Star Trek: 10 Things You Need To Know About The Lost Era

The subspace shockwave in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country was followed by waves of letters; fans were clamouring for a spin-off series with Captain Sulu. Take "Shields! Shields!" and write a rhapsody on it! For a while, "George and Gracie on the Excelsior," as Grace Lee Whitney herself once phrased it, was given some serious consideration by the higher-ups at Paramount.

A little later, Flashback was thought of as a "(backdoor) pilot for (an Excelsior) mini-series," Whitney told StarTrek.com in 2011. "Why don't you do this show and bring us on every three months in an episode?" Whitney suggested to producers. Evidently, that Excelsior series never came to be, and Whitney sadly passed away in 2015. As recently as 2020, however, George Takei expressed his continued enthusiasm for a Sulu spin-off to StarTrek.com once more.

Sign no doubt of the character's ineffable popularity, the first book of the Lost Era series, The Sundered, also went to Sulu and the Excelsior. In the novel, set primarily in 2298, Sulu and crew are sent to engage in peace talks with the Tholians but encounter another enemy in the process — the Neyel.

We discover that the Neyel are, in fact, a genetically-altered offshoot of a group of humans who, in 2155, were flung through an interspatial rift to the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) (a [real] dwarf galaxy situated about 200,000 light-years from the Milky Way). In The Sundered, the Excelsior crew (including Tuvok, Chekov, and Rand!) also pay a visit via spatial rift to the Small Magellanic Cloud. Keep that fact in mind for later!