Star Trek veteran and For All Mankind executive producer Ronald D. Moore has confirmed which three shows exist in AppleTV+ show’s alternate timeline.
Summary
- For All Mankind’s alternative timeline features three Star Trek shows: The Original Series, the never-happened Phase II, and The Next Generation.
- Star Trek: The Next Generation is the final Star Trek show in For All Mankind’s timeline, reflecting the show’s focus on the space race and landing on Mars.
- The absence of Star Trek shows in For All Mankind’s timeline suggests that the franchise’s golden days of the 1990s never occurred.
For All Mankind co-creator and executive producer Ronald D. Moore has confirmed which three Star Trek shows exist in the AppleTV+ alternative history show’s timeline. For All Mankind season 4, episode 9, “Brazil” revealed that only three Star Trek shows existed in the show’s alternative 2003, meaning that the franchise’s golden days of the 1990s never happened. While the existence of Star Trek: The Original Series was never in doubt, viewers speculated over what the second and third shows could be.
Ronald D. Moore previously spoke about which Star Trek shows exist in For All Mankind in a 2021 interview with Inverse. Now, the Star Trek veteran and For All Mankind co-creator has more information on the alternate timeline. Moore explained this during a Q&A at Collider‘s exclusive For All Mankind season 4 finale screening in Los Angeles attended by his fellow executive producers, Ben Nedivi, Matt Wolpert and Maril Davis, and stars Joel Kinnaman, who plays Ed Baldwin, Krys Marshall, who plays Danielle Poole, and Wrenn Schmidt, who plays Margo Madison. Read Moore’s quote below:
“I think […] the last I counted, I thought we were saying it was Star Trek: The Original Series, Star Trek: Phase II, which was the show that never happened in the ’70s, and Star Trek: The Next Generation.”
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At Collider‘s For All Mankind season 4 finale screening, Ron Moore and executive producer Ben Nedivi also credited producer and writer David Weddle for the list of 3 Star Trek shows.
Why Was TNG The Last Star Trek Show In For All Mankind’s Timeline?
For All Mankind doesn’t need the Starship Enterprise to explore the final frontier.
For All Mankind is set in an alternative timeline where the space race never ended, and so it’s likely that there wouldn’t be much of an appetite for science fiction shows like Star Trek: The Next Generation. Characters like Ed Baldwin, Gordo Stevens (Michael Dorman), and Tracy Stevens (Sarah Jones) were immortalized on the big screen in For All Mankind‘s alternative history. Dramatizations of the race for Mars and Gordo and Tracy’s heroic sacrifice that helped avert World War III aren’t sci-fi movies for audiences in For All Mankind‘s timeline, they’re biopics.
A sci-fi show like Star Trek: The Next Generation would have to go further to engage an audience who were living through the space race. By the time TNG ended in 1994, For All Mankind‘s alternative NASA was working towards landing human beings on Mars. Star Trek: The Original Series was canceled in the same year that Neil Armstrong landed on the Moon so it makes sense for Star Trek: The Next Generation to be the final Star Trek show after For All Mankind‘s astronauts landed on the Red Planet.
