By Joshua Tyler
| Updated 23 seconds ago

Star Trek has never been at a lower point. The franchise’s last batch of shows received almost no ratings, and the brand’s total mismanagement became so bad that it drove away existing Trekkies while failing to attract any new viewers.

With no clear plan to turn it around, Star Trek has been shut down. It’s done. It’s finished. There’s nothing new in production, and there aren’t firm plans to make anything more. Paramount has torn down all its existing sets, and they’re currently auctioning off the Discovery-verse props to the highest bidders, and there aren’t many bidders.

Star Trek has been in a place where there’s nothing new coming before; in fact, it’s happened twice previously in the franchise’s history. But this time it’s different. Those previous Star Trek dark periods happened because of either Hollywood underestimating its potential or a cooling fan interest.

Star Trek enters this new dark age, drowning in hatred and indifference. Trekkies are so burned they’re now happy to see it go, convinced that no Star Trek at all is better than watching their favorite thing ruined over and over and over again. Things got that bad. It means getting out of this mess, if Star Trek ever does, will be harder than ever. 

What happened? What went wrong? More than a year ago, we tried to find the answer, but since then, things have gotten so, so much worse. Our warnings weren’t heeded, and now the end times are here.

To find out how Trek can get out of this darkest of all timelines, we’re going to have to take some risks. Luckily, risk is our business. What follows is the full and complete history of how Star Trek self-destructed.

All Of This Has Happened Before

To find the answers we need, we’ll need to visit the Guardian of Forever and peer deep into Star Trek’s past. The year is 2017. Star Trek had been off television for 12 years. The last Trek release, Star Trek: Beyond, turned out to be a box-office disappointment.

Paramount devised a bold new plan to revitalize Star Trek with a prequel series.

Oh, wait, they’d just done that. The entire 2009 Star Trek movie franchise was a prequel.

But that was on the big screen; this time, it would be different. This time it wasn’t a movie, it was a television series. 

Oh, wait, they already did that, too. It was called Enterprise, and Paramount pulled the plug on that show after four seasons. 

That very recent past somehow totally forgotten, Paramount moved forward with another prequel, their third attempt in a row at making a Star Trek prequel happen. The focus of the plan was that it serve as a flagship show for their new streaming service, CBS All Access.

Oh, wait, they’d already tried that, too. When Paramount launched its own television network in the 1990s, it created Star Trek: Voyager to serve as its flagship program. The UPN network ceased broadcasting in 2005.

Third, and I guess also second, time was not the charm. These obviously stupid decisions began the worst chapter in Star Trek’s history: The Disco era.

Star Trek Enters The Disco Era With Brian Fuller

The Disco era of Star Trek did not actually begin in the era of disco, the ‘70s, no matter what Bones’ outfit from The Motion Picture might have you believe. The Disco era began with the debut of Star Trek: Discovery in 2017. It ended, spiritually at least, with the cancellation of Starfleet Academy in 2026, a television show widely agreed to be one of the worst things ever made.

Discovery was created by a man named Brian Fuller. Fuller was a well-known television writer and producer. He’d written for both Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager in the 90s. Since then, he’d established himself as a much sought-after talent, creating critically acclaimed series like Pushing Daisies and Hannibal.

Fuller had the right resume, and so, Paramount hired him to create a new Star Trek series. His initial pitch was for an anthology series, with “diversity” as a focus, and a dark, gritty tone inspired by Game of Thrones.

That’s right, Brian Fuller wanted to turn Gene Roddenberry’s bright and hopeful view of the future into dark, gritty, and violent Game of Thrones. 

Fuller worked on the show for 9 months. His tenure was marked by missed deadlines and ever-expanding budgets. Paramount clashed with him over his desire to reboot Star Trek into a gritty Game of Thrones knockoff. The company wanted its brand to stick with the traditions that made Star Trek work, and Fuller wanted to warp it into something entirely different.

Eventually, Paramount grew fed up with Fuller and fired him.

