10 Star Trek Characters Who MUST Return (2025)
Uncertain times call for certain Star Trek characters. These are but a few to get on the comm.
Each year since 2021, we have released a version of this list. This year is a little different. Suddenly, after an abundance, there is comparatively a lot less Star Trek to come. Season three of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is planned to start sometime in 2025. We will almost certainly have a longer wait for more. If we're lucky we'll get Star Trek: Starfleet Academy within 10 months of time of writing. As for the rest, we just don't know.
We will include Starfleet Academy here. We already know that Tig Notaro, Mary Wiseman, and Oded Fehr will be reprising their roles in Star Trek's Saved by the Bell (as Jett Reno, Sylvia Tilly, and Charles Vance respectively). Others from Star Trek: Discovery (and elsewhere) could happily join them.
There's also our now annual call for Star Trek: Legacy. The series itself is a must for a series of characters who must return. As LeVar Burton and others have noted, the actors are equally keen to return. 2025 may well be a time of uncertainty for the franchise, but we can, and will, remain hopeful. Any dearth of Star Trek doesn't mean we can't dream!
10. Paul Stamets
By the end of Star Trek: Discovery, Commander Paul Stamets was at somewhat of a loss. His life's work as an astromycologist — the spore drive — had been replaced by something invented centuries after his birth — the pathway drive. The chance at a whole new horizon of scientific endeavour in the Progenitors' tech had also been taken from him. Like all aboard the Discovery, including his husband, Stamets must return to Star Trek so we can see where innate curiosity led him next.
Actor behind the real-world mycologist's namesake, Anthony Rapp, sat down recently for an interview with TrekCulture's very own Brie Beecher. Asked what his "dream casting" would be for a return to the franchise, Rapp replied,
I just saw [Jonathan] Frakes in the hallway. […] The fact that he gets to trot out Riker every once in a while now. That's part of the dream, honestly, is to come back, to get to return to [Stamets]. […] It might be cool to do something else too, but that's the dream. […] Down the road, to say, 'Hey, here I am and here's what I'm doing now'.
There is pure research, and there is applied research. There is also passing on your knowledge to future generations. As Rapp also noted to Brie in the interview, "[Stamets is not] the kind of person that's going to just relax […] and go, ok, retirement". Perhaps a professorship is the perfect next step for Stamets? Who else is going to teach the cadets about mushrooms?