Why Doesn’t Star Trek Get Credit as the First Shared Universe?

Star Trek has been doing crossovers pretty much from the beginning, long before the MCU or the DCEU or Star Wars or any other modern franchise. And they’re set for another one in the new season of Strange New Worlds, which will be a first for the franchise too, as the animated characters from Star Trek: Lower Decks will make their live-action debuts for an adventure with Captain Pike and his crew.

But why doesn’t Star Trek get credit as the OG shared universe? And how extensive is the world of Trek’s interconnectivity? We spoke to the folks behind Strange New Worlds about the very topic of the Trek Cinematic Universe, so let’s dig into the franchise’s long history of crossovers and how it has deepened and strengthened Star Trek as a whole over the years…

Monsters, Apes, and Norman Lear

Of course, right off the bat, there will be folks who argue what a cinematic universe even is, and what counts as the quote/unquote first of the kind. Putting aside comics, books, and even radio dramas, and sticking just to movies and TV, there are series like the James Bond films or the Planet of the Apes movies which were early examples of ongoing franchises, even if that term wasn’t necessarily used at the time.

Indeed, Strange New Worlds co-showrunner Akiva Goldsman says Star Trek wasn’t the first shared universe. “Star Trek actually comes to crossovers early, but not formatively,” he tells IGN.

As is the case with a lot of nerdy subjects, the devil is kind of in the details. Going back further than Bond or Apes or even Trek, you find things like the Universal horror movies and the Godzilla series.

But these played pretty fast and loose with continuity, and they mostly didn’t even have TV incarnations. (The Planet of the Apes shows actually seemed to break continuity either on purpose or because they just didn’t care about a shared universe.) As for the Universal Monsters, one of the big appeals of them when I was a kid – and yes, I’m old, but no, I’m not that old – was that they used to meet up and fight each other. But if you go back and take a look at how that played out, it wasn’t exactly a coherent plan to create a cinematic universe. What is commonly considered the first film in the series, Dracula, debuted in 1931, but it wasn’t until 12 years later that the first crossover happened in 1943’s Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. And really, the various characters had to be jammed together in ways that often broke the continuity of the earlier entries. Still, these monsters definitely mashed together.

As for the realm of TV, Goldsman rightfully points to the work of legendary TV producer Norman Lear as being key to the idea of the crossover.

You have to go back to the very first episode of Star Trek, ‘The Cage,’ for the set-up for the first crossover of the franchise: ‘The Menagerie.’

“I think that Norman Lear probably invented the crossover,” says Goldsman. “Star Trek is the author of all things, but in fairness, I think that we saw crossovers in the ’70s in a way that were pretty delightful.”

Lear of course was the mind behind All in the Family, which in turn begat Maude, which in turn begat Good Times. And then there were about a half-dozen other spin-offs of that series as well.

But you have to go back to the very first episode of Star Trek, “The Cage,” for what I think is also the set-up for the first crossover of the franchise: “The Menagerie.”

Captain Pike Returns

In that pilot episode, Jeffrey Hunter played Captain Pike, but when the show wasn’t picked up by the network, Hunter bailed. As most fans know these days, a second pilot was made, which allowed for William Shatner to step in as a new captain named James T. Kirk, and of course Star Trek as we know it was born.

But when creator Gene Roddenberry needed to buy the production schedule of his still young show some time, he wrote a story that would utilize most of the footage from the unaired “The Cage.” The resulting two-parter was called “The Menagerie,” and it effectively features the first Trek crossover, albeit with a version of Star Trek that had never even been seen by audiences at the time – and one which featured a different crew and a fairly different look.

Captain Pike was now made canon, but his story wouldn’t end there. Just ask Strange New Worlds star Anson Mount, who would revive the character in a season-long run on Star Trek: Discovery decades later before spinning off into his own show.

“I think it’s one of the great benefits of working within a franchise,” says Mount of the concept of the shared universe. “And not just in the sense that it’s a larger world, but that you have different iterations of different takes on storytelling the same canon.”

There are also the less direct references to Roddenberry’s original creation which form a sort of meta continuity.

“I laugh when I think about Ortegas, and a lot of people have pointed this out, that my [character’s] last name is an homage to a character that Gene Roddenberry originally wanted in TOS and never made it in his original version to the screen,” says Strange New Worlds’ Melissa Navia. “I’m very grateful to what happened in the 1960s to the fact that I have a job today in 2023.”

Still, as Goldsman points out, “The Menagerie” was more or less the extent of The Original Series crossovers during its 1960s run, not that it didn’t try for more.

“It’s sort of tried to do a backdoor pilot with ‘Assignment: Earth,’ but otherwise it was pretty self-contained,” he says.

That episode featured Robert Lansing as a character named Gary Seven, who lived on 20th century Earth but was an interplanetary secret agent, more or less. The episode is not great, and it didn’t go any further than that… until Goldsman himself reconnected to it in the second season of Star Trek: Picard, actually.

But something happened about 10 years after Star Trek was cancelled that would greatly impact its crossover potential: It became a movie series.

Khaaaaaan!

