In a certain way, the incredible Apple TV+ show For All Mankind can be looked at as an unofficial precursor to Star Trek. Both shows imagine an alternate reality where events in the past made it so technology and space travel continued to develop throughout our lifetimes. But while Star Trek starts in the future, on For All Mankind, we see that past. We took the moon, we took Mars, and we’re still going. If you shift that story a few hundred years into the future, you can easily imagine a Starfleet made up of ships with warp drives.
So it’s no surprise that, in the alternate reality of For All Mankind, Star Trek exists. The Wrath of Khan was mentioned in an earlier season and, in last week’s penultimate season four episode “Brazil,” we learned that as of the early 2000s, three Star Trek shows exist in this world.
“I know you hate Star Trek, but you better get used to it,” space legend Danielle Poole (Krys Marshall) tells her son, who is soon to be a father. “Because I’m gonna make sure my grandbaby is a full-blown Trekkie. That’s right, we’re gonna watch all the series, all three of them.”
That throwaway line got some fans wondering. In our reality, there were six total Star Trek shows by 2003. So, which three survived in this reality? Well, at a Collider Q&A this week, For All Mankind producer Ronald D. Moore spilled the beans. “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,” he said, per Screenrant.
Classic For All Mankind. Take what we know, and twist it a bit. Phase II, for those who may not know, was the working title of the Star Trek series being developed to follow up The Original Series in the 1970s. It, of course, didn’t happen in our reality, but did in For All Mankind’s. Which makes sense. That world is one much more driven by a love of space and exploration so it would be easier to make it to air. As for why, by 2003, only one other show existed, we don’t know. Maybe it’s because the reality of For All Mankind is so close to what Star Trek was imagining: a world where people actually did boldly go where no one had gone before.
And yet, there is a tiny twist here. We also know that Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan exists in this universe. But, according to Moore, it’s got a slightly different context, at least in his mind. “In my head, The Wrath of Khan is the first Star Trek movie [in the For All Mankind timeline],” the producer told Inverse back in 2021. “They probably did the Star Trek: Phase II show that has always been talked about. The original Star Trek went off the air before the Apollo II landing… In my version of history, Paramount does make the Phase II show in the mid-’70s. And then they transitioned into Wrath of Khan and not Star Trek: The Motion Picture, because of the run of the lengthy and glorious, and critically acclaimed run of Phase II, it’s a year later that The Wrath of Khan comes out. But it’s still The Wrath of Khan that we know and it was essentially the same story. I love The Wrath of Khan and I couldn’t bear to change that. So it’s the same thing.”
With the fourth season of For All Mankind having just ended this week, and continuing to go further and further into space, we don’t yet know if it’ll continue. But, recently, the show’s star Joel Kinneman did tell io9 how he hopes it’ll all end. “The sort of grand vision for this show would take us from the space race and then an official hand over to Star Trek,” he said. It all comes back to Trek.
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