Star Trek: Picard proved one thing; we don’t need any more series sequels

Star Trek has to avoid doing any more sequel series going forward.

Star Trek has bucked a lot of modern trends in recent years. One of which was not doing a lot of interconnectivity within the series. The idea behind The Next Generation was that it wouldn’t be attached to the original series in any meaningful way and that the show would look to distance itself from what came before and set its own path.

But now, thanks to Alex Kurtzman and J.J. Abram, Star Trek can’t exist as its own thing anymore. Every one of the five Nu Trek Era shows simmers, or is genetically infused with nostalgia. Discovery has Spock, the Enterprise, and Christopher Pike all in its first season+.

Lower Decks is a cameo cavalcade, with constant callbacks to better, more memorable characters and moments. Picard and to a lesser extent Prodigy, are sequel series to The Next Generation and Voyager, though Prodigy is a soft sequel, with the primary focus being on the younger, new characters.

And Strange New Worlds is a prequel. Frankly, it’s obnoxious. There isn’t one new Star Trek property that can stand on its own. One, or even two is fine. But for this to be the baseline for the new show has got to stop.

Especially with the failings of Picard as a franchise. The show may have some hope for its final season, but no one should have to watch through two bad episodes, let alone two bad seasons, to get to the good stuff.

Picard has done a lot of damage to many characters, so it’s best if franchises are just left alone, to avoid damaging the legacy of a character, like Star Wars did to Luke Skywalker. We don’t need our heroes deconstructed.

So we have to severely disagree with Collider, who said it’s time for a Deep Space Nine sequel. The current crop of creators for Star Trek is more focused on growing the viewer base than it is on maintaining the viewers they have. In turn, they don’t respect what came before and are willing to make drastic changes to characters and plots to help bolster interest in the new property.

Imagine how bad Picard had been for the first two seasons, and now consider those same creators taking a hatchet to the deep, complicated, religious-based lore of Deep Space Nine? Yeah, that’ll go over well.

While we’re at it, Star Trek has to avoid any prequel series as well

I love Strange New Worlds, but one’s enough. This show gets grandfathered in because in a lot of ways, it’s the series we were supposed to get in the 1960s. But we don’t need to keep revisiting the same characters over and over again.

I’m good at ever seeing Spock again. No more Spock, please. I don’t want to see a young Jean-Luc Picard or pig-tailed “Katie Janeway” in Indiana. I’m good, I’m out. No more. Set something after Prodigy for the next show, with new characters, and let’s go forward, without the albatross like an anchor around the neck of the franchise that we call nostalgia.