With the cancellation of Star Trek 4 it seems that the Kelvin Timeline has come to an end, howeverit also seems to follow a familiar pattern in Star Trek history and if the pattern were to continue the next step would be Star Trek The Next Generation Kelvin Edition.

Star Trek the Next Generation Season 1 Cast Publicity Image

The crew of the USS Enterprise NCC-1701 had set out on its five-year mission in 1966, however that mission was cut short when just three years in they were shelved and pulled of the air, what followed was the short-lived Star Trek The Animated Series, six projects on a different medium (movies) and finally in 1987 a return to television with the crew of the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D for Star Trek The Next Generation .

So far the Kelvin timeline has inadvertently followed the same pattern, in 2009 Captain Kirk and company took to the stars again aboard the NCC-1701 on a five-year mission following a universe altering event in the attack on the USS Kelvin, with the most recent entry Star Trek Beyond taking place three years into the five-year mission and once again it has been shelved. The shelving happened to follow with an announcement of another Star Trek Animated series and we have no less than six projects on another medium (streaming).

While this is all pure coincidence as the Paramount run Kelvin series has no connections to the CBS run streaming service it is an interesting series of parallels that if continued would logically continue with a Next Generation continuation of the Kelvin Timeline,.

What would the Kelvin timeline look like 95 years later?

It’s impossible to say for sure, but we can make a few assumptions based upon what we know from the glimpses we’ve been given into the universe. The obvious are the destruction of Vulcan, the technological advantage to both the Klingons and Federation with access to the Narada and the change in Kirk’s timeline which lead to the Enterprise A coming into service decades earlier than in the original.

However these changes will cause major ripples in the future, notably the events of all of the Star Trek The Original Series movies will never happen, the 1701 wasn’t relaunching at the time of V’ger, Genesis wouldn’t have been a priority, the search for Spock was unnecessary, the crew of the Enterprise wasn’t on their way home when the whale probe attacked, Sybok may never have gone looking for God and Praxis was destroyed earlier so the Undiscovered Country never opened a dialogue between the Federation and the Klingons,

The Klingons are a smaller presence with the destruction of a large part of their fleet at Praxis, and without the war with the Federation ever going from cold to full on there as never a dialogue, this would likely mean the Klingons never signed an official treaty with the Federation,

The Romulans were less likely to launch the event of Balance of Terror against the far more advanced Starfleet, so did they ever learn that Vulcan’s and Romulans are so closely related? Since the Klingons had a much smaller fleet we can only assume they never traded ships for cloaks with the Romulans, so the Romulans would be the only ones with a fully functional cloaking device, likely pushing them further into isolation and possibly hiding the fate of their star from them for the moment.

The Federation had started a faster land grab, moving further out faster than before, their borders would be much larger, and may even include a good part of Romulan space. The border war with the Cardassians would not have been as difficult for a federation with a larger number of more advanced ships and the Cardassians likely driven off Bajor and to a smaller union than in the prime timeline. Was DS9 a Federation starbase put in place as Bajor joined the federation?

The events of Yesterdays Enterprise would also have been affected, it would seem unlikely with this more aggressive timeline that the Enterprise B, and C would have come into existence as late as they did, by the time Captain Picard and his crew set a course for Farpoint Station it’s entirely possible that it was aboard the Enterprise E and that their mission may be radically different. Do the Romulans again announce their intention to return to the fray early on as they did in Star Trek The. Next Generation?

It’s fun to think about, but the real question we face today in this article is, who would be cast in these Next Generation movies set in the Kelvin Timeline? JJ Abrams concerned himself with a few things as he attempted to recast the iconic crew of the Enterprise, a small eye towards physical appearance but with the actors ability to create their own take on the characters at the forefront. The crew of the Kelvin movies do not come off as pale imitations of the actors who played the original version of the character, but instead as their own versions with a slight homage to the original version, for this article we will attempt to capture this same spirit and will not be concerned with re-imagining the characters, just with recasting them under the same terms.