Star Trek: Lower Decks S5 teaser gives Cerritos crew one last mission

Star Trek: Lower Decks is a particular favorite among Ars staffers; it's arguably the best of the recent crop of Star Trek shows, along with Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. So we were disappointed when we learned that the animated series would be ending with its fifth season. Paramount+ debuted the first teaser for S5 during the Star Trek panel at San Diego Comic-Con over the weekend, along with a teaser for Star Trek: Section 31—a spinoff film from Star Trek: Discovery featuring Michelle Yeoh's Philippa Georgiou—a clip from Strange New Worlds S3, and the latest news about Star Trek: Starfleet Academy.

The Lower Decks teaser opens with a suitably nostalgic recap of some of the highlights of the adventures of the plucky crew of the USS Cerritos, inviting viewers to join them for one last adventure. Cue Boimler (Jack Quaid) and Mariner (Tawny Newsome) in voiceover objecting to that description ("Yeah, right, we're not done voyaging—we've hardly even cracked one quadrant yet"). Their S5 mission involves a "quantum fissure" that is causing "space potholes" to pop up all over the Alpha Quadrant ("boo interdimensional portals!"), and the Cerritos crew must close them—while navigating angry Klingons, an Orion war, and who knows what other crazy developments?

The final season of Lower Decks premieres on Paramount+ on October 24, 2024, and will run through December 19.

Newsome is already committed to her first post-Lower Decks project: co-writing the first live-action Star Trek comedy with franchise head honcho Alex Kurtzman. There's no title yet, but Deadline Hollywood reports that the premise will involve "Federation outsiders serving a gleaming resort planet [who] find out their day-to-day exploits are being broadcast to the entire quadrant." So, a Star Trek Truman Show? Color us intrigued.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds S3

Strange New Worlds marked a welcome return to Star Trek's original episodic structure. The franchise's Comic-Con panel featured a special sneak peek at the upcoming first season. The clip is a callback to the S2 episode "Charades," in which a higher-dimensional race, the Kerkohvians, accidentally reconfigured Spock's half-human, half-Vulcan physiology to that of a full-blooded human—just before Spock was supposed to meet his Vulcan fiancee's parents.

The S3 clip has the situation reversed: The human crew must make themselves Vulcan to succeed on a new mission. They succeed in record time but aren't able to change back. The Vulcan versions of the Enterprise crew are hilariously on point, and a long-suffering Spock must endure repeated references to his inferior half-Vulcan status.

We also learned that Cillian O'Sullivan will join the recurring cast as Dr. Roger Korby. ToS fans will recognize that name; it's a legacy character (originally played by Michael Strong). Korby was a renowned archaeologist in the field of medical archaeology, introduced in the episode "What Are Little Girls Made Of?' as Nurse Chapel's long-missing fiancé. That's bound to cause problems for SNW's Nurse Christine Chapel (Jess Bush), who is currently romantically involved with Spock. SNW S5 will premiere sometime in 2025, and the series has already been renewed for a fourth season

Speaking of Strange New Worlds, remember that fantastic S2 episode ("Substance Rhapsody") in which a quantum probability field caused the entire crew to break into song? Executive producer Akira Goldman revealed during the panel that he is toying with the idea of a Star Trek stage musical, although he cautioned that "We're in the very early stages of figuring out whether we can bring a version of ["Substance Rhapsody"] to the stage."

Star Trek: Section 31

Many of us were sad when Michelle Yeoh's stylishly acerbic Philippa Georgiou was written out of Star Trek: Discovery, but took hope from rumors that a spinoff series featuring the character was in the works. Well, it turns out to be a spinoff film, Star Trek: Section 31, but we'll take any amount of Georgiou we can get, especially in light of this teaser. Miku Martineua will play the young Georgiou in the film, slated to stream exclusively on Paramount+ sometime next year. The cast also includes Omari Hardwick, Kacey Rohl, Sam Richardson, Sven Ruygrok, Robert Kazinsky, Humberly Gonzalez, and James Hiroyuki.

It seems the film will give us the backstory for Georgiou's evil Mirror Universe counterpart, where she was a despotic emperor who murdered millions of her own people. Meanwhile, Yeoh's older Georgiou is tasked with protecting the United Federation of Planets as part of a black ops group called Section 31 while dealing with all the blood she's spilled in her past. The teaser opens with a flashback to the young Philippa, musing via voiceover about how an emperor "can only be loyal to duty" to ensure that the empire stays strong. But the rest is largely devoted to Yeoh swanning about in fabulous outfits while her fellow secret agents tell her what a "bad bitch" she is. "Somebody's got to keep it lively, right?" Georgiou smirks.

Starfleet Academy

Finally, we might be losing Lower Decks, but we're gaining the new series Starfleet Academy, featuring some familiar franchise faces. Tig Notaro, Oded Fehr, and Mary Wiseman will reprise their Discovery roles as Jett Reno, Admiral Vance, and Sylvia Tilly, respectively. And Robert Picardo of Star Trek: Voyager will be back as The Doctor—in a show set 900 years after the hologram physician first appeared.

During the Comic-Con panel, Kurtzman said that the series will introduce "a young group of cadets who come together to pursue a common dream of hope and optimism," thereby answering "who are the captains before they become captains, and what happens when they don't become captains." Holly Hunter will lead the cast as chancellor of Starfleet Academy, while Gina Yashere and Paul Giamatti will have recurring roles. The main Starfleet cadets will be played by Karim Diane, Zoe Steiner, Kerrice Brooks, Bella Shepard, and George Hawkins. Production on the series will begin in August.