Every upcoming Star Trek show and movie, ranked by anticipation

2022 is set to be one of the most significant years in the history of Star Trek, with lots of series already streaming on Paramount+ and several more on the way, not to mention plentiful news on the movie front. The franchise has received a breath of fresh air thanks to executive producer Alex Kurtzman and Paramount+’s willingness to take bold steps in new directions.

We not only have new episodes of established shows like Picard and Discovery to look forward to, but also new series like Section 31 and Strange New Worlds, as well as more from animated shows Lower Decks and Prodigy. And there are other projects that may be even further in the distance, like Ceti Alpha V and a potential comedy about Worf. But even without those, what’s left has the potential to transform Star Trek.

But which projects should we be looking forward to the most? While many are undoubtedly grateful for any Star Trek at all considering how barren the output was just a few years ago, not all of these Trek shows and movies are created equal. So let’s take a look at our most anticipated Trek stuff for 2022, 2023 and perhaps even beyond…

8. Star Trek: Discovery (Season 4 and future)

Currently on an unexpected mid-season break, Star Trek: Discovery continues to divide fans at every turn. As before, the season has so far been unevenly paced and features wild fluctuations in quality, with the Dark Matter Anomaly seasonal arc being wafer-thin at best. The season so far feels rushed, and issues of poor characterization and dialogue persist. When Discovery is good, it’s excellent, with exceptional writing, editing, and visuals to rival anything else on television. However, when it’s bad, it’s terrible, particularly by the standards of Star Trek.

In many respects, Discovery has never recovered from the mistakes it made early in its run, including the fan-alienating redesign of the Klingons. Many believe that the show failed to capitalize on its initial promise.

With plenty of new and exciting Star Trek projects in the works — such as Section 31, Strange New Worlds and the forthcoming second season of Star Trek: Picard — all of which have strong fan support, it’s hard to get that excited for Discovery.

7. Star Trek: Lower Decks (Season 3)

Star Trek: Lower Decks is something unique in the Star Trek canon. Sure, the franchise has tried its hand at animation before, and the series’ irreverence and willingness to focus on the lower-ranking members of the crew is a huge departure from shows past. It shows that Paramount+ is willing to be bold in their efforts to expand the Trek universe. But does it work? Yes and no.

While the approach is undoubtedly different as far as Star Trek is concerned — the show gently mocks many of the franchise’s established tropes, it isn’t quite as radical or courageous as Paramount+ likely thought it would be during the concept phase. The animation is familiar and the humor funny but safe, meaning that Lower Decks doesn’t quite go as boldly as it might have done.

However, the second season improved a lot on the first, with the show capitalizing on its strengths while eliminating many of it flaws. With the rising quality, Star Trek: Lower Decks will surely hit its proper stride when it returns sometime in mid-2022.

6. Star Trek: Prodigy (Season 1)

Currently airing on Paramount+ and Nickelodeon, Star Trek: Prodigy is another animated entry in the Star Trek canon, this time targeted at younger audiences. The series is a continuation of the The Next Generation/Deep Space Nine/Voyager era, being set just five years after Voyager’s return to the Alpha Quadrant and continuing many of the themes seen in that show. Kate Mulgrew guest stars as the USS Protostar’s Emergency Training Holographic Advisor, based, of course, on Captain Kathryn Janeway.

While squarely aimed at children and containing nothing that youngsters will find too complex or offensive, Prodigy, like its Star Wars animated cousins like The Clone Wars, is perfectly accessible to adults. The show continues the Star Trek tradition of storytelling that fans will find instantly familiar and comforting. Action-packed and often genuinely thoughtful, the series is well-paced and has an immense amount of potential; it’s a show that’s perfect as an introduction to Star Trek. While the original Star Trek: The Animated Series will always hold a place of tremendous affection in the hearts of every Star Trek fan, Prodigy may well grow into the best animated series in the franchise. There’s much here that Discovery could learn from here.

