When Star Trek: Discovery first debuted in 2017, some Trekkies wondered if the canonical timeline was connected to the J.J. Abrams reboot movies in the Kelvin Universe. Alas, the answer was no, and for very good reasons. Discovery may have crossed into the Mirror Universe in Season 1, but it couldn’t cross into the Kelvin Universe because of legal issues. Since 2006, the rights to create theatrical Trek films and Trek TV series have been split between CBS and Paramount Pictures, a subsidiary of Viacom. But now, after 13 years apart, CBS and Viacom are re-merging, and for Star Trek, it could be the dawn of a huge crossover renaissance. Basically, this is the Star Trek equivalent the recent Fox and Disney merger. Here’s why this news should energize any Star Trek fan, plus five rad crossovers that are now possible because of the merger.

In the 1990s, Star Trek was the most influential science fiction shared universe, without a doubt. Back then, crossover from a Star Trek TV series and into a Star Trek film was not uncommon. In 1991, Leonard Nimoy played Spock in a two-part episode of The Next Generation called “Unification,” the same year that Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country hit theaters. In that film, Michael Dorn played Col. Worf, the ancestor of his character Lt. Worf on The Next Generation. In the 1996 film First Contact, Worf commands the USS Defiant, a starship from the series Deep Space Nine, because, at the time, that’s where the character lived in Trek canon. Kate Mulgrew of Star Trek: Voyager appeared as Admiral Janeway in the 2002 film Star Trek: Nemesis. It was a veritable crossover smorgasbord.

But then, after 2005, and the end of the series Star Trek: Enterprise, any depiction of that shared continuity across Trek films and TV went away, along with pretty much any new filmed Star Trek until the 2009 reboot movie. Star Trek canon didn’t go anywhere, but because of a corporate split between Viacom and CBS, the legal rights to distribute Star Trek films were retained by Paramount, and the TV rights were held by CBS. The specifics of who had what are murky (both the films and TV shows could depict the starship Enterprise, for example), but one thing was clear: The creative teams making the films and making the TV shows were separate.

Until now.

This week, news broke that CBS and Viacom will merge again, and according to Deadline, new ViacomCBS chief Bob Bakish implied there are plans to leverage Star Trek across several platforms. Here’s what that could mean for fans.

(Note: The following are speculations based on the shared rights for Star Trek films and TV series. Nobody associated with ViacomCBS has indicated that any of the following are in the works.)