Late Star Trek chronicles the commercial and creative challenges of the franchise’s flop era

Adam Kotsko, 2025

The story

Adam Kotsko

traces in Late Star Trek: The Final Frontier in the Franchise Era (out today from University of Minnesota Press) is a story of learning—on one side fans learning far too much, memorizing and systematizing every bit of in-universe detail doled out over decades until the entire edifice threatens to collapse under its own weight; and on the other side, the executives and producers who have learned far too little, who have never understood what Star Trek is, why people like it, and its natural limitations as mainstream fare, who have repeated the same mistakes over and over, mismanaging the franchise in ways as predictable as they are dispiriting.

This story has only intensified as Star Trek’s star has fallen, its 90s golden age now far in the past. Those halcyon days loom large over Kotsko’s book but they are not its focus. He begins with a charming rug-pull, evoking in turn The Original Series, “which used its iconic characters to hold up an allegorical mirror to one of the most tumultuous and influential eras of modern US history;” The Next Generation, “the franchise’s most commercially and critically successful outing;” as well as Deep Space Nine and Voyager, whose unique concepts and settings “allowed [them] to explore more complex and darker themes.” He then writes “This book is not about any of those shows.” Instead he’s interested in the work that came afterward, that had no choice but to live in the shadow of better days, and the pathologies among fans, creators, and corporate stewards that found purchase amid the dual anxieties of artistic inferiority and the looming threat of franchise death.

As the series by and large responsible for fan culture as we know it today, Star Trek has long served as a valuable lens to examine how the public metabolizes entertainment and how studio executives seek to turn that into profit. Whereas for decades Trek worked as a case study for a successful media empire, as it entered its late period in the early 2000s the terms changed but became no less useful. Trek became a study in franchise fatigue, a cautionary tale of what happens when you prolong the lifespan of a property past its natural endpoint and its fans become unappeasable and paranoid. Now, Trek plays yet a third role as it has been conscripted as the single tentpole of Paramount+ subscriptions, a perennially niche property now asked to play to blockbuster crowds, one of the truly original creations of television transformed into those most dreaded of things: IP and content.

Kotsko, a professor at the Shimer Great Books School of North Central College and the author of titles including Why We Love Sociopaths: A Guide to Late Capitalist Television and Neoliberalism’s Demons: On the Political Theology of Late Capitalism, is no stranger to sorting through the morbid symptoms of a culture and its creations that have been deformed by the pressure of money and markets. It is from the analogy to late capitalism that the book takes its title:

This designation evokes the concept of late capitalism, which has founded an influential stream of criticism that has attempted to measure the effect of the intensification of the workings of a capitalist economy on the cultural sphere. The term may initially suggest the anticipation that capitalism will end soon. In its academic usage, however, late capitalism denotes something more like late-stage capitalism, the point at which, as in the late stages of cancer, the market and its values begin devouring the natural and social worlds that underpin it by infiltrating every area of life, even altering the workings of our natural world… By analogy, then, late Star Trek marks the moment when Star Trek stops being a business out of necessity, simply because that’s what it takes to keep new stories coming, and becomes more purely commodified. It is when story decisions are dictated by business strategy, when the quest for new audiences risks undercutting everything the established fans love, and when endless reams of material are churned out in the expectation that those same fans will shell out for anything with the name Star Trek on it. In short, it is the moment when a fictional universe and its distinctive fan culture transmogrify into a franchise in the fullest (and worst) sense.

While at first glance it may appear that fan priorities are at odds with commercial interests, in reality the two forces are highly interdependent and have been a mutually reinforcing cause of Star Trek’s transformation. Over the course of the book, Kotsko walks us chronologically through Star Trek’s late period to tell a story of a franchise that has grown increasingly brittle and recursive. This tendency has been driven by both fronts. Fan fixation on accuracy to established canon leads them to greet any new show with suspicion lest it contradict the known facts. Meanwhile corporate mandates toward synergy and tie-ins have forced writers to situate all new productions within either the TOS or TNG eras, resulting in an incredibly dense and unwieldy in-universe timeline. At the same time, the writers have clearly felt threatened by cancellation and pressured to live up to Star Trek’s storied past, resulting in shows that are so self-conscious about “being Star Trek” that they lose sight of what made it great in the first place.

