comic-Con. Some of what was discussed – like a potential female villain and revisiting the Enterprise – sounds interesting, and Picard Season 3 is definitely one of my most-anticipated right now. But after an underwhelming Season 2 and the disappointment of the rather callous cutting of under-used characters, there’s no doubt it has serious work to do. Nothing I saw at Comic-Con has me anxious or worried… but because what we saw was relatively barebones, nothing blew me away either.
The upcoming video game Star Trek: Resurgence made an appearance at Comic-Con. Still scheduled for release later this year, the panel didn’t go into a lot of story details for obvious reasons, but the game seems to be shaping up nicely. It looks to be very much in line with Telltale Games titles from the past few years – the likes of Batman, The Wolf Among Us, and The Walking Dead, to name but a few – and considering that developer Dramatic Labs is made up of a number of ex-Telltale creators, that makes sense! I’ll be sure to take a detailed look at Resurgence when it launches, so stay tuned for that!
I wasn’t expecting to see any kind of teaser or trailer for Strange New Worlds Season 2; although filming recently wrapped up we’ve only just finished watching Season 1, so Season 2 is likely ten-plus months away! There was no news about a potential third season renewal either – although I suspect that’s just a matter of time!
The biggest news from the Strange New Worlds panel, though, was the surprise announcement of a crossover with Lower Decks. I’ve been longing for a proper crossover between the current crop of Star Trek shows – so this is great news! Strange New Worlds had moments of humour and comedy in its first season, so the pairing is not as unnatural as it might first appear. I’m not quite sure how the episode will blend live action and animation, though – will Boimler and Mariner appear as cartoons on a live-action set? That’s something to watch out for!
The crossover episode will air as part of Strange New Worlds’ second season sometime next year, and will be directed by Jonathan Frakes. Frakes has directed some of Discovery and Picard’s best episodes and knows the Star Trek franchise inside and out, so I’m really hopeful that this crossover will end up being as much fun as it sounds! I might not have chosen to stick Lower Decks and Strange New Worlds together, but with both shows hitting their stride after successful debut seasons, the time is right for a crossover. Hopefully it will be the first of many as Star Trek’s renaissance continues!
There were some interesting pieces of merchandise shown off at Comic-Con, too. I didn’t see any Prodigy toys or figures, but there were some prototypes from Playmates and EXO-6 showing off their latest figures of the likes of Captain Kirk, Locutus of Borg, and other classic characters. Factory Entertainment also debuted their Motion Picture insignia and Type II “dustbuster” phaser – which I hope will come to the UK!
Alex Kurtzman teased us with news that there may be two unannounced Star Trek projects in early production. With Picard finishing its run after Season 3 next year, I feel like an announcement can’t be far away for at least one new project, but what that project may be is still unknown! One potential series is the untitled Section 31 spin-off that was announced back in 2019, but my gut says that project probably won’t see the light of day. There’s been talk of a Ceti Alpha V miniseries focusing on Khan, and there’s also a rumoured Starfleet Academy series. Any of those could be announced before the end of the year – so watch this space!
I wonder, though, if one of these unannounced projects could be a 25th Century post-Picard series, perhaps even a spin-off focusing on Seven of Nine and Raffi. There seemed to be a lot of investment in new sets built for Picard Season 2 that were only seen at the beginning and end of the season, so could those sets be repurposed for a new series set aboard the new USS Stargazer? It’s all speculation at this point, of course, but I can’t help wondering!
A trailer for Lower Decks Season 3 debuted at Comic-Con, and the series has recently been confirmed to be returning on the 25th of August – in just a month’s time! The trailer picked up from where the Season 2 finale left off, with Captain Freeman in custody and the crew having to figure out what to do next. It seems like we saw several clips from the first episode – at least, that’s the impression I got – so there may be surprises still to come later in the season!
One story will take the Lower Decks crew to Deep Space Nine, and we saw the station and nearby wormhole shown off in the trailer – along with the familiar Deep Space Nine theme. I absolutely adore Deep Space Nine, and after the station was briefly glimpsed in a Season 1 flashback, it will be amazing to head back there for what will be the first post-Dominion War episode in that setting. Series creator Mike McMahan has promised us a look inside the station as well as some familiar faces, too!