One of the things that’s remarkable about The Original Series is that from pretty early on, there’s a continuity to the universe Roddenberry and his team built that was out of the ordinary for the time. Again, you look at something like the Universal Monsters series, where continuity was not a concern – and which incredibly had only ended 18 years before Star Trek began – and Trek’s early world-building is pretty impressive.

This would continue when the series was warped onto the big screen in the wake of Star Wars’ success, and indeed it remains one of the components of Star Trek even in 2023 that is so attractive to fans. The internal logic, if Spock will forgive the term, of the various worlds, races, rules, and even the starships has always been highly appealing.

While The Original Series was cancelled in 1969 after three seasons, the characters and most of the cast returned for a short-lived animated show in the early 1970s which was already maintaining continuity – and building on it as well. The recurring villain Harry Mudd returned, and the Enterprise’s first captain, Robert April, was also revealed, reminding us that the Enterprise had a history before Captain Kirk. (He’s now a recurring character on Strange New Worlds, by the way.)

The movies featured world-building and character pulls from the show that we take for granted now but must’ve been big leaps for the filmmakers at the time. 

But the movies were a whole different story, featuring world-building and character pulls from the show that we take for granted now but must’ve been big leaps for the filmmakers at the time.  From Kirk’s unwanted promotion to admiral to Spock’s complete rejection of emotion (only not really) to our first visit to 23rd century Earth, the debut movie really evolved the Star Trek universe. 

And then came the second film, where a little-remembered character from the episode “Space Seed” returned in a big way. Ricardo Montalban’s Khan would become the most iconic villain of the franchise, but maintaining continuity between a big-budget movie in 1982 and a 1967 episode of television was basically unheard of back then. And brilliant.

As the film series grew in popularity and The Original Series continued to be a syndication staple, Paramount was ready to branch out to a whole new generation of the Star Trek world.

Making It So

Star Trek: The Next Generation was met with some suspicion from a segment of fandom when it arrived, featuring as it did a story set almost a hundred years after the original and with nary a Kirk or Spock or original crewmember to be found. Well, that’s not quite true.

When DeForest Kelley cameod briefly in the pilot episode as a very, very old Dr. McCoy, Captain Picard’s new adventures became inextricably linked to Captain Kirk’s old adventures. And not just that, but the world of Trek was still evolving in a manner that completely made sense and fit into what had come before, from the natural evolution of the Enterprise to a peace treaty with the Klingons and more.

But at the same time, beyond the McCoy appearance, the show’s producers knew that Next Gen needed to stand on its own before indulging in too many crossover appearances. And that’s why the simple utterance of one word in Season 3 sent such a shudder down the spines of so many fans: Spock!

When Picard met Mark Lenard’s legendary Vulcan ambassador Sarek, who also happened to be Spock’s father, the reluctance to dip into Original Series lore began to erode. In fact, eventually Original Series characters began to pop in perhaps too frequently. Leonard Nimoy’s Spock himself showed up for a big Season 5 two-parter that kinda disappointed in the end. We learned that poor Scotty had been stuck in a transporter buffer for 75 years. (That would drive anyone to drink. Good episode though.) And even Chekov almost made the jump in what sounds like a, if you’ll forgive the term, fascinating story idea where he would’ve been a prisoner of war for years who, upon returning to the Federation, plots a violent revenge against his captors. Whoa.

But the biggest, most wished-for crossover would have to wait for the Next Generation’s jump to the big screen.

It Was… Fun

When Star Trek: Generations hit in 1994, The Next Generation was at the height of its popularity, sliding directly into the movies. The Kirk-era crew had signed off – literally – in 1991’s Star Trek VI, where the first tentative steps towards peace with the Klingons took place – a peace we would find realized in Picard’s time period. And so it was Jean-Luc’s turn to make it so on the big screen.

Generations begins in Kirk’s time period, and tells the story of the legendary captain’s death. Two of them, in fact. A new Enterprise is introduced, the B, as is a new crew for the legendary starship. And while this ship’s captain – Alan Ruck – is mostly played for laughs, the design of this new ship hews more closely to what the Enterprise-D on Next Gen looked like, with the forward-facing stations now separated and touchscreen control panels. Even the technobabble was sounding more Next Generation-like!

Kirk’s apparently killed while saving the Enterprise-B, and the film then cuts to 78 years in the future. Here, Picard gets involved in some outer-space shenanigans where he finds Kirk has been chopping wood and making eggs for the past 80 years, unchanged from that moment when he disappeared on the B. This allows for the two captains to finally meet up, though Kirk is killed again, this time seemingly for good. And a lot Trekkies could’ve died happy in that moment when the old and new Treks were finally, fully merged.

But Star Trek itself never dies, and the universe continued to grow and evolve.

Space: The Final Rebootquel

Trek continued on with Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Enterprise, and more movies, and they all intermixed and shared story threads and characters in a variety of ways. But by 2005 the mainstream public’s appetite for the franchise had seemed to dry up, and Trek went on a bit of a break.

