5 Sci-Fi Icons Star Trek Needs to Borrow Next
Star Trek launched in 1966 with a quietly radical promise: exploration without colonialism, a Federation built on interspecies diplomacy. Nearly 60 years later, that audacious vision has powered more than a dozen series and still sets the course for sci-fi.
Star Trek is hitting 60 and still messing with the formula in all the right ways. The latest lap around the sun comes with Starfleet Academy wrapping its first season on Paramount+ and a new live-action movie in development. So let's have some fun: if Trek is already the most crossover-ready sci-fi universe out there, which off-world ringers would actually make sense on a Starfleet bridge?
Why Trek is built for this
Gene Roddenberry launched the whole thing in 1966 on a deceptively simple pitch: a future where the United Federation of Planets means what it says, diplomacy comes first, and exploration doesn't equal colonialism. Six decades later, that big-hearted premise has carried more than a dozen TV series and thirteen theatrical films, partly because Trek keeps stretching itself. You can go from Deep Space Nine's political trench warfare to Strange New Worlds' swashbuckly, optimistic vibe without breaking the ship.
Trek has also spent years winking at its neighbors. There are plenty of Star Wars nods scattered across the franchise. And the Doctor Who connection isn't just a nod: in 2012, there was a full-on comic book team-up putting the Eleventh Doctor on the Enterprise-D with the Next Gen crew. Point is, Trek can play nice with other sandboxes. Here are five characters from other series who would slide into the Federation's orbit and immediately stir the pot in interesting ways.
Five ringers who belong on a Starfleet bridge
- Malcolm Reynolds, Firefly (Nathan Fillion)
Mal runs the Serenity with a stubborn anti-authority streak and a permanent grudge against big centralized governments. The Federation may be utopian, but it's still a sprawling interstellar bureaucracy that would look suspiciously familiar to a guy who fought the Alliance in the Unification War. Drop him into Trek and you get instant ideological sparks.
He makes his living on the fringes, hauling cargo and taking jobs the law politely ignores. That maps neatly to the Federation's own soft borders, where Starfleet's presence thins out and independent operators step in. He'd be right at home out there, needling admirals and quietly doing the jobs nobody wants to put on a mission brief.
- James Holden, The Expanse (Steven Strait)
Holden is The Expanse's conscience in a flight suit, the guy who chooses absolute transparency even when the galaxy is begging him to keep a lid on things. That attitude would collide, fast, with Starfleet's habit of balancing the Prime Directive and diplomacy through classified orders, withheld intel, and delicate treaty maintenance with, say, the Klingons or Romulans.
He'd bounce off the chain of command before his second briefing, and that's the point. Both Trek and The Expanse ask whether humanity can build institutions that don't repeat our worst instincts; they just land on different answers. Putting Holden in a Starfleet uniform would force that question into every scene.
- John Crichton, Farscape (Ben Browder)
Crichton is a contemporary Earth astronaut who gets slingshotted into deep, hostile unknowns and survives on instincts, unpredictability, and an endless stream of pop-culture quips. He's not a product of any academy, which makes him a perfect chaos element on a buttoned-up Starfleet deck.
He also knows wormholes in a way that turns heads. Trek loves a good spatial anomaly, and wormhole science sits at a juicy crossroads: Deep Space Nine's Bajoran politics on one side, Starfleet's temporal security headaches on the other. Park Crichton next to 24th-century professionals and you get culture clash, comedy, and legitimately useful expertise.
- Kara 'Starbuck' Thrace, Battlestar Galactica (Katee Sackhoff)
One of sci-fi's deadliest sticks, full stop. Starfleet has great helmsmen and tacticians, but Kara's whole deal is out-flying the box the institution tries to put her in. That tension writes itself the minute a red alert hits.
Picture her dropped into a Borg incursion or a Dominion border flare-up. You get the clean contrast between Trek's explorer ethos and a warrior who's survived extinction-level stakes. And her spiritual odyssey? Honestly, it tracks a little too well with the weird cosmic curveballs the Enterprise runs into every other week.
- Samantha Carter, Stargate SG-1 (Amanda Tapping)
If anyone from outside the franchise feels pre-approved for Starfleet, it's Carter. She's an Air Force officer and astrophysicist who spent a decade calmly applying hard science to impossibilities: stabilizing wormholes, reverse-engineering alien drives, the works.
She also knows what it's like when military imperatives collide with the joy of discovery, and she's fought parasitic empires while she's at it. Slot her into engineering or sciences and you get the ideal Trek hybrid: rigorous curiosity backed by field-tempered tactical sense.
So who else are we beaming aboard?
Trek's always been game to test its own boundaries, from DS9's grim politics to Strange New Worlds' breezy charm, with the occasional wink to galaxies far, far away and a legit Doctor team-up back in 2012. Your turn: which non-Trek sci-fi character do you want stepping onto a Starfleet bridge?