Next Star Trek To Be Set Entirely On Earth?
A new Star Trek series could be coming with a setting that's gone largely unexplored in the franchise. It would be solely on Earth.
This article is more than 2 years old
Star Trek, as a franchise, has always wanted to boldly go where no man or woman has gone before. It’s been kind of their marching orders since the show first debuted all those decades ago. But with a continued expansion of the universe both physically and with a new group of characters, it would make sense that they were always looking for new stories and settings. Well, apparently one of the next ideas is to keep things a little closer to home. According to insider Daniel Richtman, the plan for a new Star Trek project would have the series set only on Earth.
This news about a new Star Trek project doesn’t have much in the way of details and is clearly still in the planning stages. But it is interesting that we could possibly be getting a show that deals solely with the world the other series’ characters left behind. In the franchise, it is clear that Earth obviously still exists, we are given references and even visits there in a number of shows and movies. The Voyage Home took us back there and Chris Pine’s Captain Kirk launched from there at the beginning of Star Trek as well even returning for a fight at one point.
More recently, we’ve seen the home planet mentioned and even visited on Star Trek: Picard where the good Captain makes trips and is in communication with the Federation. And in Discovery, the crew makes multiple trips back there to dock or for other reasons. So the planet has always been tangentially part of the setting. That being said, we’ve never really spent all that much time there in any of the different shows or movies. Why would we? The whole point of the franchise was to explore the never-ending reaches of space and time. Earth can look boring by comparison.
But with so much happening in Star Trek these days it does make sense to get a feeling for how the missions of the Starfleet do affect those still grounded on terra firma. With all the new discoveries and alien contact across the galaxies, how do the people on our home planet view these kinds of things? Are the members of Starfleet seen as heroes? Do their discoveries make waves here at home or is it just business as usual? It’s fascinating when you consider that Earth has been generally skipped over in terms of the franchise. It’s been a way station but rarely explored in any great detail.
With so much happening in the Star Trek franchise, it makes sense to look for new and exciting stories and settings out there to mine for the characters. The standard operating procedure has always been to commission a ship, get a captain, stack a crew and get to exploring. But now we could be looking at something different, a Star Trek show about those left behind.
Before we get there though, there’s plenty of new stuff coming in this franchise. We have the aforementioned Picard and Discovery ramping up for new seasons. Plus there’s Strange New Worlds and Prodigy coming this year. Plus there are a number of different Star Trek movies in development as well. This franchise is still boldly going places, but the next story could happen right here on Earth.