“The data [on measuring Prodigy as a success] is pretty obvious. We’re going to be patient because we think the show is fantastic and creatively just exceeds all expectations. I have no doubt that we’ll be doing more,” Paramount Pictures CEO Brian Robbins told The Hollywood Reporter in 2021. “Alex [Kurtzman] and I have talked about what the theatrical film version of this show is and the likes of that. We’re really excited. Ramsey [Naito] and our [Nickelodeon] team could not be more thrilled to explore more.”

5. Star Trek: Section 31 (Season 1)

The introduction of the Section 31, a secretive arm of the Federation, during Deep Space Nine was controversial at the time. Many felt that the organization represented a complete departure from Gene Roddenberry’s vision, showing a more realistic and brutal side to the utopian Federation. However, its inclusion created a more fully rounded and relevant Federation, allowing storytellers to develop plotlines that were far more reflective of our own time. In our world, such organizations work either to defend American democracy or ensure global hegemony in a corrupt and failing system, depending on your point of view. Will humanity truly develop away from these ideals? While optimists in the 1960s thought not, people in the 1990s who’d seen some of the failures of the past few decades disagreed.

The moral ambiguity of the group has always provided fertile ground for storytellers. Starting in 2000, a popular series of novels from Pocket Books covered Section 31’s actions in every era of the show, and the organization had such appeal that Section 31 was one of the first new Star Trek shows discussed before being officially announced in 2019. Starring Michelle Yeoh’s Mirror Georgiou and Shazad Latif’s Ash Tyler, the show will be set concurrently with Discovery.

That said, we don’t have a timeline for release yet. Despite concern amongst some fans, showrunner Alex Kurtzman maintains that Section 31 is still happening, although a Variety interview from March 2021 suggests the show won’t get off the ground until one of the other Star Trek series has ended. Hopefully, that will be soon.

“We actually have a couple of [Section 31] scripts. COVID frankly, just changed the game for everybody and every show,” Kurtzman told a Producers Guild of America panel last year. “We were on a very specific schedule that then got thrown completely into whack because of COVID. Even Discovery season 4 started many months later than originally planned, Picard too. Everything got pushed… So we’re actually on a great track with Section 31, and I’m very optimistic about it.”

4. Star Trek IV

If you want to talk about the next Star Trek movie, the first question you have to ask is, “which one?”

Since Star Trek: Beyond all the way back in 2016, the Star Trek landscape has been completely transformed, as has the movie business itself. COVID-19 has inspired many studios to release movies straight to streaming platforms, with theater-going audiences not yet returned to anywhere near their pre-pandemic peaks. All this affected the production of Star Trek movies, with a fourth film to follow Beyond seemingly stuck in development hell for several years.

While Beyond’s $343.5 million box office take was respectable, it was dwarfed by its two “Abramsverse” forebears, and there’s been a feeling that the franchise needed a change. Planning for Star Trek IV began right after Beyond, with Chris Pine (Captain Kirk) and Zachary Quinto (Spock) already signed on and Paramount announcing the return of Chris Hemsworth as George Kirk.

Then Quentin Tarantino got involved.

Paramount could never ignore a pitch from a prestigious director like Tarantino, who reportedly wanted to make his own R-rated Star Trek movie based on the Original Series episode “A Piece of the Action.” The idea was controversial from the start, with many worried that the director would be unable to adapt himself to the necessities of Star Trek. Writer Mark L. Smith was attached to pen the script for Tarantino’s movie, and soon enough there were two Star Trek films in production.

The road soon grew bumpier, with Pine and Hemsworth quitting their Trek project after refusing pay cuts and Tarantino’s proposal stalling. Noah Hawley was working on a project in 2019, but it was dead by 2020. Next it was Discovery writer Kalinda Vazquez’s turn to be attached to a new Star Trek movie, announced in March 2021 and then seemingly sidelined when Paramount confirmed in July that Star Trek IV was going ahead with a different creative team.

Despite behind-the-scenes chaos and indecision on Paramount’s part, a new Star Trek movie is always an event; some of the most memorable moments in the entire franchise happened on the big screen. While J.J. Abrams’ take on Star Trek has been divisive amongst fans, there are certainly many who would enjoy further adventures for the alternative universe Kirk and Spock.

