Fans are gearing up to watch Starfleet Academy, the Star Trek: Discovery spinoff that will bring back the Doctor from Voyager to help train the next generation of the Federation’s best and brightest. But Paramount is already preparing for their next big show: Star Trek: Year One, which could tell more adventures about Kirk’s first year as captain of the Enterprise.
Strange New Worlds co-creator Akiva Goldman is waiting to pitch this new show to his company’s new management, but he needs to be wary because Star Trek: Year One runs the risk of completely destroying Trekkie the fandom.
How Star Trek: Year One Could End Trekkies
The basic idea behind Star Trek: Year One is simple enough: to use the cast members playing young versions of Kirk, Spock, Scotty, and the rest to revisit Captain Kirk’s earliest days commanding the most famous ship in Starfleet. Most of the cast is already in place (minus certain TOS characters that will need to be recast, such as Dr. McCoy, Sulu, and Chekov), and it would be relatively easy to use existing Strange New Worlds sets and designs to bring this new show to life.
If it’s not handled well this show’s life will mean Star Trek’s death. It has the potential to be even more divisive than Discovery.
Paramount’s Pursuit Of Hypothetical Replacement Fans
Since the NuTrek era began, there has been tension among fans because Paramount is trying to appeal to two very different groups. The first group are the older Trek fans who have loved the franchise since the days of The Next Generation or even earlier. The second group are younger fans or hypothetical would-be fans that the network sees as the future of this franchise.
That has led to constant online debates about how well the NuTrek writers were treating canon, including arguments about everything from Spock having a secret sister to Starfleet being cool with destroying an entire planet to end a war. There were also debates about tone because the new shows (especially Discovery and Picard) leaned into violence and gore in ways that earlier Trek shows never would. And when NuTrek isn’t being too bloody (very bloody) serious, it’s being too silly, as evidenced by Strange New Worlds filling its 10-episode run with no less than three silly episodes focused almost entirely on humor.
Removing Star Trek’s Safety Net May Cause A Core Breach
Because of this, Trekkie fandom is a powder keg that Star Trek: Year One runs the risk of igniting. After all, we’ve already seen Kirk’s first year as the Enterprise captain way back in Season 1 of Star Trek: The Original Series. A new show with the exact same characters in the exact same setting and time period will inevitably lead to endless debates about how well Year One’s writers are honoring the foundational canon of the entire franchise.
That extends to performances, too: while audiences have generally enjoyed the actors portraying the original Enterprise crew (Paul Wesley’s Kirk and Ethan Peck’s Spock are particularly great), there has always been a kind of narrative safety net because Strange New Worlds takes place years before The Original Series. Therefore, whenever someone seems out of character (like the mostly emotionless Spock constantly acting human and dating half the ship), it can be explained away by saying that the character is still growing into who they are in TOS. But if these kinds of out-of-character plot beats continue into Star Trek: Year One, it will make debates over Paramount’s treatment of canon worse than ever.
All The Ways Yet Another Star Trek Prequel Can Go Wrong
Those fan arguments will get even worse if, say, the new show begins to encroach on Original Series plot points. For example, Strange New Worlds has given us a very different portrayal of the Gorn than we previously saw; how would this new show possibly retcon Kirk’s iconic encounter with one of these lethal lizards, especially after SNW showed us a sweet and kindhearted Gorn? Handled poorly, the new show could effectively remove most of Trek’s most famous episode from canon, leaving fans nervous about what the new writers might erase next.
Other possible problems exist: for example, the new show might have a hard time matching the tone of The Original Series, especially if it leans too hard into the humor that TOS used so sparingly. And the writers might not be able to resist giving Kirk his own canon-defining long-term girlfriend, just like they did for Pike (someone destined to end up with a completely different woman than Captain Batel, the seeming love of his life).
Plus, even if they get everything else right, the writers of Star Trek: Year One may descend into sloppy writing. That’s what the Strange New Worlds writers did when their Season 3 finale threw the franchise’s diplomatic ethos out the airlock to tell a weirdly black and white story about the forces of good fighting the forces of utmost and irredeemable evil.
As usual, I’d like to be wrong: I’ve genuinely enjoyed most of Strange New Worlds, and I think these writers and actors certainly have it in them to create another great homage to The Original Series. But Paramount is playing with phaser fire here (level 10, baby) with this show’s capacity to fully fracture the fandom. Here’s hoping that, like Captain Kirk, the creative powers that be can beat this no-win scenario and deliver the show that Star Trek fans old and new have been waiting for.
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