All the TV a Trekkie Could Watch: Star Trek on Paramount+

With Star Trek: Strange New Worlds premiering May 5, the number of Star Trek shows currently running on Paramount+ has expanded to five. What are all the shows about and should you be watching them?

Star Trek: Discovery is the first new series that premiered on Paramount+ (then CBS All Access). Initially is didn’t feel much like a typical Star trek series at all. Initially set a decade before the original Star Trek series), the series was initially focused on the war between the United Federation of Planets and the Klingon Empire, which is kicked off by a mutinous act by First Officer Michael Burnham (played by Sonequa Martin-Green, previously best known for her role on The Walking Dead). The early part of the series addresses the consequences of her actions and the war she created before eventually moving on to the mirror universe and then the far off future. It isn’t until the crew settles into the future that the series truly begins to feel like a Star Trek series. While the show doesn’t have the typical standalone episodes that were a hallmark of the classic shows, instead focusing on season-long mysteries, they do focus more on the wonder of discovery and making first contact that has always been at the heart of Star Trek.  

Connected to Discovery is Star Trek: Short Treks, which is a series of mini standalone episodes focuses on characters from Discovery before and during the series. Each episode focuses on a single character or a couple of characters and delves into themes related to the Discovery.

Star Trek: Picard follows legendary retired general Jean-Luc Picard (Sir Patrick Stewart) as he deals with new threats and past pain. For fans of Star Trek: Voyager, Jeri Ryan’s Seven of Nine joins the adventure as a Fenris Ranger. This series is much darker than either characters’ original series, forcing us to questions aspects of the United Federation of Planets and Starfleet, which are typically held up as the standards of morality. While the series delves into Picard’s backstory, Seven feels the most multi-dimensional even as the show could spend more time on her. The current season involves traveling through time with the Borg Queen in order to ensure that Q doesn’t permanently alter time. Both Picard and Seven have been assimilated by the Borg, Picard near the end of his Starfleet career and Seven as a child, which is one of the few things the pair have in common.

Star Trek: Lower Decks is the second animated Star Trek series but it has a distinctly different feeling than any show that has come before it. Lower Decks follows the oft-ignored lower-level crew members of Starfleet who are rarely more than dispensable characters to demonstrate the seriousness and danger of the typical Star Trek story. Following four ensigns on one of the least important and prestigious ships in Starfleet, the series is much more sarcastic and tongue-in-cheek than you might expect. These are not the bravest, smartest, most qualified crew members that we’re used to. They’re not captains or members of the senior staff. Instead, Ensigns Mariner, Boimler, Rutherford and Tendi are just trying to get by as best as they can while maintaining some level of a social life.

Star Trek: Prodigy is another animated series, though this one is targeted towards children (it even airs on Nickelodeon in addition to Paramount+). It’s a great entry point for parents who want to introduce their children to the Star Trek universe. Five years after the USS Voyager has returned to Earth, a group of young aliens on the Tars Lamora prison colony (which is really more of a slave labor colony where the inhabitants are prevented from speaking a common language in order to ensure that they cannot plot their escape) discover a Starfleet ship, the USS Protostar, and use it to escape. Because it is an animated series, it really leans into the idea of beings from a variety of alien species working together, with what is likely a series first – no humans in the crew. Voyager fans will be particularly excited for the ship’s Emergency Training Holographic Advisor, modeled after Kathryn Janeway herself.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is said to be embracing the typical Star Trek format more wholeheartedly than any of the more recent series. Anson Mount, Rebecca Romijn, and Ethan Peck respectively star as Captain Christopher Pike, Number One, and Science Officer Spock, reprise their roles from season two of Discovery. All three characters are from the original Star Trek series and Strange New Worlds acts as a prequel for the original series. It will follow the trio, and a number of new crew members, as they explore new worlds while traveling the galaxy aboard the USS Enterprise.

If that isn’t enough for you, the previously announced Discovery spinoff Star Trek: Section 31 is supposedly still in development. In 2019, CBS announced that they would be producing Section 31 starring Michelle Yeoh as Emperor Philippa Georgiou (brought back from the Mirror-Verse by Discovery and embodying a highly questionable moral code). At the Paramount+ Executive Session during today’s TCA Winter Tour, Paramount+ Original Scripted Series President Nicole Clemens provided a brief update on the series: “We are still in development on Section 31, so there will be more news on that soon.”

Photo: Star Trek Universe. Courtesy of Paramount.