Fuller’s Ghost Pushes Star Trek: Discovery Forward

Aside from the fact that no lessons were learned from their previous failures, Paramount had up til this point made at least some reasonable decisions on this project that, probably never should have happened in the first place. Hiring Fuller didn’t work out, but on paper, it should have. And when Fuller failed, Paramount made another good decision by firing him. Paramount’s good decisions stop here.

They replaced Fuller with Gretchen J. Berg & Aaron Harberts. Berg & Harberts were Fuller’s people. They’d worked with him on past projects and were already helping him make Discovery. The ideas Fuller was implementing, the terrible ideas that got him fired, were also their ideas. So they stayed the course and kept working on their Game of Thrones-ification of Star Trek.

Eventually, Berg & Harberts were also fired, amidst accusations of abuse towards the show’s writers.

Alex Kurtzman Seizes Control Of Star Trek

Alex Kurtzman was put in Berg & Harbert’s place. Kurtzman was the man most responsible for the worst of the recent Star Trek movies, Star Trek: Into Darkness. He now held the future of the entire franchise in his hands. He would remain in charge not just of Discovery, but of the entire Star Trek franchise, throughout the Disco era.

By then, production on Star Trek: Discovery was pretty far along. Kurtzman made tweaks to satisfy some of Paramount’s concerns, but much of what the show would be was already written in stone. 

Discovery was the most expensive series Star Trek ever produced. Paramount could have trashed it and taken a tax write-off, but that’s tough to do with so much money on the line. So they released it.

Star Trek: Discovery Arrives On Streaming And Gets Quarantined

Star Trek: Discovery was poorly received by fans from the beginning. Critics initially praised it, but critics rarely watch shows beyond the first one or two episodes. They ignore it after that, which makes their reviews meaningless. 

Reports of Discovery’s ratings were vague and unreliable. Most indications were that after an initially strong showing, people began abandoning the show.

Paramount took note and tried making big changes for season 2. They brought in Anson Mount to play Christopher Pike, and Mount was fantastic. 

Unfortunately, the rest of the show was still the show it was always designed to be. Adding one good character to a terrible show cannot save it. 

Stuck with a show no one liked, Paramount did the only thing they could do besides cancel it: They quarantined the entire series, separating it from the rest of Star Trek. They did that by time-jumping Star Trek: Discovery so far into the future that nothing it did could have any further impact on the franchise.

Strange New Worlds Rights Discovery’s Wrongs

Then, they created a spinoff called Star Trek: Strange New Worlds for Pike to rescue him from Discovery’s sinking ship. Though his new series was technically an extension of the Disco-verse, it quickly went to work differentiating itself from Discovery and the mistakes it had made. Strange New Worlds even fixed the Klingons.

That new direction should have been it for the Disco era. The franchise forked away from it; Paramount was working on other Star Trek shows. Discovery limped onward but was soon canceled after five seasons of disinterest

But as Discovery was canceled, Strange New Worlds soon morphed into something different. 

Strange New Worlds Becomes A Vaudeville Act For Theater Kids

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 was a distinct decline in quality from season one. By season three, the show had become a vaudeville act for theater kids, filled with musical episodes, puppet episodes, and endless silliness, which had nothing to do with Star Trek. 

Paramount finally had enough. With season 3 still airing and two more seasons completed and awaiting airtime, Paramount pulled the plug. The remaining two seasons would eventually be allowed to stream because they’d already been completed, but the sets were torn down and thrown in the trash. 

Michelle Yeoh Wins An Oscar And Changes Everything

Amidst all of this, Alex Kurtzman had been trying to make a Star Trek: Section 31 spinoff since the first season of Discovery. His plan centered on a widely disliked Star Trek: Discovery character, played by actress Michelle Yeoh. 

Fans hated the idea, and no one at Paramount seemed particularly excited about it. They prioritized Strange New Worlds over it, and while a Section 31 series was announced, it never went into full production. Kurtzman’s last update stated clearly that Section 31 was now a very low priority.

