Popverse's top stories

• The Magic: The Gathering and Star Trek crossover deck 'leak' that was actually a Ferengi-style hustle aimed at you and your search engine
• Nearly 40 years ago, The Legend of Zelda changed the way I saw video games [Gamify my Life]
• From teenage fan in a Jurassic Park pop-up tent to star of Jurassic World Rebirth, Scarlett Johansson talks her 30-year relationship with the franchise

Ahead of the debut of the third season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, producers have been talking about the show’s eventual conclusion — and what might come afterwards.

Paramount+ announced in June 2025 that Strange New Worlds has been renewed for a fifth and final season, with the reduced run — it’ll last just six episodes - serving as a capper to the acclaimed show. Speaking during an appearance at the Tribeca Film Festival soon after that announcement, executive producer Akiva Goldsman said that the five-year mission had been the plan from the outset.

“We made a promise to ourselves that we would arc the show into [The Original Series]. And so we sort of thought, ‘Well, five year mission, okay, can we do five years?’” he explained. “And we needed to be able to tell that story. Because right now [the characters] are in mid-stage development. How do they become who they are? What happens to some of them? Those are questions that we knew we needed to answer and promised to answer. And so that’s our five-year plan.”

The question of “what happens to some of them” is a leading one, given that five members of the crew are characters pulled from the original 1960s Star Trek — with three going on to become recurring or leading characters in the franchise. (That’d be Spock, Uhura, and Chapel, of course.) But perhaps that was the intent; Goldman told the crowd, “But they’re not dying. And we have those sets…”

The idea that Paramount might lean into a rebooted Original Series is one that fans have discussed for years at this point — almost as soon as the second season of Star Trek: Discovery, which introduced the Strange New Worlds cast complete with a recast Spock. Since then, Strange New Worlds has introduced new versions of Uhura, Chapel, James Kirk, and Scotty — leaving only Sulu, Bones, and Chekhov unaccounted for of the Original Series’ core cast. Just in case, you know, a reboot does end up on the cards…

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 3 begins on Paramount+ July 17. Keep watching to see if any more Original Series characters show up unexpectedly…

Space may be the final frontier, but there's no end to Popverse's love of the Star Trek universe. Hop aboard the starship Enterprise with our Star Trek watch order, explore strange new worlds with our upcoming Star Trek TV shows and movies list, seek out the new life of the franchise, and boldly go where no Star Trek film has ever gone before - with Quentin Tarantino?