Star Trek and Timelines, certainly a complex mix, but what about crossovers? Now that is something worth talking about…
Hello everyone, my name is Captain Jack and welcome to Trek Central!
The Star Trek franchise is no stranger to inter-universe crossovers:
Scotty, McCoy, Spock and Bashir on Next Generation or Riker on Voyager, Lower Decks and Deep Space Nine,
those are just a few examples.
The list is actually quite long. By and large, each of these crossovers were met with approval from the fans.
It all happens in the same multiverse, after all. Viewers don’t have to stretch their imaginations to see these characters together.
It all just makes sense.
It would still make sense today. So why haven’t they done it on a grander scale?
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Today we’re talking about crossovers, specifically, a big Star Trek crossover event!
So why haven’t the powers that be in Star Trek embraced the concept of a major crossover event?
The time has obviously passed to have a full crossover between the Treks of the 90s and 2000s,
even though many of them were running in tandem on television and may have presented the easiest path for a crossover event.
Television was presented very differently in those days.
Episodic, 20+ episode seasons were the norm, and more relevantly, there wasn’t a lot of precedent for a large crossover event at the time.
Today, on the other hand,
Star Trek television is presented in smaller, more digestible, chunks.
With seasons running fewer than half as many episodes and shows not running in parallel,
but in sequence so that one series begins after another ends.
Currently, there are five different Star Trek series in various stages of development:
Star Trek Discovery, Picard, and Strange New Worlds are the live-action series,
while the animated series of Lower Decks and Prodigy round out the current franchise.
The time for a major crossover event may be closing in on the Star Trek universe.
In recent years, massive crossover events have become more normalized,
and are an accepted and proven money-maker in the wider world of Entertainment.
For example of massive crossovers being successful in movies, one need not look much further than the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe
for a reason to get into the large-scale crossover event business
Heroes are established in either their own movies, or as a secondary character in someone else’s
and every now and then the different characters come together to solve a common problem in a massive crossover event like the Avengers movies,
or Captain America: Civil War.
Another prime example is Disney’s own Star Wars: The Mandalorian,
and how that show has seen characters cross over from other shows such as The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels.
It seems these crossovers are becoming the new norm for some franchises.
With the recent announcement that Kalinda Vazquez, a writer who has written for Star Trek: Discovery,
is penning a script for a new movie, speculation season has started so it’s appropriate to guess that this new movie might focus on one or more of the “new” trek shows
and could easily be a crossover event film.
We’re still very early on in the development process, though,
so it’s difficult to speculate on what it might or might not be about.
Given that Bad Robot, the company behind 2009’s Star Trek is involved
there’s also the possibility of a Kelvin timeline script emerging.
Could we possibly be getting a Kelvin / Prime universe crossover? We’ll have to wait and see.
Back in the world of television the 2019 success of the CW’s major crossover DC comics event,
Crisis on Infinite Earths, could provide another example for a possible Trek crossover template.
In this case, Crisis on Infinite Earths brought together characters from the already established television universe.
The Flash, Supergirl, Superman, Legends of Tomorrow, Batwoman, The Green Arrow, Black Lightning and more came together to create what amounted to a five episode mini-series.
Granted, the hurdles for Marvel and the CW aren’t the same as those that would be faced by Star Trek.
Where all of the characters from the Marvel and DC Crossovers operate within the same timeframe roughly.
For example, Star Trek’s shows are divided across time as well as space. Any crossover event would have to navigate this hurdle.
Fortunately, time travel and temporal anomalies are a dime a dozen in the Star Trek universe, so this challenge is definitely not insurmountable.
The extended Star Trek universe surely hasn’t shied away from having characters and stories crossover.
In books, the Destiny series, for example, makes use of characters from The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and even Enterprise
to tell their story in three parts, revolving primarily around a major Borg attack on the Alpha Quadrant,
but also introducing us to a new species, the Caeliar, who mistakenly created the Borg in the first place.
With the help of their new friends, the Borg invasion of the Alpha and Beta quadrants was stopped by the crews of the Aventine
with Captain Ezri Dax, the Enterprise under Captain Picard and the Titan under the command of Will Riker.
The aftermath of the battles were absolutely devastating, wiping out or simply devastating
entire worlds including both Qo’noS and Khitomer.
These events are followed up in the next crossover series of Novels, The Typhon Pact.
The Typhon Pact Series, another great read, tells an eight part story using characters from The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager.
This octilogy imagines a universe where a number of antagonistic species have banded together in their own, new and dangerous alliance
in the wake of the events of the Destiny series we just mentioned.
