Star Trek: Legacy Series Canceled But For The Best Reason?

Star Trek: Discovery helped kick off the modern Trek renaissance, but it also introduced an ongoing problem with NuTrek: season-long stories have mostly replaced the episodic adventures of years past. When those long stories are weak (like in seasons three and four of Discovery and seasons one and two of Picard), we get boring, unfocused stories that leave us nervously checking the runtime. That could have been a potential issue with a Star Trek: Legacy series, but turning the potential show into a film can circumvent this narrative issue and give us a tight, focused story.

Obviously, movies can’t afford such meandering storytelling: they need to have a definitive beginning, middle, and end spread out over a couple of hours (give or take). Previous Star Trek films like The Wrath of Khan, The Voyage Home, and Star Trek Beyond really benefited from telling contained stories that allowed our favorite characters to shine. If Legacy is turned into a film, we’ll get to see Seven of Nine and Picard’s son at their best when dealing with a high-stakes dilemma; isn’t that better than watching them unravel a season-long mystery that you never really cared about in the first place?

From the very beginning, the purpose of Star Trek: Picard was to give a great send-off to our titular character. While the first two seasons were very rocky, season three managed to deliver on this premise by giving Patrick Stewart’s character plenty of closure: he rekindled his relationship with Beverly Crusher, discovered he had a secret son, and managed to save the Federation one more time. Of course, the “secret sauce” of this season was getting to see more of our favorite characters from The Next Generation that we otherwise hadn’t seen in decades, including Worf and Geordi LaForge.

Many fans want a Star Trek: Legacy series specifically because they want to see more of these characters, but hear us out: in an ongoing show, those characters would most likely be reduced to a handful of disappointing cameos spread out over several seasons. Why settle for the occasional episode of Riker making pizza or Worf finding his inner calm when we could have a film that gives the most beloved characters their own Picard-like sendoffs? Just as Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country gave closure to The Original Series, a Star Trek: Legacy movie could give closure to The Next Generation in a way that Nemesis never did. 

As we noted before, Paramount reportedly wants the Section 31 movie to kick off a trend where they release a new Star Trek film on Paramount+ every couple of years. One reason Alex Kurtzman and crew likely want to do this is they don’t want to oversaturate Paramount+ with Trek content as Disney+ is saturated with Marvel content…after all, the Trek equivalent of “superhero fatigue” could completely destroy the momentum of this franchise renaissance. However, here’s our pitch to Kurtzman and Paramount: turning Star Trek: Legacy movie will allow them to avoid series fatigue while also testing the waters for future spinoffs.

On the most basic level, the success or failure of a Legacy film can help determine whether fans would want an ongoing series with these characters. But audience reaction to the film can also help Paramount discover other spinoff potential: for example, an extended Worf cameo could help them determine the viability of that solo Worf series Michael Dorn has wanted to do for so many years, and the series could even bring in characters from Deep Space Nine or (more) characters from Voyager to see if fans will show up for sequel shows to those series. 

When all is said and done, the answer is clear: the legacy of Star Trek as a franchise may very well hinge on Kurtzman’s willingness to deliver a Star Trek: Legacy film. Worst case, if it’s awful (like Picard season two awful), fans will know we dodged a phaser blast by not getting an entire series that looked like something that Rom found during waste extraction duty.