The third and final season of Star Trek: Picard set the stage for a possible continuation, which showrunner Terry Matalas dubbed Star Trek: Legacy. It’s a project which fans were hoping would actually happen, but Paramount didn’t bite, and Matalas jumped ship to Marvel to take charge of the VisionQuest series.
Exactly what Star Trek: Legacy would have been about hasn’t been revealed, but Matalas did drop a few plot details on the first season of the scrapped series while speaking at Creation Entertainment’s STLV: Trek to Vegas.
The epilogue of the final episode of Star Trek: Picard found Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan) as the new captain of the U.S.S. Titan, which was rechristened as the U.S.S. Enterprise G. With Raffi (Michelle Hurd) as her first officer and Jack Crusher (Ed Speleers) as the captain’s special counsellor.
As for Legacy, Matalas said it would have put a big focus on the Klingons, particularly Worf and his son, Alexander.
“The first season of Legacy was going to be about the Klingons,” Matalas said. “The Klingons were always stand-ins for the Russians. Echoing today, there was an unstable element in the empire and one of those elements was going to be Alexander, so it would’ve have been a very different Worf-Alexander storyline.“
Alexander first appeared in Star Trek: The Next Generation as a child. He popped up in a handful of episodes, but wasn’t seen again until Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, where he was suddenly a teenager. Worf and Alexander didn’t always have the best relationship, so it would have been interesting to see where this new series would have taken them.
I still think Paramount dropped the ball by not pursuing Legacy, but it’s a little late now.
After a solid decade of various Star Trek projects in production, the franchise seems headed for a hiatus. The fourth season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds recently debuted, with the fifth and final season already shot. Star Trek: Starfleet Academy was cancelled after its first season, but a second season will still debut. And…that’s it. There are no new Star Trek shows in development.
There is a new movie in the works from Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, the duo responsible for 2023’s Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, but it’s not a sure thing.
The pair have teased that the project won’t feature any of the characters seen in previous Star Trek movies and will be set “a little further into the future than we’ve been before.” Whether that means post-Picard (25th Century) or post-Discovery (32nd Century) remains to be seen. At San Diego Comic-Con, Daley added that it will be “a version of Star Trek that no one’s ever seen before.“