Probably not. But maybe…

Wrath of Khan Director Nicholas Meyer Says He’s Working On a New Star Trek Project

The headline contains just about all the actual information that’s available. Maybe it’s a series. Maybe a movie. Maybe a video game, maybe a comic book, maybe a pack of trading cards.

Still, lack of data is never a good enough reason to not speculate wildly. One possibility: Paramount has finally realized that STD is promising to be such a disaster that they’re already looking at ways of rapidly recovering by doing something that, unlike STD, won’t irritate the fans. Possibilities include the obvious such as a series set 15 years after the end of Voyager in the “prime” Star Trek universe. If it covers such stuff as the trashing of the Romulan empire and twenty years of post-Dominion War changes, it could be pretty interesting.

But for some reason, the suits think it’s a good idea to keep setting Star Trek series in the “past.” Enterprise, the NuTrek movies, Discovery. It seems they have an obsession with it. So… fine. I have an idea.

How about a series that covers *two* eras? Deep Space Nine showed Reliant-class vessels and Excelsior-class vessels all the time. These ships could well be pushing a century of service life. This it not that unlikely… the B-52 has been in service more than 60 years, for example. If things were only slightly different, Iowa-class battleships might still be in service, three quarters of a century later. So a starship a century old? Sure, I can buy that.

So here’s my notion: Star Trek: Rand, say. The adventures of the USS Ayn Rand (because why the hell not), a Reliant-class vessel that was first built around the time of “The Motion Picture” and was the pinnacle of high tech for its time. And… it’s still around a century later, with upgraded everything. No longer front line, but still doing a job. So show two entirely different crews: an early crew wearing “Wrath of Khan” era uniforms, the top of their class , in a ship that’s still new, out doing a 5-year mission. And alternate that with episodes featuring a post-Voyager crew… *not* the best of the best. You can use a lot of the same sets, and maybe even go to a lot of the same destinations, a century apart.

Have a *few* overlapping characters. Ensign Skippy is Early Rand’s enthusiastic young Vulcan science officer-in-training. Commander Skippy is Old Rand’s curmudgeonly, cranky first officer or Chief Engineer. “A century I’ve spent on this same damn ship, serving under a succession of increasingly dumbass human captains. Sigh…”

You could throw some real curveballs in there. Voyager showed a lot of new propulsion technologies, stuff pushing well past warp drive. Most of the time they didn’t work well or reliably, but they’ve had a generation to perfect what Voyager brought back.So the warp nacelles have been removed and replaced with… what? Tiny nacelles? Landing gear? Cargo pods? Empty space? Given the possibilities of the new propulsion system, then perhaps the Rand is a technology testbed, being sent to the Magellanic Clouds.