Late Star Trek: The Final Frontier in the Franchise Era -- Adam Kotsko

<p><b>How <i>Star Trek</i>'s twenty-first-century reinventions illuminate the unique challenges and opportunities of franchise-style corporate storytelling</b></p><p><i>Late Star Trek</i> explores the beloved science fiction franchise's repeated attempts to reinvent itself after the end of its 1990s golden age. Beginning with the prequel series <i>Enterprise, </i>Adam Kotsko analyzes the wealth of content set within <i>Star Trek</i>'s sprawling continuity--including authorized books, the three "Kelvin Timeline" films, and the streaming series <i>Discovery, Picard, Lower Decks, Prodigy, </i>and <i>Strange New Worlds</i>--along with fan discourse, to reflect on the perils and promise of the franchise as a unique form of storytelling. </p><p> Significantly including the licensed novels and comic books that fill out the <i>Star Trek</i> universe for its fans, Kotsko brings the multiple productions of the early twenty-first century together as a unified whole rather than analyzing them in their current stratified view. He argues that the variety of styles and approaches in this tumultuous era of <i>Star Trek</i> history provides the perfect opportunity to reflect on the nature of the franchise storyworlds that now dominate popular culture. By taking the spin-offs and tie-ins seriously as creative attempts to tell a new story within an established universe, <i>Late Star Trek</i> highlights creative triumphs as well as the tendency for franchise faithfulness to get in the way of cr