Strange New Worlds’ Almost Ended With a Movie

Just before the latest season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds kicked off, we learned that the Enterprise‘s journey had set its end date: the show would conclude with a fifth and final season. However, that apparently wasn’t always going to be the case, and the show nearly ended sooner.

That’s according to Rebecca Romijn, who plays Una Chin-Riley (a.k.a. Number One) on the show. Speaking this past weekend at the Star Trek convention STLV in Las Vegas, the actress—via TrekCore—revealed that initially, Strange New Worlds would’ve come to an end after its currently-in-production fourth season, before being capped off with a feature-length movie. According to Romijn, showrunners Henry Alonso Meyers and Akiva Goldsman were able to convince Paramount to change plans, resulting in the six-episode season five.

At the very least that means Strange New Worlds fans are getting a little more Star Trek than originally planned (according to TrekCore, Romijn noted that the movie would’ve been “just” two hours), even if it still is a truncated season compared to prior ones. But it also speaks to some of the tumult Star Trek has faced in recent years as Paramount has contracted the franchise after years of a streaming renaissance, and the studio itself prepared to seek new ownership (it was made official last week that Skydance’s $8 billion takeover of the company had closed). Much of the Star Trek that helped define this new era for the series on streaming TV has wrapped up in the past few years, and with Strange New Worlds joining them in the next few, just one more series remains in production alongside it: Starfleet Academy, which will stream for at least two seasons.

What, if any, Trek will come beyond that remains up in the air right now, although the hope of new ownership and a renewed focus on streaming could see a new generation of Trek shows emerge. Right now, much of the franchise’s definitive future lies in film, just like Strange New Worlds‘ almost did. Patrick Stewart has spent the years since the conclusion of Star Trek: Picard suggesting a new film was in the works, and on the theatrical side of things, there’s long been the perpetual hope of a fourth “Kelvin Timeline” Trek film—but there’s also Toby Haynes’ planned “origins” film detailing the early years of Starfleet post-First Contact. With all that in mind, a planned streaming movie conclusion to Strange New Worlds at least makes a little more sense.

But only a little. After all, despite a rich cinematic legacy, Star Trek fans will likely always insist that the boldly going is just better in a long-form TV format. Who knows—maybe it would’ve been a better bet than a Section 31 movie turned out to be?

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