Three years ago, the end of Star Trek: Picard Season 3 appeared to set up a bright future for the USS Enterprise. Commander LaForge formally retired the USS Enterprise-D, but Jean-Luc discovered his son Jack hadn’t been assigned to the Titan after all. Rather, that ship had been rechristened the Enterprise-G, under the command of Captain Seven of Nine. It was a beautiful end, made all the more exciting by showrunner Terry Matalas pitching a Star Trek: Legacy spinoff. Sadly, Paramount passed on the opportunity.
Speaking at STLV: Trek to Vegas, the world’s largest annual Star Trek convention, Matalas revealed his pitch for Star Trek: Legacy Season 1. Apparently this story would have centered on the Klingons; Star Trek has always used the Klingons as stand-ins for the Russians, and Matalas intended to base the plot on real-world tension with Russia. He’d have tied it in to Worf, whose son Alexander would have been one of the unstable elements causing problems in Klingon space.
During the Terry Matalas panel, Terry explains the premise for the first season of Star Trek: Legacy. #STLV
It’s a fascinating concept, not least because it stands apart from what Star Trek eventually did with the Klingons instead. Star Trek: Starfleet Academy revealed the fate of the Klingons, and it completely abandoned the Russian parallels; the Klingons were almost wiped out when a cosmic event known as the Burn destroyed dilithium across the galaxy, with the resulting explosions rendering the Klingon homeworld Qo’noS almost uninhabitable. The Klingons battled to stave off extinction, insisting on facing their fate without compromising their historic ethical codes. Starfleet found a strange way to help, identifying a possible new homeworld for the Klingons and staging a fight over it.
While this was an interesting concept, it must be noted that it sits uncomfortably with the Russian parallels Matalas noted always lay at the heart of Star Trek‘s Klingon plots. In contrast, his appears to have wrestled with real-world imagery. The story would no doubt have evolved, and would sadly remain timely given the continued war between Russia and Ukraine. It would certainly have been fascinating to see how Worf’s son Alexander played into this story, and this – combined with Picard’s son, Jack Crusher – would certainly have meant the show lived up to its “Legacy” title.
Sadly, Paramount passed on Star Trek: Legacy. Stars have suggested there was never a chance it was going to happen in the first place, because too many of the stars would have been over 70 years old. Matters probably weren’t helped by the fact Picard was one of the more divisive Star Trek TV shows, inevitably so because legacies are naturally contested; everyone has their own idea of what a “proper” legacy for an iconic character should look like. Legacy would have continued this pattern, and no doubt would have been every bit as controversial as the show it spun out of.
