By Shor M. Masori
SAN DIEGO— Comic-Con’s Star Trek Universe panel opened Saturday with two visions of spacefaring futures. One grounded in golden-age ideals, the other navigating the wreckage of a galaxy in collapse.
Executive producers Alex Kurtzman and Noga Landau were joined by cast and creatives from Strange New Worlds and Starfleet Academy, in a session moderated by Voyager veteran Robert Picardo, who also appears in the new series.
The first half of the panel focused on Strange New Worlds, Trek’s most classically structured series in years. With its episodic format, philosophical core, and just the right amount of camp, it remains a love letter to Gene Roddenberry’s vision: curious, optimistic, and occasionally ridiculous in the best way.
Appearing in person were cast members Rebecca Romijn (Number One), Ethan Peck (Mr. Spock), Jess Bush (Nurse Chapel), Christina Chong (La’an Noonien-Singh), and Paul Wesley (Captain Kirk), alongside co-showrunners Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers, and executive producer Kurtzman.
In an upcoming episode, the show goes full meta. La’an finds herself inside a holodeck murder mystery about a murder on the crew of a fictional 1969 sci-fi series called The New Frontier, a delightful parody of the original series. Wesley mimics his forbearer and plays the actor who starred on the show, channeling a William Shatner-esque performance within a performance. It’s a loving parody that nods to Star Trek’s precarious origins and overtly asking: What if the original series had just been canceled and forgotten? What ripple effects would have never happened, be they scientific, cultural, or otherwise?
And though the Strange New Worlds (SNW) team confirmed the series will wrap after five seasons (with season three currently airing), they hoped for a potential continuation in the form of Star Trek: Year One. A new chapter focusing on Kirk’s first year as captain of the Enterprise, if fans holler loud enough at the studio.
The showrunners also revealed that they once pitched an anime episode of SNW, though it never made it to production. Still, its existence as an idea reinforces the creative range SNW is willing to explore.
After premiering the murder mystery episode of Strange New Worlds the second half of the panel shifted to the new series Starfleet Academy. Set in the 32nd century after the Burn (a galaxy-wide collapse of warp travel), the series explores what happens when the institutions that once held the galaxy together have fractured. The cadets we meet are not stepping into a gleaming Federation, they’re inheriting its wreckage.
Present on stage were Holly Hunter (as Chancellor/Captain Nahla Ake), Sandro Rosta (Human cadet Caleb Mir), Karim Diané (Klingon cadet Jay-Den Kraag), Kerrice Brooks (SAM, a Caspian hologram), George Hawkins (Khionian cadet Darem Reymi), and Bella Shepard (Dar-Sha cadet Genesis Lythe), alongside co-showrunners Kurtzman and Landau.
Kurtzman explained that the series is rooted in today’s generational moment: young people trying to piece together systems they didn’t break. They looked at the world that kids are inheriting and ask what it would look like if they had to bring back something as ambitious and idealistic as Starfleet.
I respect the attempt. I also hope the show embraces the harder questions: What if Starfleet shouldn’t return exactly as it was? What if some systems shouldn’t be restored, but reimagined?
If I may step out of the journalistic frame for a moment. I just graduated from Johns Hopkins master’s program in international affairs. This came after a year earning another master’s degree in conflict resolution and mediation at Tel Aviv University during one of the largest regional conflicts in recent memory. I’ve watched as international institutions buckled under crises they weren’t built to withstand. I’ve studied well-meaning frameworks as they fail because they were designed to preserve old power structures, not solve collective action problems.
So, when Star Trek Academy asks whether the next generation can fix what’s broken, I’m invested. I want to believe in that future. But I hope the show doesn’t just default to the idea that old ideals, however noble, can solve new challenges without serious rethinking.
And this matters beyond fiction. One reason the Jewish people have survived millennia of displacement, violence, and change is our ability to adapt tradition without abandoning it. That’s what I want to see in this show: not just reverence for the Federation, but a willingness to question and evolve it.
One of the show’s most compelling new figures is SAM, played by Kerrice Brooks. A Caspian hologram “born” only weeks before the events of the show, SAM will likely wrestle with questions of personhood, identity, and history while embodying none of it. It’s a clever callback to Picardo’s EMH on Voyager. SAM enters a galaxy shaped by traumas she didn’t experience, and is still expected to solve them.
Paul Giamatti was announced as a half Klingon and half Tellerite, continuing Trek’s exploration of hybrid identities and the tensions they hold.
Finally, the panel previewed Star Trek: Khan, a new scripted podcast premiering on Star Trek Day (September 8), starring Lost’s Naveen Andrews as Khan Noonien Singh. Tim Russ (Tuvok) and George Takei (Captain Sulu) will reprise their roles in what promises to be a layered space opera that fills in Khan’s backstory.
This Star Trek doesn’t promise that the future is perfect. It doesn’t even promise that it’s salvageable. But it suggests that someone, somewhere, has to try—and maybe that’s the most hopeful idea of all.
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Shor M. Masori is a freelance writer based in San Diego.