Despite Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 3, 2025 was a bumpy year for Star Trek as fans continue to cope with several harsh realities about our favorite sci-fi franchise. Star Trek is nearly 60 years old and has seen several stages of ‘deaths’ followed by glorious rebirths.
2025 has been somewhere in between. The year began with promise, despite a vastly reduced output of new content on Paramount+. Star Trek only had one movie, Star Trek: Section 31, and one season of TV, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 3, in 2025.
Neither Star Trek: Section 31 nor Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 3 lived up to everything fans hoped for. However, 2026 seems brighter. Star Trek is fueled by optimism, and there are signs that Star Trek‘s 60th anniversary year could reinvigorate the franchise.
New York Comic Con in October will offer a glimpse of Star Trek‘s 60th year celebrations by hyping up Star Trek: Starfleet Academy season 1 and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 4.
In the meantime, however, Star Trek fans keep on enduring the following harsh realities as 2025 winds down.
New Shows Lack Sufficient Episodes
The most common lament from Star Trek fans is that there simply is not enough new Star Trek on television. Paramount+ mandates a 10-episode season for its streaming Star Trek series, which is out of the creators’ hands.
A mere 10 episodes for series like Star Trek: Strange New Worlds isn’t enough, considering the show’s massive cast and episodic format, which would lend itself to a more ample exploration of characters and alien planets with classic Star Trek’s structure of 22-26 episodes.
Star Trek: Discovery season 1 was 15 episodes, season 2 was 14, and season 3 was 13 hours when the series was co-financed by Netflix internationally. Once Star Trek: Discovery shifted exclusively to Paramount+, seasons 4 and 5 were the usual 10 episodes.
Unfortunately, Paramount+ shows no indication of increasing Star Trek‘s format of just 10 episodes per season. Sadly, <em>Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 5 will be the first Star Trek season to clock in at only 6 episodes for its final run on Paramount+.
Paramount+ Canceled Almost Every New Star Trek Show
The disheartening cancellations of Star Trek saw their effects roll into 2025. Although three Star Trek series aired in 2024 – <em>Star Trek: Discovery season 5, Star Trek: Prodigy season 2, and <em>Star Trek: Lower Decks season 5 – it also ended up being the final season of all three shows.
The original expectation was that *Star Trek: Discovery*, like the shows from the ’90s executive-produced by Rick Berman, would run for seven seasons. However, Paramount+ unexpectedly canceled it after five seasons, granting it an extended series finale.
The animated series *Star Trek: Prodigy*, which was canceled by Paramount+ in early 2023 before being saved by Netflix due to fan demand, managed to stream two seasons totaling forty half-hour episodes. Unfortunately, Netflix did not order any additional episodes after that.
The rights for *Star Trek: Prodigy* on Netflix will expire at the end of 2025, leaving its future uncertain.
The fifth season of *Star Trek: Lower Decks* also concluded despite being relatively inexpensive to produce and having potential for many more seasons. It starred Jack Quaid, a popular actor who is also a fan of *Star Trek*.
The year of hope in *2022*, when five *Star Trek* series aired new episodes almost every Thursday on Paramount+, starkly contrasts with *2025*, which felt barren despite the presence of *Star Trek: Section 31* and *Strange New Worlds* season three.
10 Year Wait (And Counting) For New Star Trek Movies
