Captain's Log: Star Trek: Year One Is Still Waiting on Paramount Skydance
A new 60th-anniversary interview with Akiva Goldsman about Star Trek's future doesn't mention Star Trek: Year One once — and that omission is worth noticing. Six months after co-showrunner Henry Alonso Myers confirmed the Paul Wesley Kirk prequel had reached Paramount Skydance for review, there's still no public update on where it stands. The pitch itself remains one of the most promising ideas Trek has had in years.
Captain's log, stardate 2026.9.12. There's a particular kind of quiet that isn't the same as "no." I've learned to distrust it more than a flat rejection, and this week's 60th-anniversary interview with Akiva Goldsman is full of a different kind of quiet: the kind where a question just doesn't come up at all.
Goldsman, nearing the end of his run as Strange New Worlds co-creator with the show's six-episode final season on the horizon, talked to The Hollywood Reporter about the franchise's staying power — Trek reflecting "the world as we wish it was," the value of interspecies cooperation as a message that still lands sixty years on. What he didn't talk about, in an interview built around Trek's next sixty years, is Star Trek: Year One — the Kirk prequel he and co-showrunner Henry Alonso Myers have been quietly building a pitch for. That's not necessarily a bad sign. But it's not nothing either, six months after the last real update.
For anyone who missed the pitch itself: Star Trek: Year One would follow Paul Wesley's James T. Kirk during his actual first year commanding the Enterprise — the stretch of time between taking the chair and "Where No Man Has Gone Before," the second TOS pilot. Goldsman and Myers have described it as filling in "those great lost years that exist in all of our head canon," using the cast rapport Strange New Worlds already built — Wesley, Ethan Peck's Spock, Celia Rose Gooding's Uhura, Martin Quinn's Scotty — rather than starting a new ensemble from scratch. It's a genuinely smart pitch. Prequel shows live or die on whether the audience already has a reason to care about where these characters end up, and Year One would inherit four seasons of exactly that groundwork for free.
The last word on where that pitch actually stands came back in March, when Myers told reporters at the Saturn Awards that it had formally reached Paramount Skydance: "It's in their hands right now. They're taking a look at it, trying to decide it." That's not a rejection. It's also not a green light — six months on, it's still the most recent public statement anyone connected to Year One has made about its status, and Paramount's merger with Skydance is exactly the kind of transition that swallows pitches like this whole. New management inherits a slate of shows that predate them, and the natural instinct of new studio leadership is to audit everything before committing to more of it, especially anything not already in production. A pitch sitting on a desk during that kind of transition isn't necessarily dead. It's just competing with every other decision the new regime hasn't made yet, and Trek doesn't have the leverage of being the thing currently making anyone money at this exact moment — that's Strange New Worlds' job, and Strange New Worlds is on its way out.
I want to be precise about what we actually know here, because Trek reporting has a bad habit of turning "pitched" into "coming soon" without anything in between. Year One is not greenlit. It is not in development. As of the most recent public comment, it was a completed pitch package sitting in front of decision-makers who hadn't yet engaged with it. Six months of silence since then could mean anything from "still in the queue" to "quietly shelved" — nobody involved has said which.
What makes this worth a check-in now is the timing. Strange New Worlds' final season — six episodes, described by Goldsman as "a six-episode goodbye" — is explicitly built to bridge into the era Year One would pick up. The franchise is spending its current flagship show's last breaths setting a table that a follow-up series may never actually sit down at. If Year One doesn't happen, the audience gets a beautifully constructed bridge to nowhere. If it does happen, it's arguably the most natural continuation Trek has lined up since Deep Space Nine spun out of TNG's world instead of just following the next ship.
There's a version of this that should worry longtime fans more than it seems to. Goldsman, asked point-blank about the next generation of Trek fans in this week's interview, didn't sugarcoat it: "I have no evidence to suggest there is another generation coming." He can't get his own kids to watch the show. But he followed that with something closer to faith than data — he still believes there will be another generation, "as an act of faith," because, in his words, a lot of Star Trek has always run on exactly that. That's not the tone of someone who knows what's coming next. It's the tone of someone who built something they believe in and is now watching its future — both the fans' and Year One's — sit in a queue they don't control.
None of that means Year One is doomed. Studios sit on good pitches during transitions all the time and greenlight them once the new regime settles in — sometimes faster than anyone expects, once someone senior actually reads the material. But "reached the desk" and "got picked up" are different sentences, and six months after the first one, Trek still doesn't have the second. The 60th anniversary gave the franchise a full year of theatrical screenings, Guinness World Records, LEGO sets, and global goodwill. What it hasn't given it yet is a clear answer on whether any of that goodwill — or the six episodes still to come — translates into what comes after Strange New Worlds closes its logbook.
Live long and prosper — and to whoever's desk that pitch is still sitting on: it's a good one. Read it.
Comments (0)
Log in to leave a comment.