A great deal of Late Star Trek is about matters of canon. With each new production—Enterprise, the JJ Abrams films, Discovery, and so on—Kotsko broadly describes the conditions under which it was made, its story, and the fan reaction. Trekkies certainly distinguish between good and bad by our usual standards, but any project’s implications for the canon are a major contributing factor to a positive or negative reception. One telling example Kotsko highlights is a comic called Countdown. Released as a tie-in for the first Abrams film, it provided backstory for the picture’s villain, a Romulan named Nero. The Abrams movies take place in a different timeline called the Kelvin timeline, a fork in the path caused by Nero and Spock being thrown back in time and altering things—namely, destroying the USS Kelvin, the starship captained by James Kirk’s father. The fans don’t much care for the Abrams films. But Countdown, by providing backstory for Nero, provided information not about the Kelvin timeline but the Prime timeline, the proper canon world of Kirk and Picard that hadn’t been “updated” in close to a decade. The Romulan supernova that sent Spock and Nero back to the past thus became a canonical event in the Prime timeline to which future productions would be beholden.

The fan obsession with canon emerged organically—Kotsko told me that The Original Series eventually hired someone to write back to fans and square the inconsistencies they had compiled—but in his view it has been fostered by the studios and networks in order to encourage completionism, thus boosting the franchise’s profitability and making creatively unworthy projects a good bet financially.

Star Trek’s long history and staggering number of tie-in novels should be an incredible resource, a well of plot threads and ideas that writers could draw from and extrapolate outward endlessly. But the urge toward systematicity and perfect coherence has turned it into a burden instead. “I think they could selectively dip back into the archives and leverage something for a new story,” Kotsko told me. “And I think that's very productive and a cool benefit of having a long-running tradition of storytelling. But the corporations make it into a straitjacket themselves. We should not forget that canon is a marketing strategy to put everybody on the hook continually. If you want to know what happened in Star Trek, you need to watch every single show because every one is canon. And if you haven't watched it, then when you get back on, you're going to be lost. Again, we need to focus on the way that the corporate ownership structure has distorted these things, has turned lore into canon in ways that then they turn around and complain about and blame the fans for what they themselves chose to do.”

This is far from the worst way that Paramount has degraded Star Trek over the decades but I find it sad that these series, which from the beginning were telling stories meant to reflect and comment on our world, and at their best are truly literary (see Kotsko’s reading of the incredible DS9 episode “In the Pale Moonlight” as a Faust riff)—that these series’ most committed fans have been taught not to read them with literary sensitivity, but rather simply as dispatches from an imagined future. Kotsko, who has been a committed participant in hardcore Star Trek fan discussions on the Reddit board r/DaystromInstitute, described this dynamic to me:

I found in my discussion with fans that they resisted the idea that there was symbolism or that there were themes discussed, or even that there were patterns or that there was intentional structure to things. They want it to be a newspaper from a fictional universe. They don't want it to be a story. They want it to be factual. And on the one hand, that is kind of easier in a way, but I think that the construct of canon encourages people to think that way. And the fact that things can be referenced simply for the sake of referencing and not for an organic reason—why does Captain Picard need to be the one to discover this fact about how all humanoids are related? Why is that this week's adventure? Why does everything happen to them? These questions are not asked, and I think that they want to forget that it's fiction, and I think part of that is a kind of intellectual laziness. But it’s also the distorted incentives that the idea of canon gives them—that they're rewarded for their memorization of facts, but they don’t get the same type of rewards for actually understanding how the stories work or why we care.

But Paramount’s mismanagement of Trek goes far beyond encouraging shallow reading. The company’s handling of Enterprise is a representative case. The show, a prequel set on one of Starfleet’s first warp-capable ships, premiered in fall 2001 after Voyager wrapped its run the previous spring. It was not just the standard bearer for Star Trek but for Paramount’s hopes to stand up a television network of its own. Enterprise was supposed to be the flagship show of UPN, which Paramount hoped to make a real competitor to ABC, NBC, and CBS. But Enterprise’s timeslot was constantly preempted and it was shunted around the schedule willy-nilly, frustrating longtime fans and making it all but impossible for it to find new viewers.

