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Alasdair Stuart assesses the current state of play in the Star Trek universe…

It’s a weird time to be a Star Trek fan. After the flotilla of new shows in recent years, all great but many criticised for not being Exactly Like The Old Days, we’re entering a period of flux again. Strange New Worlds will end with a truncated fifth season, with the third season airing right now. Starfleet Academy has been pre-emptively renewed for a second season, which is both great news and looks a lot like a traditional 20 episode season split into two. Lower Decks and Discovery have ended and Prodigy, a show that the studio sometimes seemed to forget they’d commissioned, has also come into land. Section 31 also happened and while I’ve not seen it, our reviewers elsewhere on the site have a lot to say about it.

You’d be forgiven for looking at this slate and thinking the studio had no idea what to do with a franchise it claims to love. But it seems they do, and recent comments have suggested that Starfleet’s finest are finally coming back to the big screen.

One of the very, very few terrible things about working in this field is that we sometimes have to listen to earnings calls. These are when a senior member of the executive board at a company hops on a call with shareholders and journalists to claim that everything’s great. They’re soul crushing, and thankfully we didn’t have to sit in on this one, because Deadline did. Thanks to their report, we have news that Paramount CEO David Ellison is very big on Star Trek and wants to make new Trek movies ‘a high priority’. Some bullet points:

A film featuring new characters and directed by Andor director Toby Haynes is in development. The script is by Seth Grahame-Smith and Simon Kinberg and JJ Abrams are producing it. This is all but confirmed to be the ‘Starfleet origins’ movie that’s been in development for a couple of years.

And then there’s this:

A new movie with ‘Captain Kirk, Spock and the rest of the usual characters returning that also has Abrams producing and Steve Yockey writing.’

It’s safe to assume this movie is the long-planned Star Trek 4, if nothing else because a third complete cast reboot (fourth if you count Strange New Worlds) sounds exhausting. Most of the Kelvinverse cast have talked about wanting to do a fourth movie for a while now. There were concrete plans after Star Trek Beyond, including a mooted team up with Chris Hemsworth’s George Kirk via time trave, a pre-Alien: Earth Noah Hawley, a pre-Fantastic Four Matt Shakman and a legendarily weird Quentin Tarantino script. None of them came to fruition, largely because of the tragic pall Anton Yelchin’s death cast over the franchise. The biggest challenge a fourth Kelvinverse movie would have is addressing this with the taste and kindness it deserves. Sofia Boutella’s excellent Jaylah, introduced in Star Trek Beyond, seemed primed to be a possible replacement and it’d be great to have her back.

The man behind the screen for this is Steve Yockey, a name you’re more familiar with than you might think. He wrote two episodes of the Netflix Scream show, and eleven episodes of Supernatural which he also co-produced and story edited for. He’s the creator of The Flight Attendant; the acclaimed comedy mystery series starring Kaley Cuocuo, and wrote for the equally beloved Doom Patrol and Dead Boy Detectives. Yockey is good at this exact sort of work and he’s a great fit for the series. Haynes too has a perfect aesthetic for the series.

It’s easy, even expected, to be cynical about Paramount’s treatment of the series. Why it can’t exist on the big and small screen at once is a mystery above all our pay grades for one and Star Trek 4 has been announced about half a dozen times now. But if the ‘early days of Starfleet’ movie is good and, somehow, we get a new and possibly final adventure for the Kelvinverse crew then maybe they’ll finally have got their act together. Here’s hoping,