Enlarge / The crew of the Enterprise in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan , a film with many references to Starfleet Academy. (credit: Paramount)

There's officially another Star Trek series on the way, and this time it's one we've been hearing rumors about since 2018: Starfleet Academy .

Announced today in a press release and reported by Deadline , the CBS Studios-produced series will follow a group of teenage Starfleet Academy students as they come of age while enduring rigorous training for future interstellar missions.

The central characters will reportedly have to navigate friendships, rivalries, and romances as they face a new enemy that threatens the Federation.

Enlarge / Jonathan Frakes is my dad. (credit: Paramount+)

Few involved in the making or watching of 2002's Star Trek Nemesis would say that it was a fantastic send-off for the beloved characters of The Next Generation . Over seven seasons, TNG became one of Trek 's most nuanced and consistent entries (though still one that was capable of producing terrible , silly , and just plain weird episodes). But Nemesis is a flat action movie defined by thin characterization, a cheesy one-note villain, and distracting plot contrivances, and it did so poorly ($67 million on a $60 million budget, in a time before "maybe it will make a lot of money in China" was a thing) that it foreclosed any possibility of another sequel. The cast and those characters, the thinking generally went, deserved better closure.

Star Trek: Picard has been the TNG continuation you'd get if you wished for a TNG sequel on a monkey's paw. The first two seasons made only intermittent use of any non-Picard characters, and the new characters were either annoying or bland or both. The show's creative staff uses "convoluted twists" as a stand-in for clear and interesting storytelling. It's a show strictly for die-hard Trek completists, and it's easily the worst of the five Trek shows in active production as of this writing.

The show's third and final season has been pitched as a true TNG reunion, and if nothing else, it's nice to see the clear affection these performers still have for one another. But Picard is still Picard , and many of the characters and plot points in the season so far (we've seen the first six episodes of a planned 10, though this piece will only refer to specific events from the season premiere and the trailers) are eerily reminiscent of the ones that made Nemesis so unsatisfying.

Enlarge / The crew of the Enterprise in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan . (credit: Paramount)

Many people consider Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan to be the finest Star Trek film ever made, and no small amount of credit goes to director Nicholas Meyer for that success. Now, Meyer has written a prequel to the movie that will stream in narrative podcast form.

Meyer directed Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country and helped write the screenplays for both of those, as well as the Leonard Nimoy-directed Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home —in other words, all the best Trek movies, by most fans' reckoning. The director brought influences from beloved, epic naval stories and series like Horatio Hornblower, Moby Dick , and Botany Bay—as well as Shakespeare—to give the franchise a whole new look, vibe, and set of themes. That narrative cocktail was a huge creative success.

It turns out that over the past several years, Meyer had worked on a potential TV miniseries or film project that would be a prequel to The Wrath of Khan , focusing on the time villain Khan and his superhuman crew spent stranded on the dying planet Ceti Alpha V between the original TV series episode "Space Seed"—which introduced the characters—and the film The Wrath of Khan , which ended their story.

Nichelle Nichols made TV history with her portrayal of Nyota Uhura in Star Trek: the Original Series . (credit: CBS)

Actress Nichelle Nichols—who made history with her portrayal of Nyota Uhura on Star Trek: The Original Series —died Saturday, July 30, at the age of 89. Her son Kyle Johnson announced Nichols' passing on her official Instagram account, saying his mother had died of natural causes. Deadline Hollywood confirmed her passing with Gilbert Bell, her talent manager and business partner of 15 years. Nichols suffered a mild stroke in 2015 and was diagnosed with dementia in 2018. She rarely appeared in public after that.

(Last year we wrote about Woman in Motion , a new documentary about Nichols and her recruitment work for NASA, directed by Todd Thompson (streaming on Paramount+). Much of the following is adapted from that text.)

Nichols started her career as a dancer and singer. She had wanted to become the first Black ballerina, and by age 14 landed her first gig at the Sherman Hotel in Chicago. She subsequently toured the US, Canada, and Europe with Duke Ellington and Lionel Hampton before settling in Los Angeles in 1960 to pursue acting.

Enlarge / The official Star Trek Wine collection has expanded from two varieties to six. (credit: Sean Carroll)

Back in 2019, (partly)  in honor of the announcement of Star Trek: Picard , Ars staffers held an informal tasting session to sample two bottles of official Star Trek Wines , a collaboration between CBS Consumer Products and Wines That Rock. And the wines were.... far better than we expected, although very much over-priced.

Picard has now wrapped its second season, with a third currently in production, and the folks behind Star Trek Wines have expanded their collection from two varieties to six. So a second informal wine tasting was clearly in order. And who better to help us in this noble endeavor than Q himself—aka actor John de Lancie—and The Orville writer Andre Bormanis, who launched his career as a science advisor on TNG ? They joined a fresh group of tasters (eight people in all) on a cool late spring evening in Los Angeles, where the nibbles were plentiful and the conversation flowed freely. (Wine assessments were anonymous, in keeping with the gathering's super-casual vibe. And the wine was purchased out of pocket, not gifted for promotional purposes.)

Let's start by revisiting the original two varieties. First up: a 2017 Sonoma Valley zinfandel, described as a blend of 87 percent zinfandel, blended with petite sirah and just a hint of syrah.. The packaging plays up the fictional connection, claiming the wine is produced under the United Federation Special Reserve Label, "blended by our intergalactic sommelier and designed to fit the palates of multiple planets." (The back label tasting notes adds "Andalorian spice" to the description just for fun.)