We’re currently in a place where there’s no active Star Trek show in production, but that doesn’t mean that people aren’t trying. While we still wait for a bit more of Trek‘s future, the team behind one of those remaining TV shows, Strange New Worlds, still has some hope there might be a way to keep the series’ premise (and its sets) going.
That idea is Star Trek: Year One, a long-discussed pitch that would pick up where Strange New Worlds is expected to leave off, covering the very earliest days of Captain Kirk’s command of the USS Enterprise. We already know that the last episode of Strange New Worlds‘ fifth and final season has cast a new Doctor McCoy and Sulu to join the plenty of familiar faces we have in Strange New Worlds‘ cast, so it certainly seems like the series will end in a place where a spin-off show could pick up straight away.
But previously, Year One was just a hope of Strange New Worlds‘ creators. Now, it’s an actual project they’ve pitched to Paramount.
“We think it would be a great [show], it’s the next thing for Star Trek, we think, in the story that we’ve been telling,” Strange New Worlds producer and co-showrunner Henry Alonso Meyers recently told TrekMovie about the potential for the show. “But it’s out of our hands… Yeah, we’ve brought them a lot. We’ve done a lot to give to them. It’s in their hands right now. They’re taking a look at it, trying to decide it. I mean, there’s a lot of love for our show over there, and obviously a lot of love for Star Trek.”
While Strange New Worlds has wrapped filming both its fourth and fifth seasons, post-production is still well underway on the show, so it’s still very much an ongoing concern even as Paramount itself undergoes its own vast changes and tries to chart a new future for what Star Trek can be. While no new shows have been confirmed—just two more seasons of Strange New Worlds and at least one more season of Starfleet Academy—the studio has at least begun work on a new Star Trek movie project with the Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves duo John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein.
But interestingly, according to Alonso, Strange New Worlds‘ sets are currently still standing at the CBS stages in Mississauga, Ontario. “Well, our sets have not been destroyed yet. That is what I can say,” Meyers continued. “That makes this the big decision for them, because, it’s about, do you hold on to the sets, currently? As I said, they have not been destroyed, so we’re waiting to find out what they want to do.”
Sets or otherwise, only time will tell at this point if the pitch for Year One goes forward. After all, the cast and crew of Picard pushed hard for a continuation called Legacy when it concluded, and seemingly nothing came of it. But Meyers remains optimistic—after all, the 60th anniversary year for Trek seems like a great time to announce what is essentially a redo of the original series.
“The way I tend to look at it, my job is to get [Strange New Worlds season 4 and 5] done, to finish the show,” Meyers concluded. “I try not to think about what our partners at the studio have to do, because, that’s a whole other world. Akiva [Goldsman, Strange New Worlds‘ co-showrunner] likes to go in and really push hard, and I’m probably more of a softer push on that, but my heart is where Akiva is.”
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