While very little is currently known about the plot of the fourth movie, WandaVision director Matt Shakman is confirmed to be at the helm, with Lindsey Beer (The Magic Order) and Captain Marvel screenwriter Geneva Robertson-Dworet writing the script. And it’s finally been confirmed that Pine, Quinto and the rest of the cast will return!

3. Starfleet Academy

Starfleet Academy, like Section 31, is one of those concepts that Star Trek fans have been clamoring for for many years, with the expanded universe already covering the subject across a variety of media such as books and video games. Indeed, the concept has been around ever since the 1980s, when it was considered as the storyline for one of the classic movies.

Confirmed as being in production just this month, there is little information yet available about Starfleet Academy. It seems likely that we won’t see anything of the show for some time yet.

Focusing on the training academy for young Starfleet officers, the show could provide a great young adult entry into the franchise, and perhaps even recast some familiar roles depending on the timeframe, much as Discovery has done with Pike and Spock.

We’ve already seen the young Spock at the Academy in the first Abramsverse Star Trek movie alongside the future Captain Kirk. Might Starfleet Academy cover the same ground, or perhaps introduce us to a young Picard? Or how about an anthology series where each season focuses on a different legendary Star Trek character?

Or perhaps it might be best if Starfleet Academy looked to the future with a whole new cast and era, eventually leading to a spinoff series of its own. The ideas are endless, and Starfleet Academy might well be the most interesting new show in the franchise.

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.”

1. Star Trek: Picard (Season 2)

Due to COVID-19, we’ve had to wait an extra year for more episodes of Picard; season 2 was originally scheduled for 2021 before being pushed back to March of 2022. We’re now just a little over a month away from finally seeing it. While some Next Generation die-hards hated the first season, others were delighted with the show. Following up on The Next Generation decades later, Picard felt fresh, new, and up-to-date, although it still payed homage to the show that gave birth to it.

The first season was an eventful one for Jean-Luc Picard, who dies and is “reborn” in a synthetic body. Patrick Stewart and showrunner Michael Chabon are keen to explore what that means for Picard and how he deals with no longer being the man he once was. We can also expect other themes from the first season to continue in the show’s second; the relationship between Raffi and Seven of Nine will be explored and Agnes Jurati will answer for the murder of Bruce Maddox.

However, the main antagonist of the season will be Q, a fan-favorite character returning to Star Trek after an absence of 20 years and played once again by the peerless John de Lancie. Q appears to be central to the plot, which involves a parallel timeline and the Picard traveling back to our time period. The new storyline will allow the show to make the kind of social commentary that both The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine excelled at.

It’s believed that Picard season 2 may act as a sequel of sorts to the Deep Space Nine episodes “Past Tense I” and “Past Tense II,” which focused on the “sanctuary districts” created by the government as a response to increasing poverty, homelessness, and discrimination. As seen in DS9, this period features the fictional Bell Riots, one of the most violent civil uprisings in history; the government response caused hundreds of fatalities. It would certainly be a prime time period for exploitation by Q, with his meddling possibly leading to a totalitarian future where Picard himself is a fascist leader. No doubt the accusations that Star Trek suddenly got “woke” will come thick and fast from certain sections of social media.

De Lancie has said that the version of Q we’ll see in the new season of Picard isn’t quite the one we remember. “[I’m] a little bit of a different Q this time,” he told TrekMovie. “A little more age-appropriate, what can I say? It’s been a long time since I put on that hat, as it were.”

"I must say it’s not the sort of Puck-ish, Mercutio of old. It’s a different Q this time. It’s what they wanted, and I think that it makes sense. But Patrick and I have had nice opening scenes and scenes with Brent and working with Jonathan Frakes. It’s been really interesting, and I am delighted. Who would have thought?"

Alongside Q, we can expect the return of the Borg Queen, this time played by Annie Wersching. Whoopi Goldberg will be returning as Guinan, Brent Spiner as Altan Inigo Soong, and there are rumors that Robert Duncan McNeill (Tom Paris) and LeVar Burton (Geordi La Forge) will turn up.

Season 2 of Star Trek: Picard premieres on March 3 on Paramount+.

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