Now that we're less than a month away from new episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds after a two-year hiatus, I find that anticipation is being tempered with the news that the end of the show is on the horizon. With season three set to premiere July 17 and season four in production, word has come down that season five will be the show's last, and it will consist of only six episodes, instead of ten, to give the series a total of 46 episodes. As a result, I am simultaneously anticipating SNW's return while dreading its eventual demise.
While I understand the reasons behind the delay, rooted in the double-whammy disruption of the writers' and actors' strikes that occurred just after season two was released in 2023, it still feels like a long time to wait. But then, we've had to wait longer between other installments. There was a four-year gap between the time the original Star Trek aired its last episode on NBC in the spring of 1969 and the animated Star Trek premiered on the same network in the fall of 1973, and there was a similar gap between the end of the animated series in the spring of 1975 and the release of Star Trek: The Motion Picture in late 1979. The subsequent feature films came out at roughly two-year intervals, up until the proverbial floodgates opened in the mid-'80s.
Star Trek: The Next Generation was announced in September 1986, a couple of months ahead of the cinematic release of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, and premiered on the small screen a year later. From the fall of 1987 until the spring of 2005, audiences were treated to the video equivalent of a 17-year all-you-can-eat buffet of Star Trek with overlapping TV series (TNG, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Enterprise) and feature films, beginning with Star Trek V: The Final Frontier and concluding with Star Trek: Nemesis.
Audiences entered another four-year dry spell without new any Star Trek between the cancellation of Enterprise and the release of J. J. Abrams' Star Trek feature film in the summer of 2009. Again, the wait was on with a three-year gap before Star Trek: Into Darkness (2012) and four years until Star Trek Beyond (2016). No new feature films have been released to date, save for an ill-conceived Section 31 streaming movie in early 2025.
But audiences had to wait less than a year following Star Trek Beyond before the CBS All Access streaming service (now known as Paramount+) brought yet another wave of Star Trek, beginning with Discovery in 2017, and quickly followed by the overlapping releases of Picard, Lower Decks, Prodigy, and Strange New Worlds, the latter of which was a spinoff from Discovery's second season.
While not all Star Trek content has been to everyone's taste--I personally have difficulty sitting through an episode of Lower Decks and I don't care if the rumored fourth and final installment of the J. J. Abrams Trek films ever gets made--the dry spell between Strange New Worlds' second and third seasons has been anything but truly dry. The flow may have slowed to more of a trickle, but looking ahead, I trust that the remaining 26 episodes of Strange New Worlds maintains the same high standards of the 20 episodes we have already seen, and that the upcoming Discovery spinoff, Starfleet Academy, will measure up to the best of its predecessors as it Star Trek boldly goes into its next 60 years.
