Time Is a Companion
Sir Patrick Stewart died on 28 October, aged 86. He was a Royal Shakespeare Company actor for sixteen years before he was a starship captain, and he took the captain’s job expecting it to be cancelled. It ran, in one form or another, for thirty-nine years. The franchise he carried has outlived him by rather less than it looks.
The line everyone has been posting this week is from Generations, and it is worth having in full, because the full version is better than the fragment:
Someone once told me that time was a predator that stalked us all our lives. But I rather believe that time is a companion who goes with us on the journey, and reminds us to cherish every moment, because they’ll never come again. What we leave behind is not as important as how we’ve lived.
He is talking to Riker on the wreck of the saucer section, having just buried a man who spent the entire film trying to get back into a place where time does not pass at all. It is the closest the franchise ever came to stating its own thesis out loud, and it works because of who is saying it — a man who could make exposition sound like it had been thought about.
His family said he died after a short time living with Alzheimer’s disease and dementia with Lewy bodies. The second of those is the one that killed Robin Williams, and in his case it was only identified after his death; his widow wrote afterwards about how little understood it had been while he was alive. It is the second most common degenerative dementia after Alzheimer’s, and most people have still never heard of it.
Sixteen years before the bridge
This is the part that gets flattened in the headlines. Stewart was born in Mirfield in the West Riding in 1940 and joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1966, and he stayed there until 1982. Sixteen years. He was Snout in Peter Brook’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, the production that changed what English Shakespeare looked like. He won an Olivier for Antony and Cleopatra in 1979, and another nearly thirty years later for playing Claudius opposite David Tennant’s Hamlet, with a Tony nomination attached to it. He did Waiting for Godot with Ian McKellen. He did A Christmas Carol alone on a stage, all the parts, for years.
He was never nominated for an Academy Award. Not once, in sixty years. He has four Emmy nominations, three Golden Globes, three from the Screen Actors Guild, and won none of them. What he did win was two Oliviers, a Drama Desk, and — this is my favourite line in his record — a Grammy, for narrating Peter and the Wolf.
The casting story is almost too neat. Robert Justman saw him give a literary reading at UCLA and decided that was the captain. Stewart signed a standard six-year contract and by his own account expected the thing to fail inside a season, which is why he reportedly did not bother moving his furniture over. He was forty-seven, bald, English, and classically trained, in a part written for an American adventurer. Every single one of those was supposed to be a problem.
The order I found them in
I started thinking about writing this in the gym on Saturday morning. The Enterprise theme came up on my playlist, and somewhere in the next few minutes I worked out something I had never quite put into words: of all the things I have followed over the years, this is the one that has taken up the most of my life. Not necessarily the best. The biggest.
The theme in question is one I would put second in the whole franchise, behind Jerry Goldsmith’s theme for First Contact. It is the odd one out — a vocal pop song where everything else is orchestral — and plenty of people never forgave it for that. I think they were wrong. It is a song about people who have not got anywhere yet, sung by someone insisting that they will, which sums up humanity rather better than any amount of brass.
I came to it backwards, like most people my age. The Original Series first, in repeats, already old when I saw it. Then The Next Generation as it aired, which is the one I actually grew up with and the one that formed whatever I think good television is.
Deep Space Nine I did not like at first and now rate higher than almost all of it — it is a series about occupation, collaboration and a war that cannot be won cleanly, hiding inside a show about a space station. Voyager was the same shape of experience: slow to start, better than I gave it credit for. Enterprise was cut off at four seasons in 2005, just as it had worked out what it was for. And Picard, whatever you think of its first two seasons, used its third to give the Next Generation crew the ending the films never quite managed.
Discovery belongs in that list too, and followed the same pattern: I did not get on with the first season and ended up glad I had stayed with it. What soured it was not the programme. Paramount cancelled it in March 2023 and did not tell the cast and crew until they had finished shooting the fifth season, so the ending they had already filmed was not an ending at all. The studio then paid for three extra days of filming to bolt a conclusion on. That is a better outcome than most get. It is still a series being told how it finishes by an accountant.
This is the recurring Star Trek theme, and Enterprise is the worst case of it by a distance. Its final episode is not about its own crew. It is framed as a holodeck recreation being run by Riker and Troi, characters from a series that had ended eleven years earlier, and it kills Trip Tucker off in a way the story does not need. Jolene Blalock called it appalling before it had even aired. Brannon Braga, who wrote it, has since said the Tucker death “wasn’t a great idea” and that making the finale about The Next Generation is his biggest regret. Four years of work, and the cast were handed somebody else’s ending.
Strange New Worlds is the one that surprised me. It is the first of them in years that feels like the programme I started with — episodic, curious, a ship going out to look at something and coming home again — and watching it put me straight back in front of those Original Series repeats. Which makes six episodes and out a particularly irritating way for it to finish.
Not everything landed. Starfleet Academy never grew on me the way the others eventually did, and the animated ones never have either. I am prepared to accept that may be me rather than them — Lower Decks has people who love it the way I love Deep Space Nine — but I could not get there.
The films divide neatly. The Wrath of Khan is one of the best films anyone has made out of a television series, full stop. The Next Generation films were good without being that, and Generations did something genuinely clever: it handed the franchise from one cast to another inside a story about a man refusing to accept that his time had ended. The Kelvin films were better than people now admit.
