Star Trek has become Paramount’s franchise counterpart to Disney’s Star Wars and Warner Bros.' Harry Potter. In this age of franchises and immortal IPs, one finds it hard to think that Paramount might ever stop producing Star Trek movies and TV shows. It’s just a matter of time until the next one comes out.Star Trek: PicardandDiscoverymay be ending, but fans ofThe Next Generationgot the reunion they always wanted. Now Paramount sets its sights on the future. They’ve put in fornew seasons ofStrange New WorldsandLower Decks, as well as an order for a teen-focused series set in Starfleet Academy.
But Star Trek is one of those IPs with a rather complicated timeline in its main canon. Aside from J.J. Abrams creating a branching timeline with his 2009 reboot film, sections of the main canon occur all throughout time, all the way back to the days of primordial Earth. Regularly, history is changed, revealed, or rewritten. If Paramount wants to continue expanding its universe, it must do so surgically. There is a continuous debate surrounding Star Trek’s timeline, and it’s always been difficult to establish a chronology since the series was designed trying to avoid using any recognizable dates.Paramount+ will have to be carefulwith its new Star Trek series, but we’re looking forward to them all the same.
The Trouble with Timelines
Star Trek has always been hard to pin down on the Gregorian calendar, if only because it uses stardates specifically to avoid lining up their universe with ours. But after years of popularity and study from fans, people have created a basic timetable that can put stardates in our terms, more or less. Though there is still debate (some of Captain Kirk’s snappy retorts create a margin of error of about a hundred years), the events ofThe Original Seriesand the subsequent movies took place in the 23rd century. The Enterprise flew her five-year mission and returned home between 2265 and 2270. But where that mission started is a whole other issue.
The essential and perhaps most famous argument among Star Trek fans is the one surrounding the series’s pilot episode. Most fans will know that Gene Rodenberry’s original pilot episode forStar Trek(entitledThe Cage) was rejected by NBC for being “too cerebral.” He eventually created an alternate pilot episode calledWhere No Man Has Gone Before,which aired as the third episode in season 1 ofThe Original Series. These two episodes create some confusion in the original timeline sinceThe Cagehad Christopher Pike as captain of the Enterprise, and James Kirk only replaced him once the series began in earnest.
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It’s become generally accepted in the canon that there was a previous 5-year mission beforeThe Original Seriesduring which Christopher Pike was captain of the Enterprise. And now it has become official because it operates as the premise of Paramount’sStrange New Worlds. Regularly, the series references the events which occurred in episodes 11 and 12 ofThe Original Series(entitledThe Menagerie), which incorporates, in a certain way, events fromThe Cageinto the main canon’s timeline. So, while there is still much debate, a lot of time travel, and not a solid answer to how the series started, the main canon is generally accepted to go in this order:Enterprise,Strange New Worlds,The Original Series,The Next Generation,Deep Space Nine,Voyager,Lower DecksandPicard. Keep in mind this is not a comprehensive list of the Star Trek timeline, only a simplified one used to create a very basic outline of the canon.
Modern Star Trek
Strange New Worldshas taken an interesting position on the timeline. With its story centering around Captain Pike, the first season’s plot was entirely about Pike’s eventual fate inThe Original SeriesepisodeThe Menagerie.Strange New Worldswent so far as to show us the changed future if Pike remained captain of the Enterprise andThe Original Seriesnever happened. But creative decisions were made to remain on the prime timeline, and now Paramount has a limited space to work with. The entire story ofStrange New Worldsmust happen before the events ofThe Original Series,and it must avoid creating any significant changes to the timeline as it stands.
Related:5 Ways Star Trek: Discovery Impacted the Franchise
The new season ofLower Deckstakes place far in the future and has more to do with the lore surrounding the Titan than anything of greater consequence in the Star Trek universe. As for other future projects, Paramount has announced they plan to order a teen-focused series that wouldtake place in Starfleet Academy. It’s not stated where on the timeline this would fall, but it’s equally likely for it to be about a random group of Starfleet cadets as it would be about the adventures of Kirk and Spock while they were still kids attending the academy. But moving forward, Paramount has a difficult job trying to expand the Star Trek universe while they fit it together like a puzzle. The most interesting times in Star Trek are often those with the least room for creativity, so seeing how Paramount+ adds to their franchise will be very intriguing.
