If you thought 2020’s 23-week-run of Lower Decks into Discovery was a considerable amount of Star Trek to consume, well, 2022 is looking like it’s going to dunk your head into a holodeck and not let go for quite some time.
Today Paramount+ announced a swath of new premiere dates and renewals throughout 2022 for every current ongoing Star Trek series on the platform, including live action and animation. The slate, beginning with this month’s return of Star Trek: Prodigy and next month’s return for Star Trek: Discovery season four, essentially lays out the groundwork for a new episode of Star Trek dropping every Thursday on the platform from now until middle of July… and perhaps more Star Trek even beyond that. You know, as a treat.
Things kick off with the aforementioned returns of Prodigy and Discovery. The next batch of Prodigy episodes began on January 6, and will wrap up with the 10th and final episode of season one on February 3. That’s just in time for the previously announced February 10 return of Discovery season four, which will air its five remaining episodes weekly.
That means there’ll actually be some Trek overlap, as Star Trek: Picard has been given a March 3 premiere date for its 10-episode second season — meaning Discovery and Picard will air together for three weeks. As Picard wraps up, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds — the Discovery spinoff that, thanks to timeline shenanigans, is both a sequel and a prequel, following Captain Pike and the crew of the pre-Kirk U.S.S. Enterprise after the events of Discovery’s second season — will begin its debut season on May 5.
It’s… a lot of Star Trek, but there might be even more consecutive boldly going along the way. Although no specific dates were given, Paramount+ also noted that on the animation front, Lower Decks would return for a third season in summer 2022, while Prodigy will air the remaining 10 episodes of season one “later in 2022.”
Also included in the announcement was a season renewal for Discovery, which will return for a fifth season — which Gizmodo has confirmed will be, in line with the other live-action Trek series, a 10-episode run, down from the previous 13-episode runs. Plus, Lower Decks will be returning for a fourth season, and Strange New Worlds is gaining a second season. Prodigy had already been previously renewed for a second season, and no details were revealed for Picard’s future, likely because the series doesn’t need to yet: production is currently underway on the already-announced season three for the series, returning from a brief pause due to a covid-19 outbreak on set.
Even before Star Trek: Discovery had barely just begun, ViacomCBS execs envisioned an incoming period for Trek where it would be airing basically all the time. With a whopping five different shows running practically consecutively throughout 2022, and still a few more on the way at some point, it’s safe to say that just a few years later… they’re getting pretty damn close to just that.
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