Hey all,
With the Kurtzman era of Trek likely almost over, I'm looking back on everything, and considering how, despite occasional comments he made about wanting to have an "Avengers-style teamup" the conditions were pretty much never in place to have the shows be interconnected.
Much of this, of course, just comes down to how divided the timeline of modern Trek is. You essentially have DIS Seasons 1/2 and SNW as TOS prequel shows, LDS immediately post-Nemesis/pre ST09, PRO essentially happening a few years later than this, PIC happening a few decades thereafter, and then DIS Seasons 3-5 and SFA occurring in the 32nd century. With decades to centuries of time between each of the installments, absent time shenanigans, it's really hard to get people jumping from one to another, let alone to get a big multi-show story arc going on. Of course, there were some little one-off things, like having Mariner and Boimler show up in an episode of Strange New Worlds, and having the finale of Prodigy loop back to the Romulan supernova. But overall, the shows were more content to reference things from earlier Trek series rather than one another.
As a result, the most ambitious multi-series arc of Trek remains the Maquis plotline from the Berman era. Created to provide backstory for Voyager, it was given two episodes of setup in TNG (Journey's End and Preemptive Strike) and given development across 15 episodes of DS9 stretching from the second to the sixth season. Yeah, Voyager squandered that setup due to network interference, so it meant little after Caretaker, but it still an ambitious vision.
To be clear, I'm not necessarily arguing that Star Trek should've tried to ape the MCU. Hell, even the MCU has struggled to be the MCU in the post-covid environment. But I have been shocked at how little was done to give the idea of a potential longer-form "story" involving characters across multiple shows. Everything has felt like its own little one-off experiments, which has given the franchise a bit of a "throw everything against the wall and see what sticks" vibe at times, rather than having a grand vision.
With the Kurtzman era of Trek likely almost over, I'm looking back on everything, and considering how, despite occasional comments he made about wanting to have an "Avengers-style teamup" the conditions were pretty much never in place to have the shows be interconnected.
Much of this, of course, just comes down to how divided the timeline of modern Trek is. You essentially have DIS Seasons 1/2 and SNW as TOS prequel shows, LDS immediately post-Nemesis/pre ST09, PRO essentially happening a few years later than this, PIC happening a few decades thereafter, and then DIS Seasons 3-5 and SFA occurring in the 32nd century. With decades to centuries of time between each of the installments, absent time shenanigans, it's really hard to get people jumping from one to another, let alone to get a big multi-show story arc going on. Of course, there were some little one-off things, like having Mariner and Boimler show up in an episode of Strange New Worlds, and having the finale of Prodigy loop back to the Romulan supernova. But overall, the shows were more content to reference things from earlier Trek series rather than one another.
As a result, the most ambitious multi-series arc of Trek remains the Maquis plotline from the Berman era. Created to provide backstory for Voyager, it was given two episodes of setup in TNG (Journey's End and Preemptive Strike) and given development across 15 episodes of DS9 stretching from the second to the sixth season. Yeah, Voyager squandered that setup due to network interference, so it meant little after Caretaker, but it still an ambitious vision.
To be clear, I'm not necessarily arguing that Star Trek should've tried to ape the MCU. Hell, even the MCU has struggled to be the MCU in the post-covid environment. But I have been shocked at how little was done to give the idea of a potential longer-form "story" involving characters across multiple shows. Everything has felt like its own little one-off experiments, which has given the franchise a bit of a "throw everything against the wall and see what sticks" vibe at times, rather than having a grand vision.
