‘Strange New Worlds’ Season 5 Confirmed To Be A Classic Star Trek Prequel

Although Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is only just now debuting its third season, we already know the direction and literal endpoint of its fifth season, at least two years from now. SNW Season 3 hits Paramount+ with a two-episode season on July 17, and Season 4 is expected sometime in 2026. But, as recently revealed after that, Season 5 — which will only consist of six episodes — will serve as the literal end of the show. And now, we know that the reason for that is to make sure SNW literally moves directly into the timeline of The Original Series.

“We will take the show to Kirk’s first day of command,” Strange New Worlds co-showrunner Akiva Goldsman told TrekMovie. “Which is, by the way, not actually The Original Series. The Original Series starts a bit into Kirk’s command.”

Goldsman is referring to the fact that the second Trek pilot episode, “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” takes place in 2265, but none of the rest of TOS does; all other episodes in Season 1 take place in 2266 and onward. As Goldsman points out, in the Prime Universe, we’ve never actually seen the beginning of Kirk’s tenure on the Enterprise, because even “Where No Man Has Gone Before” is quite obviously not his first mission as captain of that ship.

Logistically, Goldsman has also revealed, in the same interview, that Strange New Worlds was nearly cut off at Season 4. And that the whole purpose of the six-episode Season 5 was to give the show a proper ending, which was what basically didn’t happen with Star Trek: Discovery.

“Discovery’s loss was our gain,” Goldsman explains, and when presented with SNW ending at 4 seasons, Goldsman argued that in “six episodes,” the series could create an ending that gets “fans to the TOS era.”

Clearly, this means that Season 5 will also help to show how Captain Pike (Anson Mount) and Number One (Rebecca Romijn) actually end up leaving the Enterprise. Those characters, along with many of the new SNW crew, aren’t present in TOS. But some canon mysteries are now nearly six decades old. Most TOS and Discovery fans are well aware that Pike will suffer an accident in the near future, but what about Number One? What will be the reason she leaves the Enterprise?

“I have thought about it a little bit,” Romijn tells Inverse. “It’s a little bittersweet… I think we’re really grateful to get to complete our five-year mission, which was what the intention was from the get-go. It says at the beginning of every single show, ‘five-year mission.’ So the fact that we know in advance that we get to finish out these storylines and figure out where everybody’s going to go, I think we’re really grateful to get to do that.”

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds streams on Paramount+.