The Romulan Star Empire, Breen Confederacy, Tzenkethi Coalition, Gorn Hegemony, Tholian Assembly, and the Holy Order of the Kinshaya
stand together to prevent the Federation and its allies in the expanded Khitomer Accords from gaining power in the wake of such devastation.
Moving even deeper into Beta canon, the Star Trek extended franchise certainly isn’t a stranger to crossovers outside of its own universe.
Matt Smith’s 11th Doctor Who, for example, has had adventures with the cast of The Next Generation
where the teams came together to fight the threat of the Borg and their spiritual forefathers, the Cybermen.
Not to be forgotten, there was an almost unbelievable and certifiably wacky Star Trek vs. Transformers series
where the Enterprise itself was depicted as one of the robots in disguise.
It was an autobot, for anyone who’s curious.
Not to be outdone, comics publisher IDW got in on the action with a Star Trek Original Series / GI Joe / Transformers / Ghostbusters crossover called Infestation in 2011.
But what would a live-action Star Trek crossover event even look like? We can only really speculate. So let’s do that:
Why hasn’t this happened yet?
It’s hard to say specifically, but such a project would be impressively expensive and require very precise schedules to be set.
a project would be impressively expensive and require very precise schedules to be set. It would also need a strong buy-in from Paramount execs and the cast and crew of at least three different Trek shows.
That’s not to mention a likely need to wait until the chaos of COVID has passed due to the tight scheduling that such a project would necessarily face.
For many reasons, most of them logistical, we can guess that the plot would stick to the live action shows with Lower Decks and Prodigy left out.
It wouldn’t be impossible to include the animated shows, but it would provide one more obstacle.
How would the two animated series be treated?
To start with, it’s probably safe to say that they’re not going to do the Space Jam thing and present live and animated characters together on screen.
It never looks quite right, and wouldn’t account for the dramatic differences in animation style between the Lower Decks and Prodigy.
Where these two shows could be used would be leading up to the event itself.
Episodes could be dedicated to each show singularly, just to include them in whatever it is going on.
As we said before though, the most likely eventuality is that the animated shows be left to the side.
Then again, Star Wars animated characters like Ahsoka Tano and Bo-Katan have both recently crossed into Live action, and it’s come out rather well!
Given the Paramount+ airing schedule, and the necessary complexity of the plot, a crossover event would likely be presented as a movie
as referenced earlier, or a stand-alone Paramount+ mini-series set to air between seasons of the already existing shows.
The cast, one would imagine, would have to include at the very least Captains, Pike, Picard and Burnham and likely some of all of their supporting characters.
In the interest of getting as much out of the secondary casts as possible,
Trek could take the CW’s formula of having each episode focus on one captain or crew separately,
coming together with a select group for the finale.
A cast like this could easily include characters from the previous series like Deep Space Nine, Voyager,
The Next Generation and Enterprise combined with the crews from Discovery, Strange New Worlds, and Picard.
Setting-wise, it’s likely that the powers that be are going to want to use as many existing sets as possible to try to save some money,
so you’d be likely to see a lot of scenes set on the bridges, hallways and important rooms of the various hero ships.
In order to reduce the number of characters in an already enormously bloated cast, the villain of the story is most likely to be something abstract like the “non-living entity”
that has been teased as the threat in Season 4 of Discovery than it is to be another new character that would have to compete for screen time to provide background and exposition.
Something like the Uber-synth interdimensional mechano worms from Picard’s first season,
for example, would work as well.
You don’t always have to know the thoughts and feelings of a giant robot monster from another dimension in order to know that it’s a threat.
The story, we know, would have to involve some kind of time travel.
Given that Strange New Worlds and Discovery now take place roughly 1000 years apart
with Picard sandwiched in between them,
you just can’t ignore the topic.
There are already a number of ways to time travel in Star Trek. Temporal Rifts, Slingshotting around a star, transporter accidents, Q, tIme ships,
the Borg, crewmen from the future, the Nexus, tiny wormholes… The list goes on.
It’s hard to say which direction a crossover might take.
It would have to be something that allowed, at a minimum, for communication between timeframes,
but is more likely to be some kind of direct time travel. Who knows, we might get another visit from Paul Guilfoyle’s Carl.
Otherwise known as The Guardian of Forever.
The sentient portal, by Discovery’s time, has grown cautious over the years, but would likely make an exception for some kind of inter-temporal emergency.
We could continue to speculate on more specifics, but instead we are going to leave you with the following questions:
1) Do you like the idea of a Star Trek Crossover Event and 2) What would such an event look like to you?
We look forward to seeing your answers in the comments down below.
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For now, I’ve been Captain Jack, thanks for watching and we’ll see you next time! Live Long and prosper my friends!