And then, in March of 2023, Michelle Yeoh won an Oscar. 

In April of 2023, Star Trek: Section 31 went into full production as a full-length feature film. Oscar-winning tends to have that effect.

The Worst Star Trek Movie

In January of 2025, Star Trek: Section 31 arrived as a direct-to-streaming movie on Paramount+. It was the first Star Trek movie released in nearly a decade. It’s now the worst-reviewed movie in the entire Star Trek canon, and audiences have given it an appalling 15% fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes. 

Star Trek: Section 31 begins when a spitwad flies across the screen, tracing the shape of the Starfleet logo. Viewers would later learn that Spitwad is actually the movie’s hero ship, but that knowledge doesn’t make it any better. 

The movie revolves around Michelle Yeoh’s Philippa character, a woman responsible for numerous acts of genocide, and she’s not sorry about any of it. The movie quickly confirms her status as a monster with a flashback, in which she exterminates her entire family for a job promotion, where she’ll get to spend decades committing galactic massacres and torturing the man she loves for fun. This murderous abomination is Philippa Georgiou, played by Michelle Yeoh on Star Trek: Discovery.

Star Trek Endorses Genocide And Cannibalism

The movie flashes forward to a present where she runs a floating space bar. We’re reintroduced to her while the soundtrack blasts badass chick rock music to clue the audience in on the notion that we’re supposed to think she’s really, really awesome, despite being an unapologetic slaughterer of innocents. 

Then Georgiou pops a human eyeball into her mouth and savors its taste as the music swells and the camera swirls around her in adoration. Yes, Star Trek: Section 31 is selling the idea of cannibalistic mass murder being super cool, as long as it’s done in high heels. It’s the entire premise of this film. 

Hooray for space Hitler?

There are other characters in Section 31, but they’re no better. The super cool Section 31 spy team engages in introductions by shouting at each other, making threats, and posing for the camera. Like Georgiou, they’re also mostly serial killers, and they’re all pretty upset they aren’t able to do more killing.

Luckily, this mission to do a thing takes place in the exact same space bar they’re already standing in. Paramount didn’t need to build any other sets for their heist. What a financially fortuitous coincidence. 

There’s a confusing fistfight in front of a bad green screen rendering of a blurry tunnel. A murder mystery that no one cares about. A robot gets incapacitated by being kneed in the crotch. Star Trek: Section 31 ends when Phillipa Georgiou genocides an entire universe on suspicion of possible mischief and then tells her team she’s going to kill them.

If you still have doubts about the quality of Star Trek: Section 31’s writing, please enjoy this actual line of dialogue from the movie: “She died like she lived. By that you know what I mean.” 

Alex Kurtzman Solidifies Star Trek As A Franchise For Criminals With Starfleet Academy

Using Star Trek to glorify atrocities while offering up a light endorsement of cannibalism in a movie everyone hated and no one watched should have ended the career of Alex Kurtzman and prompted a pause for self-reflection. That didn’t happen.

At the same time, he’d been pushing for this terrible Section 31 movie, Alex Kurtzman’s other pet project was a show set at Starfleet Academy. This idea had been kicking around for a long time as a way to get hot, young people on screen posing for the camera. Obviously, it’s a terrible idea; fans never liked it or wanted it. Which is why it never happened. With the failures stacking up, some coke fiend at Paramount said, ‘Why not?’ and Kurtzman made it.

Starfleet Academy begins with a hero character who is a criminal. It’s the second NuTrek series to be led by a criminal, and the third time a Star Trek project has been centered around a lawbreaker.

A criminal past was Michael Burnham’s introduction, too, on Star Trek: Discovery. 

The 2009 Star Trek movie begins with a young James T. Kirk being arrested for stealing a car.

In the future, all the best people will be criminals, I guess? No more high-achieving, hardworking professionals. Something to aspire to, kids.

40,000 Viewers Per Episode Ends Star Trek

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy would go on to be the most hated thing in the history of the franchise. You might think otherwise, since Kurtzman did manage to convince critics to give it good reviews by stuffing every episode with woke political propaganda. Critics love that stuff and will praise it any time they see it.

