Every upcoming Star Trek show and movie, ranked by anticipation

2. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (Season 1)

Star Trek fans have fantasized about a whole series starring Kirk’s predecessor Captain Pike for a long time. The original pilot for the entire franchise, “The Cage” starred Jeffrey Hunter as Pike and Leonard Nimoy as Spock. Eventually, William Shatner took Pike’s place in the captain’s chair, and the rest is history. Yet Pike remained canon, with footage from the “lost” pilot making its way into the Original Series episode “The Menagerie.” The legacy of “The Cage” continued into the present day with Discovery using the footage for “If Memory Serves,” an episode where both Pike and Spock returned to Talos IV, the scene for “The Cage.”

“When we said we heard the fans’ outpouring of love for Pike, Number One, and Spock when they boarded Star Trek: Discovery, we meant it,” executive producer Alex Kurtzman told StarTrek.com. “These iconic characters have a deep history in Star Trek canon, yet so much of their stories have yet to be told.”

Indeed, Anson Mount as Pike, Ethan Peck as Spock, and Rebecca Romijn as Number One were considered the best thing about Discovery‘s second season. They became so popular that Paramount took notice and commissioned an entire series focusing on the pre-Kirk Enterprise. Paramount is so sure that the series will be a success when it launches later this year that a second season is already in production.

Strange New Worlds will forego the continuing narrative style of Discovery and Picard and return to the episodic style of classic Trek, bringing back the “planet of the week” format that first put Star Trek on the map. The show will also feature many names familiar to fans of the original Star Trek, with younger Cadet Uhura (Celia Rose-Goodin) and Nurse Christine Chapel (Jess Bush) both in the series.

“We’re going to try to harken back to some classical Trek values, to be optimistic, and to be more episodic,” executive producer Akiva Goldsman told Variety in 2020. “Obviously, we will take advantage of the serialized nature of character and story building. But I think our plots will be more closed-ended than you’ve seen in either Discovery or Picard.”