Worse still, the show didn’t have a writing staff. Following a mass exodus from the writers’ room when Voyager ended, Enterprise was left with two people: Rick Berman, who had shepherded the franchise since the early days of TNG, and Brannon Braga, the showrunner of Voyager and longtime series writer, with inventive scripts going back to TNG. Two men cannot write 26 episodes each season themselves. I would think this self-evident, but apparently no one at Paramount insisted they bring in new writers, both for a fresh perspective and to lighten each writer’s duties. One wonders if Paramount executives were actually thrilled at the prospect of paying so many fewer salaries.

All of this would repeat with uncanny similarity fifteen years later when Paramount jumped into the streaming wars with its Paramount+ service. Paramount’s catalogue of original and iconic intellectual property is, shall we say, rather thin, so once again Trek would take center stage as the chief enticement to subscribe. But once again, the shows were dragged down by poor planning and staffing problems.

The first installment in Trek’s new era was Discovery, another prequel series, but this time situated much closer to the TOS era. The network brought on Bryan Fuller, the auteur showrunner behind Hannibal and Pushing Daisies, to run things. Fuller then left midway through production on the first season. Discovery, which ran five seasons, was received negatively by fans from the jump, but Kotsko’s heterodox opinion is that its first season is very good—finally a Trek show with modern production values, a serialized story, a heightened pace, and expertly deployed twists. The following seasons, which saw new showrunners entering and exiting, often mid-season, he does little to defend.

Worse is the case of Picard. Jean-Luc Picard is without a doubt the most important character to almost all Trekkies. As played by Patrick Stewart, the erudite captain of the Enterprise-D is the embodiment of Star Trek’s core ethos. He is intimidatingly intelligent, fiercely courageous, compassionate, accepting, a true leader and a role model. To return to his character thirty years after TNG concluded is a prospect no fan could turn down. Discovery had already begun to struggle, but surely the return of the franchise’s most beloved character could stabilize and legitimize Trek’s new era.

Due to his involvement writing a short tie-in film for Discovery, Picard was ultimately put in the hands of the novelist Michael Chabon, who despite his stellar track record in literature had absolutely no experience with television. He was nonetheless retained as writer, co-creator, and showrunner. Kotsko rehearses in full the byzantine plot of the resulting season, which he considers one of the greatest artistic failures in all of Star Trek (only to be eclipsed by the following two seasons of Picard, and the recent Section 31 direct-to-streaming film. We know from public comments from Trek streaming czar Alex Kurtzman and others that the season began shooting without a finished set of scripts. Like Enterprise, the show was set up to fail by a lack of oversight and the failure to institute any basic guardrails or quality standards.

Enterprise is not a successful show, though Kotsko has a certain fondness for it, and Picard is a disaster. On one level, the blame for that falls on the writers and showrunners. But Kotsko lays most of the blame on the corporate higher-ups who adhere to a business plan that calls for more Star Trek even if it’s a betrayal of everything the franchise represents:

One aspect of my research for the book that was most discouraging was looking at the corporate side of things and just how badly mismanaged it all was. An important reference point for me here is an article called Franchise Fatigue by Ina Rae Hark. She emphasizes that people talk about the fortunes of Star Trek as though it's solely an interaction between the writers and the fans. And really the fans are granted the ultimate agency because they either accept the material or reject it. The writers are trying their best, and it takes a lot for them to admit that maybe the writers made a mistake or something like that. But the corporate overlords who are actually determining the broad outlines of this are never present in these discussions. They're never considered, and for instance, Enterprise, when it was meant to be the tent pole of the network, it was also constantly preempted. Its time slot was moving around constantly, and you can't do that in linear TV—people, they get into the habit or they don't, and they were actively trying to make it impossible for people to become regular viewers of the show. And then they blame the fans for being snobs or the writing being poor. And both of those things might be true, but they're not the ultimate explanation.

It’s this attention to the conditions under which each show was made that gives Late Star Trek its heft. Every description of an ill-conceived story arc or a bizarre character turn is part of an argument that refers back to insufficient planning or wrongheaded executive strategy off-screen. When Berman and Braga write an embittered and self-indulgent finale for Enterprise, well, it’s because they’re feeling embittered and self-indulgent at that point. It doesn’t excuse it, but it renders it legible. When Discovery devotes episode after episode to slowly moving a character toward a posting in the black ops group Section 31, we understand that follows from a mandate to produce a back-door pilot for a Section 31 program. It’s still unfortunate, but we understand why it happened. The book contains a wealth of plot synopsis and lore investigation but it never feels scattershot because it is impeccably structured around the relationship between Star Trek’s fictional world and our own while it was being produced.