Objective viewers and anyone who likes good writing hated it. The show has some of the lowest audience scores of any series in history.  Some reports have Starfleet Academy’s viewership as low as 40,000 tune-ins per episode. For a Star Trek show. Paramount’s flagship Star Trek show. 

Starfleet Academy was humiliation on an epic scale. Despite the fact that a second season had already been filmed, Paramount quickly waved the white flag and canceled Starfleet Academy, too.

No Lessons Were Learned

As of this moment, that’s the end. The end of Star Trek. There’s been some vague talk from Paramount that they’re exploring ideas, but for now, they aren’t making it anymore.  It’s also the final legacy of Star Trek’s Disco era. The destruction of everything Star Trek fans loved. The destruction of a franchise 50 years in the making.

Along the way, no lessons were ever learned. Instead, mistakes were repeated over and over and over again.

Did your show about a criminal fail? Make another one. 

Did your prequel fail? Make another one. 

Did your network fail? Make another one.

Rejecting Good Ideas Along The Way

It didn’t have to be this way. Even after Fuller’s initial Discovery plans failed, Paramount had ways to correct course.

Developing in parallel with the Disco-verse was a Star Trek animated series called Lower Decks, helmed by Rick & Morty alum Mike McMahan. The show he created was a huge success, and it had nothing at all to do with the Disco-verse. Paramount rewarded McMahan’s success by canceling the show after five seasons and firing him. 

There was also Star Trek: Prodigy, an animated series for kids, which was so beloved that fans basically forced Paramount to give it another season with a letter-writing campaign. Paramount gave in and allowed more of the show, but only begrudgingly. They didn’t put it on their streaming app, opting instead to let Netflix have it to defer costs.

Tangential to the Disco-verse was the Picard-verse, a series vanity project developed around Patrick Stewart’s Captain Picard character. The show was a standard Alex Kurtzman disaster for two seasons until the third, when Paramount turned the whole thing over to veteran TV showrunner and legit Star Trek fan, Terry Matalas.

Indications are that Kurtzman wasn’t involved in making the third season, occupied with filming his pet projects, instead. That allowed Matalas to run with it and make Picard season 3 a tribute to the thing he loved most: Actual Star Trek.

Terry jettisoned everything the series had done previously, started over, and, in the process, delivered the best Star Trek season of the modern Trek era. Fans loved it. Audience scores were through the roof.

Matalas lobbied to be given more work, pitching a spinoff series called Star Trek: Legacy. Fans launched petitions to support him, trying to convince Paramount to hand the entire franchise over.

But Kurtzman was still firmly in charge, and if I had to guess, probably jealous over the response Matalas was getting, in comparison to the way people were deservedly shitting on him. So, he responded to that outpouring of support by firing Matalas. 

Why Star Trek Failed

That’s the current state of Star Trek. It’s dead. There are two more seasons of Strange New Worlds in the can to release, and maybe Paramount will also still release that completed second season of Starfleet Academy, but that’s it, and those last few dribbles are likely to do more harm than good since basically everyone hates all of it.

Ok, sure, the .001% of humans who spent their formative years as theater kids may like it. But is that really a demographic worth pursuing? It’s like five people, and four of them are named Skylar.

I get the impulse. The entertainment industry actually is run by theater types. By actors and drama dorks who actually really were theater kids. But that’s not who their audience is. That’s not who they’re making shows for. 

Star Trek is supposed to be for people who like Star Trek, and instead of making that, Paramount got a bunch of theater kids together and let them turn Star Trek into something for themselves. It’s next-level narcissism. Rot from the inside. The antithesis of everything that the entertainment industry is supposed to be about.

Your job as a creative is to think outside yourself, to think beyond you to something bigger, greater, and more noble. What you create should be informed by your experiences, not imprisoned by them.

That’s what Star Trek is now: A prison. Let me out!

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