Today is Star Trek Day, and Paramount+ celebrated with a day of conversations with the various Star Trek cast members, along with some sneak peeks of upcoming episodes, brand new images, and backstage tours. Check out news for Strange New Worlds and Picard, and read on for highlights from Lower Decks, Prodigy, and Discovery!
Star Trek: Lower Decks
Lower Decks, which charts the ongoing adventures of the crew of the U.S.S. Cerritos, returned on August 25th, and streams weekly on Thursdays. During conversation between cast members Tawny Newsome and Noël Wells, and moderator Paul F. Tompkins, the hosts revealed a sneak peek of an upcoming episode, “Crisis Point 2: Paradoxus,” featuring an attempted sequel to the holodeck movie from back in season one. And yes that is a very dramatic screenshot from it.
Star Trek: Prodigy
Star Trek: Prodigy will return on Thursday, October 27th! And they’re coming back with a new addition to the cast: Billy Campbell will reprise his role from Star Trek: The Next Generation, returning as Thadiun Okona. Campbell will join a cast that includes Admiral Janeway’s NEW crew, featuring Daveed Diggs as Commander Tysess and Jameela Jamil as Ensign Asencia. We’ll also encounter Jason Alexander as Doctor Noum and Robert Beltran as Captain Chakotay, who we saw only briefly in the first half of season one.
The second half of season one joins the crew of the experimental high-warp ship U.S.S. Protostar as they attempt to flee Vice Admiral Janeway–who’s trying to find the ship thinking that Chakotay is still on it–and as they learn that their ship is carrying a weapon that could destroy the United Federation of Planets. Star Trek Day celebrated Prodigy with a talk between series voice cast members Kate Mulgrew and Brett Gray, and a preview clip for the show’s mid-season return!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsgEONjoEjY
Star Trek: Discovery
In season five, Captain Burnham and the crew of the U.S.S. Discovery will uncover a mystery that sends them on an epic adventure across the galaxy to find an ancient power whose very existence has been deliberately hidden for centuries. There are others on the hunt as well…dangerous foes who are desperate to claim the prize for themselves and will stop at nothing to get it. (So…like seasons 3 and 4. Why does the distant future hate the crew of Discovery so much?!?!?!?) An image from the forthcoming season can be seen at the top of this article.
Star Trek Day also included a backstage set tour hosted by Wilson Cruz that was charming as heck! Sonequa Martin-Green danced perilously close to a spoiler, Mary Wiseman, Blu del Barrio, and Blu’s puppy, enjoyed a break in an uncharted part of the galaxy known as “Margaritaville”, Anthony Rapp, a poetry reading, and a tantalizing moment of filming were all featured. But alas, no Grudge!
Evil Wesley Crusher
There was an evil Wesley Crusher.
Lower Decks is available on Paramount+ each Thursday, the second half of Prodigy‘s first season premieres on October 27th, and Star Trek: Picard arrives on February 16th. Live long and prosper!
Anyone who has ever interacted with Wheaton online knows that Evil Wesley isn’t that much of a stretch.
“we’re all featured” <– That apostrophe should be removed, and the whole list is crying out for semicolons. ;^)
@2: Fixed it, thanks! And it’s too early in the morning for semicolons. :)
And we’re getting an Ortegas focus episode in S2 of SNW!
Sigh… I miss the main storyline and beautiful graphics in Discovery, but not the awful drama. The show is 50% soap opera… GAG! I wish they would dial that back so we could all genuinely enjoy a sci-fi instead of ffwding through ridiculous sap stories based on over wrought stories.
I agree with number five. Cut the sap.
I was really hoping that Disco would move away from epic mystery box story arcs going forward and just kind of explore the far future, but I guess that that’s their format and they’re not going to change it now. Oh well; the DMA arc last season was actually pretty good, so I hope that it’s written along those lines.
@7/jaimebabb: Yeah, I hope they do what the first half of season 4 did, and what I suspect the fired showrunners intended for the “seven signals” arc in season 2 — to have the season arc be just a catalyst for a series of episodic stories, rather than being one big serial. The first half of S4 worked quite well, with the looming threat in the background but each story exploring a different aspect of how it affected things in the galaxy. I wasn’t as happy with the second half where it became just one big serialized story.
To clarify, the first few episodes of season 2 were pretty standalone, and I got the feeling that the “seven signals” format was meant as an excuse to have the ship bouncing around the galaxy into different episodic stories, in a “treasure hunt” format like Doctor Who‘s Key to Time season. Since the description here is pretty much literally a treasure hunt premise, it could easily lend itself to that.