Paramount announce launch dates for new seasons of STAR TREK: DISCOVERY, PICARD and PRODIGY

Paramount have announced the launch dates for their next raft of Star Trek series.

In addition to Season 2 of Lower Decks, currently airing on Paramount+ in the USA and Amazon worldwide, the first season of Star Trek: Prodigy debuts on 28 October.

The new series, the first Star Trek show to be completely 3D CG-rendered, returns to the Delta Quadrant for the first time since the conclusion of Star Trek: Voyager in 2001. The series, set five years after the end of Voyager, features an all-alien, non-Starfleet cast of characters who stumble across the USS Protostar, an experimental Starfleet vessel despatched to the Delta Quadrant. The vessel is abandoned for reasons unknown, until it is found by a group of young aliens. The ship comes equipped with an Emergency Training Hologram, based on Admiral Kathryn Janeway (Kate Mulgrew reprising her role from Voyager), who helps them get to grips with piloting the vessel.

Prodigy is swiftly followed by Season 4 of Star Trek: Discovery, which will debut on 18 November, marking the first time since 1999 that two Star Trek series will air new episodes simultaneously (when the seventh and final season of Deep Space Nine overlapped with the fifth season of Star Trek: Voyager). The new season of Discovery sees the crew adjusting to life in the 32nd Century as they help the Federation and the Milky Way galaxy rebuild after the cataclysmic event known as the Burn, only to encounter a new anomaly which could threaten everything.

Finally, the second season of Star Trek: Picard will debut in February 2022. In the new season, a returning Q (an also-returning John de Lancie) apparently changes time into a dystopian nightmare, as part of a test for Picard. Picard and his colleagues utilise knowledge from a captive Borg Queen (Anna Wersching) to time travel back to the 21st Century and repair the damage done by Q.

Picard has been renewed for a third season, alongside rumours this may be the final season since Sir Patrick Stewart turns 82 next year and Paramount+ is developing several more shows with a view to one of them replacing Picard once it runs its course.