New Star Trek Release Could Finally Settle the Franchise's Biggest Timeline Mystery
Star Trek’s next mission is unknown. With Starfleet Academy scrapped and Paramount silent on what follows the Alex Kurtzman era—if it’s ending at all—the franchise is drifting, its signal drowned out by endless fan bickering instead of concrete plans.
Star Trek on screen feels stuck in limbo right now. Starfleet Academy got canceled, Paramount is cagey about what comes after the Alex Kurtzman era (or if that era is even over), and the chatter about Starfleet Academy’s divisive reception has been endless and exhausting. The future is muddy. The good news: other corners of the franchise are very much alive.
What is actually coming this year
- A follow-up to the well-liked Red Shirts comic
- Star Trek: Picard novel To Defy Fate
- A handful of new reference books
- Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is back July 23, and yes, there is a new trailer
- In November, DK releases Star Trek Timelines for the franchise’s 60th anniversary
The big swing: DK’s Star Trek Timelines
This one is ambitious. The book promises to lay out a franchise-wide chronology that includes the messy stuff: alternate realities like the Mirror Universe, the Kelvin timeline, and Voyager’s Year of Hell. If it does what it says on the tin, it could finally straighten out a bunch of long-standing continuity knots, including the one that never dies: Khan and the Eugenics Wars.
Why the Eugenics Wars are still a headache
Originally, the Eugenics Wars were said to happen from 1993 to 1996. Then The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager did stories set in the 1990s that sailed right past any mention of that very large world event. Years later, Strange New Worlds season 2 tried to square the circle in the episode Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow with a bit of temporal triage:
'Whole temporal wars have been fought over' Khan and the Eugenics War, leading to 'time itself... pushing back, and events reinsert themselves'.
Translation: in-universe, time keeps shuffling the deck to prevent paradoxes, so dates and details move around. Convenient, sure. But it only works if the shuffle has rules.
The snag Picard introduced
Picard season 2 adds a fresh wrinkle. Brent Spiner’s Dr. Adam Soong kicks off his 'Khan Project' in 2024. Meanwhile, Strange New Worlds shows Khan as a child in 2023 in its adjusted timeline. That is an awkward overlap at best. A proper timeline has to either plant a flag and say what happened when, or clearly explain how those events coexist without hand-waving.
What the book needs to nail
If Star Trek Timelines picks a definitive placement for the Eugenics Wars and the key beats of Khan’s life, great — we have a map. If it leans entirely on the time-is-fluid loophole, the whole exercise risks feeling pointless unless the book also spells out which events are actually subject to those shifts and which are fixed.
The smaller stuff a timeline can quietly fix
It is not all galaxy-grade contradictions. There are little continuity scuffs fans love to point out, like Spock claiming in The Original Series episode Dagger of the Mind that he had never tried a human mind meld — despite Strange New Worlds showing him do it twice before the TOS era. A detailed chronology could smooth over those bumps with sensible context.
The bottom line
On screen, Star Trek’s next phase is uncertain. Off screen, we have a busy year, a new Strange New Worlds season on July 23, and in November, a timeline book that could either clean up decades of confusion or shrug and blame temporal turbulence. I am rooting for the former. And I am very curious to see how bold DK gets with Khan.