It didn’t last long, however, and just four years after Enterprise went off the air – in an episode that featured Riker and Troi! – J.J. Abrams relaunched the franchise with a new film simply titled Star Trek. Returning to the early era of Kirk and his crew’s careers, the script used some time-travel trickery to create an alternate reality for the characters that allowed Abrams to take them into new and different directions without interfering with what at that point had become the precious continuity, for diehard fans anyway, of everything that had come before.

While that first film is pretty great, the dangers of such an approach in a series that is so dependent on in-universe inter-relatedness became apparent in the sequel, Into Darkness, as a new Khan was introduced and the film resorted to mostly meme-like plays on iconic Star Trek moments. See Zachary Quinto attempting to mimic William Shatner’s classic “Khaaaaaan” scream for an unfortunate example.

The Return to TV and the Future 

With Star Trek: Discovery’s debut in 2017, Star Trek finally returned to TV, which – let’s face it – is where it’s at its best. The show’s producers made the curious decision to set it just a decade or so before The Original Series, but to totally revamp the tech, the costumes, and even the alien make-ups designs in such a way as to, well, mess with the continuity that had been so closely adhered to for the previous 50 years.

Of course, it never would’ve made sense to hobble the show with the cheap sets and limited production values of The Original Series, but fans found it hard to reconcile how the two versions of the mid-23rd century could look so different, especially when shows like Next Gen and Deep Space Nine had so carefully hued to that history.

It never would’ve made sense to hobble the show with the cheap sets and limited production values of TOS, but fans found it hard to reconcile the two versions of the mid-23rd century.

Discovery was also where Anson Mount’s Pike, Ethan Peck’s Spock, and Rebecca Romijn’s Una made their modern debut, all reprising characters from that first Trek pilot, “The Cage.”

“The fact that Strange New Worlds really was an offshoot, a spinoff of what Anson, Ethan, and Rebecca did so well on Discovery, but then even that, fans fell in love with them because they knew their characters,” says Melissa Navia. “I mean, because they’re excellent, but also because they knew their characters before there was already this connection. So, even in just that, you see the connectedness between all the shows over the course of decades, right?”

Eventually, Discovery just blasted its crew all the way into the 32nd century, 900 years after where it started, which dispelled with all of those weird continuity issues. But it left behind several other new Trek shows which were able to deal with the shared universe aspects of the franchise more easily, from the Next Gen sequel Star Trek: Picard to the Easter-egg-laden animated series Lower Decks to the sorta-Voyager follow-up Prodigy, which is also animated and billed as the first Trek kids show, but is actually super-faithful to what has come before in the various series.

And then there’s Strange New Worlds, which is set in the same period as Disco’s first two seasons, but manages to seamlessly tell the early stories of the USS Enterprise without clashing with or contradicting its predecessors.

“Here we are in this 10-year stretch on the Enterprise where they’re now inventing the canon and inventing the backstory for Uhura and these legacy characters, and fleshing out these character points for Una that we get to play around with [and] take artistic liberties,” says Rebecca Romijn.

Sure, the ship’s still slicker, the costumes are fancier, and the budget is higher than anything Roddenberry had to work with, but there’s also a narrative confidence that enables the viewer, the fans, to say, “Yeah, I’ll go with Spock totally having a freak-out moment right now. He won’t be the Nimoy version for years yet. It works!”

And that brings us to what may be the most audacious crossover yet.

“We’re friends with Lower Decks’ writers,” says Strange New Worlds co-showrunner Henry Alonso Myers. “It was one of the things where it just kind of became a unique opportunity and we were like, let’s try to do this.”

To bring Tawny Newsome’s Mariner and Jack Quaid’s Boimler to the live-action Strange New Worlds with their uniquely cartoonish spin on Star Trek intact will prove to be quite a feat. And yet, if there’s any franchise that has mastered the shared universe crossover, it’s this one.

“We were incredibly fortunate because we worked with the folks who have been doing all of the animation work for Lower Decks already,” says Alonso Myers.

And besides, Riker himself, Jonathan Frakes, is directing the episode. And he knows something about shared universes.

Rebecca Romijn says the crossovers are going to keep coming too.

“Just you wait,” she teases. “There’s a bigger swing that comes along that we’re not even allowed to talk about yet.”

It’s reached the point where the stars themselves are actively pitching shared universe ideas as well.

“I had an idea for a long time that… maybe we’ll still do it,” says Anson Mount. “I want to do an episode that ends up having a very important effect on an episode in a different series. My general idea was it’s a time capsule episode, that we release a time capsule. It gets picked up by another series down the road in the timeline, and that you have two episodes built around the same device.”

We’ll see if that one ever happens, but it sounds like a great idea. In the meantime, we have the Lower Decks/Strange New Worlds crossover to look forward to. And to any naysayers out there, I say only this: If Frankenstein, Dracula and the Wolf Man could meet Abbott and Costello, why can’t these guys meet Pike and Spock?

Interviews by Tara Bennett.

Talk to Executive Editor Scott Collura on Twitter at @ScottCollura, or listen to his Star Trek podcast, Transporter Room 3. Or do both!