Popverse's top stories

• Summer 2026 is getting started already - we have the Florida Supercon 2026 dates!
• Why have a family vacation from hell when you could read one instead with Jennifer Thorne's Diavola? [If It Bleeds, We Read]
• Marvel Studios veterans are teaming up to bring 2000 AD icon Judge Dredd to the big screen one more time

The end of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is on its way as the fifth season is expected to go into production later this year. However, co-showrunner Akiva Goldsman already knows how the series as a whole will end, and it will be with the most iconic captain of the Enterprise at the helm. While Strange New Worlds isn’t guaranteed to lead directly into a reboot of Star Trek: The Original Series, it will give us the first canonical instance of Captain James T. Kirk in the captain’s chair of the Enterprise.

That might sound like two contradictory statements – if Kirk is the Captain of the Enterprise at the end of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, surely that means they are going to eat into at least some of what happened in The Original Series, right? But Goldsman explains that there is a sweet spot between the two shows that they plan to hit. “We will take the show to Kirk’s first day of command, which is, by the way, not actually The Original Series. The Original Series starts a bit into Kirk’s command.”

The canonical start to Star Trek: The Original Series, according to Goldsman, is not even the first episode that aired. “I think of ‘Where No Man Has Gone Before,’ and that’s not Kirk’s first mission, nor does it feel like Kirk’s second mission.”

Because Star Trek: The Original Series is a serialized show, the episodes are largely standalone stories. It also means that many of the episodes aired in a different order than they were filmed in, which is why Where No Man Has Gone Before is the pilot episode and generally considered the start of the series, even though it was not the first one to air. In the original show, we never see Kirk being given command of the Enterprise, so it sounds likely that the final episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds will end with a parting shot of James T. Kirk in the Captain’s chair for the first time before credits roll.

Space may be the final frontier, but there's no end to Popverse's love of the Star Trek universe. Hop aboard the starship Enterprise with our Star Trek watch order, explore strange new worlds with our upcoming Star Trek TV shows and movies list, seek out the new life of the franchise, and boldly go where no Star Trek film has ever gone before - with Quentin Tarantino?