13 Star Trek Pitches Out There (And Where They're At)

8. STAR TREK: LEGACY, aka CAPTAIN SEVEN

Jeri Ryan Seven of Nine Titan-A Enterprise-G Crew
CBS Media Ventures

On the home screen, the ideas have come thick and fast and wild these past couple of years. 

Remember how the TV Renaissance began? Alex Kurtzman’s Secret Hideout deal paralleled the CBS/Paramount dive into the streaming explosion of the mid-2010s— what became Discovery was first announced in late 2015, remember.  Infant CBS All Access soon echoed the prevailing streaming strategy for subscribers: Stop That Churn! So, it became content Everywhere, Everything All at Once: Non-stop Fresh Trek! Spinoffs getting in the way of spinoffs! Miniseries, movies, audio dramas!

The most beloved Peak Trek moment back in the day had to be Picard’s Season 3: a reunion, yes, but enough new faces to yield the “Seven, Raffi and All the Kids“ spinoff idea, soon tagged Star Trek: Legacy as if it were a formal title to a real pitch.

Really, Legacy was nothing more than the closing scenes and characters of Picard that showrunner Terry Matalas devised, setting up (as often happens) a gimme spinoff in case anyone in the studio C-suite cared. No actual pitch packet or meeting, but before you knew it, boom: fan campaigns, petition drives, marketing, graphics, all based on a love of those characters, trekking aboard a new Enterprise.

There was also the chance to get the Next Generation elders back for the occasional guest spot. Sure, fan demand had led to Anson Mount’s Pike and Strange New Worlds, but that was a streaming eternity ago. Four years later, the Trek tarmac taxiway was already full, just as the runways were being cut back to two series, not five.

And yet, stranger things have happened. Terry and team love the characters even as career moves pull them elsewhere, so: not any time soon for Legacy, but — never say never?

Status: HAPPY TALK

Contributor
Contributor

Back when nerds and geeks were just called "hobbyists," Larry's ninth-grade science teacher ended a bewildering conversations with him about Halkans by finally saying, "Oh Larry — don't tell me you don't know Star Trek!"— along with a commandment to go home and begins watching the daily after-school rerun. The rest is history — well, future history, anyway. Larry had always been a NASA kid and a history fan (not so much sci-fi), so Star Trek fit right in: for the phenomenon that was worldbuilding before the term was invented, Larry felt passion-called to take up "backgrounding" and gap-filling before the term "retcon" was invented. Star Trek is fun and inspiring, but it doesn't pay the bills —at least in those days— but after college and work in theatre and print news, Larry somehow managed to combine both fields with his non-fiction Trek fandom and created the monster that today is Dr. Trek. His self-published, pre-Internet star charts and TNG Concordance were precursors to the official Stellar Cartography map set and the bestseller TNG Companion, after a move to Hollywood /SoCal in the 1990s boom years. Add in a stint as managing editor of official ST Communicator magazine, the first editor and later content producer of the original startrek.com, and the franchise consultant for everything from the Star Trek World Tour to the storied Star Trek: The Experience in Las Vegas. When Star Trek went wandering in the wilderness for the first time in 18 years amid the "Paramount divorce" of 2005-06, so did Larry — until, finally, the entrepreneur web world eventually found a path and a way to stay afloat. Since then, Larry's "Trekland" has come to mean more media projects and podcast/streaming alongside the old standbys like convention guest speaking and even text writing. Sure, there's The Trek Files for Roddenberry, his own Trekland Tuesdays Live, and Dr. Trek;s Second Opinion reaction shows — but that passion for spotlighting and archiving the creatives of Trek across all arenas and eras still drives him to pioneer experiences like the monthly backstage Portal 47 features, and the Trekland Treks day tours of Trek location sights. And now ... in-depth Dr. Trek turns for TrekCulture, too!