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We just celebrated Star Trek Day here at the USS Popverse, which gave us all the hopeful, sparkly feelings that are heir to the tales of Starfleet and its heroes. But since we can't have too much of that, let's go ahead and bring the mood down by talking about perhaps the bleakest satire of the Star Trek franchise ever created - Black Mirror's USS Calister. One of the standout episodes from Netflix's dark scifi anthology, you likely already know the USS Callister episode inspired a sequel. You may also already know that, at one time, the USS Callister almost got its own spinoff series.

But what you probably don't know is what that spinoff would've looked like. Well, to make sure you feel just as bummed as we do, we'll tell you - or rather, we'll let Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker tell you.

Before we do that, though, let's remind you of what the USS Callister was. That is, an episode in the fourth season of Netflix's science fiction anthology series that starts off by presenting an OG Trek-like adventure, only to reveal that it's actually an AR nightmare in which conscious AI can't escape the misogynistic world created by its programmer, played by Jesse Plemons. The sentient programs, who are "digital clones" of Plemons's real-world office coworkers, make due anyway, returning for an adventure called Into Infinity, which was part of the show's seventh season. And according to creator Brooker, even more exploits were once on the table.

"When we first worked it out," Brooker told The Hollywood Reporter of the Callister saga, "We were working it out as eight parts, then five and then we boiled it down to three 45-minute episodes. But the one regret I have is that there was one thing I really wanted to do that was so fun that we didn’t do, that I won’t say what it was."

Naturally, Brooker's interviewer wanted at least a hint of what that could be.

"I could hint," he answered, "That there were going to be even more Cristins."

Brooker is speaking here about The Penguin breakout star Cristin Milioti, who stars in both the Callister episodes as the main sentient AI, Nanette. 

"There was going to be another incarnation of Nanette," Brooker explained, "We couldn’t do it [with the current episodes] because it would have been completely impossible to follow in 90 minutes. But since we didn’t do it, that means we could revisit that in the future."

Wait - "revisit that in the future?" Does that mean that there might be a USS Callister series after all? Don't get your hopes up, scifi fans, Brooker is just talking about a (still exciting!) third chapter of the Callister saga. Brooker isn't confirming taht that's happening , by the way, only that he'd be down to revisit it should Netflix ever give it the greenlight. Anyway, back to that would-be series...

"When we were working it out as a series," Brooker continued, "There was going to be a thing where [Osy Ikhile's] character Nate Packer piloted the real-world version of himself like a giant exoskeleton and tried to steal things from the office. It was a really fun sequence. We could revisit some of that."

Finally, as the discussion went on, Brooker thought up a possible continuation for the real-world version of Nanette, in whose head all the sentient AI reside after the last episode.

"Now that I’m actually thinking about it," concluded the writer, "If she really can’t work out how to get them out of her head, then she’s either stuck with that or she could work out a way of annihilating them and, would she do that? She couldn’t do that to these people in your heads, could she? Also, they’d know everything. There’s no escape. She has zero privacy — as none of us probably do! It is quite a nightmare."

A nightmare indeed. Not feeling all "live long and prosper" now, are we Trekkies?

Black Mirror is streaming on Netflix now.

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