Star Trek – the word around the replicator

Star Trek – the word around the replicator

0 comments 📅09 January 2019, 20:09

More Star Trek: Short Treks

According to The Hollywood Reporter, as the streaming service gears up to release the second season of Star Trek: Discovery next week, Alex Kurtzman (co-creator and executive producer) has announced two new installments to Star Trek: Short Treks as well as another animated series.

We say “another animated series” because Star Trek: Lower Decks, a half-hour animated comedy series about the crew of a less important Federation starship, was already ordered from Mike McMahan (Rick and Morty) back in October.

The newly-announced ones will be, according to Kurtzman, animated efforts and premiere in the spring once Discovery’s new season is over.

“Our goal is to not only expand the definition of Star Trek and what has qualified as traditional Star Trek, but also to tell stories that are both self-contained in a very short period of time that also connect to the larger picture of what we’re doing, not only in Discovery but in the world building of Trek in general,” Kurtzman told THR. “And you get to tell these very intimate, emotional stories that are side stories to characters. So you get the benefit of the experience in and of itself but then when you watch Discovery you’ll see that these were all setting up things in the world of Season 2.”

There’s no word on whether they will be available on any services other CBS All Access.

Star Trek 4 movie is all but officially dead

Thank God.

Even after both Chris Pine and Chris Hemsworth were reportedly dropping out of the project, now it seems like the final nail in the coffin has been hammered in.

Trek’s first female director, S.J. Clarkson, was – last we heard – at the helm. However, according to Deadline, Clarkson was just announced as both the pilot director and an executive producer on HBO’s first Game of Thrones spinoff, set thousands of years before the events of the flagship fantasy series. So, she’s no longer attached to Trek 4.

Frankly, the JJ Abrams Star Trek movies have been shockingly bad and this is the best news possible for the franchise. That doesn’t mean to say however, that the stain left behind from this trilogy of trash isn’t totally going away. Read on…

Picard series could link to the JJ-verse

Kurtzman says Picard will be living a very different life than the one he knew on the bridge of the Enterprise, thanks to a traumatic and life-changing calamity dating all the way back to JJ Abrams’ Star Trek movie — a film Kurtzman co-wrote.

The destruction of the Romulan homeworld in 2009’s Star Trek, Kurtzman told THR, was a defining event in Picard’s career, one that sets up the role Stewart will play on the still-untitled new show. “Picard’s life was radically altered by the dissolution of the Romulan Empire,” Kurtzman explained, adding that Stewart himself loved the show’s new premise, once he’d seen how different his reprised role would be.

“He [Stewart] threw down an amazing gauntlet and said, ‘If we do this, I want it to be so different, I want it to be both what people remember but also not what they’re expecting at all, otherwise why do it?’” Kurtzman said. After reading the creative team’s 34-page pitch for the new show, Stewart “walked into the room and he had a huge smile on his face and said, ‘This is wonderful.’ … He knew if he was going to go back to Picard, it needed to be for the greatest reason ever.”

Details about the new series are still thin on the ground, but it already appears as if Picard won’t be saddled with the workaday business of coordinating his old crew’s adventures from one episode to the next, in the predictable fashion of The Next Generation. But Kurtzman did add that “anything could happen,” when asked whether some of the old TNG cast might show up on the new show for a cameo or two.

Quite how the Kelvin Timeline will be woven into the Prime Timeline…still baffles us.

The second season of Star Trek: Discovery will comprise of 13 episodes with no mid-season break. It will premiere on Thursday, January 17, 2019, in the US and Canada, and in the rest of the world on Friday, January 18, 2019.

Scott Snowden is MyM’s US Editor. Follow him on Twitter.

Related stories
 New animated Star Trek series is coming to CBS All Access
Michelle Yeoh in talks for Star Trek spinoff on CBS All Access
Star Trek 4 in trouble as Chris Pine and Chris Hemsworth both drop out
• Patrick Stewart to return to Star Trek as Picard in new series for CBS
 Star Trek: Discovery – all episode reviews


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