One of those familiar faces seems to be the Klingon General Martok – an important recurring character in the latter part of Deep Space Nine’s run. It may be too much to hope for to get a real Deep Space Nine-inspired story that picks up some of the dangling threads that series left behind… but I can’t help it! I’d love to see the next chapter in the Deep Space Nine story unfold on screen, and even just getting a glimpse or a tease would be fantastic.
Other scenes in the trailer seemed to show a return to one of the first planets visited by Mariner and Boimler in Season 1, stealing the impounded USS Cerritos (presumably to rescue Captain Freeman), Boimler in Cetacean Ops, Rutherford and Tendi at Sisko’s restaurant in New Orleans, Boimler and Mariner acting as Starfleet recruiters, Dr T’Ana performing an amputation, and more! We saw Captain Freeman in uniform alongside Commander Ransom briefly, so I assume she will be able to escape the false charges laid against her!
The trailer looked like the familiar blend of animated comedy hijinks and throwbacks to The Next Generation era that we’ve come to expect from Lower Decks across its first two seasons. We’ve had some genuinely outstanding episodes so far – and only a couple of duds, really – so more of the same is no bad thing! I’m curious to see how the Captain Freeman cliffhanger will be resolved – will it be a one-episode story or will it rumble on for much of the season?
There was a surprising absence at Comic-Con: Prodigy. There was no mention of Prodigy (aside from a poster as part of the broader “Star Trek Universe” marketing), and that strikes me as odd. We’re supposedly going to be seeing ten more episodes of Prodigy before the end of this year to round out the show’s first season, so it was surprising that nothing was mentioned. We don’t even have an official broadcast date for the next batch of episodes – and there’s currently no new Star Trek being shown for the next few weeks.
It’s possible that we’ll come to learn more about Prodigy’s next steps and some of these in-production but unannounced projects in the near future. The 7th of September will be “Star Trek Day,” for example, and we could see another presentation of some kind to mark the occasion. Prodigy could also follow Lower Decks and kick off the second half of Season 1 in late October or early November – this would keep Star Trek on our screens through the holiday season and into 2023.
There was a comment from William Shatner about Star Trek that a lot of folks have picked up on on social media. At Comic-Con, Shater claimed that Gene Roddenberry would not approve of the direction of modern Star Trek, saying that the franchise’s creator would be “spinning in his grave” at the many of the creative and narrative decisions that have been taken. I think it’s worth pointing out that Shatner was similarly dismissive of The Next Generation, the Kelvin reboot films, and practically every Star Trek project that doesn’t feature his take on Captain Kirk. I don’t think we need to dedicate a lot of time to what Shatner has said; he’s entitled to his opinion, of course, and really the question of whether Gene Roddenberry would or wouldn’t approve of certain shows, episodes, or stories is rather a moot point. Modern Star Trek is doing some great things – and I for one hope it’s here to stay!
So I think that about wraps things up.
For me, the biggest and most interesting piece of news is the Lower Decks-Strange New Worlds crossover. A story like that has massive entertainment potential as both shows have demonstrated respect and reverence for past iterations of Star Trek. It seems to me that the crossover could be a real “made for fans” moment – but perhaps also one that could bring in new viewers to both series. Blending animation and live-action can be a challenge, but Star Trek has always risen to meet technical and creative challenges as it strives to tell new, different, and exciting stories!
The tease of new projects on the horizon is fascinating – but until we start to get information about what those projects may be, it’s hard to get overly excited! I’ve got a few different articles and lists here on the website looking at pitches and concepts – as well as putting together a few ideas of my own – so check those out if you’re interested. As and when Alex Kurtzman and the creative teams see fit to tell us more, I’ll be sure to cover it in-depth and give my thoughts!
So that was Comic-Con. Star Trek put in a decent showing this year, and it seems like we have a lot to look forward to both later this year and in 2023.
The Star Trek franchise – including all shows, films, and properties discussed above – is the copyright of Paramount Global. Some images used above courtesy of Star Trek/Paramount Global on social media. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Trekking with Dennis 