It’s not all doom and gloom however. In what is in my opinion the best chapter in the book, Kotsko tackles the sprawling “novelverse” of Star Trek books. The novelverse has been almost completely overlooked by academics and critics alike; one of the only exceptions is a chapter on it in the Routledge Handbook of Star Trek written by Sean Guynes and Gerry Canavan, whom Kotsko quotes in this passage:

This history of neglect is unfortunate, because the hundreds of extant novels “vastly outweigh all other media—including television—in the number of stories told about and set in the franchise’s fictional universe” and accordingly “have operated as an imaginative space for fans to collectively work out the implications of concepts from televisual Star Trek, as well as to identify and attempt to resolve apparent contradictions in the character portraits, fictional history, and philosophical themes of the series.”

Any account of Star Trek that leaves out the novels is therefore bound to be incomplete, because “no franchise has produced more franchise fiction, nor produced it more consistently, than Star Trek”—and never was this more true than in the awkward interregnum between Enterprise and Discovery. For that period of over a decade—and arguably for some indeterminate number of years before Enterprise was finally cancelled—the novels became the primary driver of Star Trek, developing a sprawling continuity that draws in all eras and characters from the franchise and significantly changes the status quo of the Next Generation-era shows.

Kotsko freely admits he can’t treat the novelverse as a whole, because it’s far too extensive for him to have read all of. Instead he focuses on three authors who each represent one of the storytelling modes that typify late Star Trek: Christopher Bennett, whose work is indicative of a fan-service first approach; Kirsten Beyer, who works within canon to achieve artistic freedom; and David Mack, whose interest lies in fresh world-building.

Early on, Kotsko identifies Star Trek as an exemplary case of franchise-style storytelling, which is defined as a process that takes place across types of media, involves audience participation, and defers narrative closure. We need hardly glance to find similar cases all around us these days. Franchise fiction has eaten Hollywood and garnered a poor reputation in the process. Star Trek’s novelverse, by contrast, represents the potential of franchise storytelling to be generative and artistically fruitful. Kotsko points out that Trek’s greatest achievements have always coincided with being ignored or overlooked by its executive owners, as was the case with Deep Space Nine. In being relegated to the margins as mere fodder for rabid fans, the authors behind the novels found room to experiment and expand the world that would never be and have never been allowed on-screen.

This is the story of Star Trek in a nutshell, the paradox at the heart of the franchise. Trek could be blamed for so many deleterious developments in American pop culture, yet it has never entirely been swallowed by those developments itself. Star Trek, deeply hokey, iconic for as many negative reasons as positive ones, has retained a vital spirit and understanding of itself that can never be fully subsumed by market forces, even as seemingly more-dynamic competitors have succumbed to their fate as pure IP.

In his conclusion, Kotsko ruminates again on the idea of canon and how ancient authors freely remixed and reinterpreted existing stories for their own purposes. In making the point that Homer felt no constraint imposed by previous versions of the story of the Trojan War, and that in turn Aeschylus felt no constraint from Homer when composing the Oresteia, he writes, “As someone who has closely studied both, there is no greater inherent depth to Odysseus than Captain Kirk, for instance, or to Achilles than to Batman.” I admit I scoffed a little when I first read that passage. But I think I’ve become convinced. I’ve been bringing up Star Trek a lot in conversation lately, with friends, acquaintances, coworkers. I have been shocked—people I would never, ever peg as Trek fans are thrilled to talk about it. They’re thrilled to have a chance to tell someone they love Garak, the Cardassian tailor/spy (and gay icon) from DS9. They’re thrilled to think about Captain Picard. They’re thrilled to say, actually, Janeway is their favorite captain. People love Star Trek! People know these characters, have held them in their minds for decades. Thanks to Strange New Worlds and the Abrams films, three different actors have canonically played Captain Kirk. I find myself believing that Star Trek could continue to be reinterpreted and new stories could continue to be told—hopefully someday outside the gravitational pull of the TOS and TNG eras—that do what Star Trek at its best always did: to reflect on our world and to imagine a better one.

Late Star Trek deserves a place on the bookshelf of any fan of the franchise, even if they’re only familiar with the good stuff. It’s a loving appreciation of work made under impossible conditions, eminently readable, deeply considered, and illuminating of far more than its subject matter.