What is actually left
Here is the thing I did not fully register until I went and counted. Every single Star Trek series is finished or finishing.
| Series | Ended | How |
|---|---|---|
| Picard | April 2023 | Planned, after three seasons |
| Prodigy | 2023–25 | Cancelled, rescued by Netflix, licence then lapsed |
| Discovery | May 2024 | Cancelled during post-production on season five |
| Lower Decks | December 2024 | Ended at five seasons; creator had two more planned |
| Starfleet Academy | March 2027 | Second season confirmed as its last, two months after the first aired |
| Strange New Worlds | 2027 | Fifth season cut to six episodes and made the final one |
The Strange New Worlds ending deserves its nuance, because it is being reported two different ways. Paramount originally meant to stop it after four seasons on cost grounds, with the merger pending. The showrunners asked for six more episodes so they could land the series into The Original Series properly rather than stop mid-sentence the way Discovery did, and got them. So it was presented in June 2025 as a planned five-season arc, and the people involved thanked the studio for it. That is a more graceful exit than Enterprise got. It is still a show being ended because of a spreadsheet.
The films are in no better shape. The Kelvin cast was formally let go in November 2025, and David Ellison has told investors the next film will not be set in that universe. Section 31, the 2025 streaming film, sits at twenty-three per cent on Rotten Tomatoes, which makes it the worst-reviewed thing in the entire franchise, and it collected five Razzie nominations including Worst Picture. There is one film in development, from Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, confirmed still alive at CinemaCon in April. New cast, new story, no connection to anything. No date. No cast announced. The “origin story” film announced in 2024 for the sixtieth anniversary has simply stopped being mentioned by anybody.
The door Picard left open
The Picard finale was not a full stop. It rechristens the Titan as the Enterprise-G, puts Seven of Nine in the centre seat with Raffi beside her, leaves Jack Crusher aboard, and has Q turn up to tell him his trial is only beginning. That is not an ending. That is a pilot.
Terry Matalas pitched it as Star Trek: Legacy and spent two years saying so in public. Paramount never ordered it. By this February the reporting was blunt: it failed to gain traction, there is no development, it is not happening. Matalas is running a Marvel series now. The premise survives as an IDW comic, which began in September — Seven of Nine, commanding the Enterprise-G, on paper.
So a studio was handed a finished pilot by its most warmly received Star Trek in twenty years, with the cast available and the audience asking for it, and did nothing with it for three and a half years. I find that harder to explain than any of the cancellations.
The ownership has changed twice in the meantime. Skydance completed its merger with Paramount Global in August 2025. Thirteen months later, on 6 October this year, that company closed its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery and renamed itself Skydance outright. Star Trek has spent the whole of its sixtieth-anniversary year inside a company that was busy being bought and then busy buying. No public plan for the franchise has been stated by anyone who actually owns it. The closest thing to an official read came from Trevor Roth of Roddenberry Entertainment, who is rights-adjacent rather than a studio spokesman, and who said in Rome ten days ago that Star Trek is “at a bit of a crossroads”.
Crossroads is generous. Sixty years in, the franchise whose entire premise is a sentence about going somewhere has nothing in production and nowhere announced to go.
The band outside the palace
Elizabeth II knighted him in 2010, in the New Year Honours, for services to drama; the investiture was at Buckingham Palace that June. This week the Band of the Grenadier Guards played the Star Trek theme at the Changing of the Guard, outside the same building. I have watched the clip more times than I would like to admit. There is something very particular about a British state ceremony, performed to the minute for two hundred years, stopping to play the theme tune of an American science-fiction programme because one of its captains came from Mirfield.
It was not the only loss. Walter Koenig, Chekov in The Original Series, died on 26 October, two days before Stewart, aged ninety. The franchise lost two of its captains’ crews inside one week of its anniversary month.
Stewart’s last screen performance, as Charles Xavier, is still to come in December.
A different kind of era ending
When Gorbachev died in 2022 I wrote a piece here called End of an Era, about growing up with the Cold War in the background and going to see Berlin while it was still cut in half. This feels like one of those, and it does not feel like it for the same reason at all.
Gorbachev’s era had finished long before he did. He outlived his own settlement by three decades and had to watch most of it come apart while he was still in the room. The man was the last thing left of it.
This is the other way round. The man went first, and the thing he made is still standing — still owned, still licensed, still being sold back to us as a sixtieth anniversary. It has not been overtaken by history or disproved by events. It has simply been left on a shelf by people who have not worked out what they want to do with it. One ending came from the world changing faster than anyone could hold on to. This one comes from nobody deciding anything.
What he left behind
He took a job he expected to lose and turned a part written as a template into the most quoted authority figure in modern television — a man whose default response to a crisis was to ask the room what it thought, and who was allowed to be wrong in front of his own crew. For a generation of people who were eleven when they first saw him, that was the model of how a competent adult behaves under pressure, and a great many of us have been quietly running on it ever since.
I am realistic about the rest of it. I am not going to see time travel, or a transporter, or anything moving faster than light. Those were always the furniture rather than the point, and the point was a room full of competent people arguing their way to a decision. But if any of it does arrive, long after I am gone, I hope whoever gets there keeps the habit of naming ships after people. Roll on the USS Picard.
And if anyone at Skydance is looking for the right way to mark his death, it is not a tribute reel. The series that was pitched and never ordered — Seven of Nine in the centre seat of the Enterprise-G, the ship his own finale launched — is sitting there finished, waiting for somebody to say yes. Making it would be a better memorial than anything any of us can write this week.
What we leave behind is not as important as how we have lived. He gets to have that both ways.
All thirteen Star Trek feature films went up free on Pluto TV on 1 November, framed explicitly as a tribute to Stewart and as part of the sixtieth-anniversary run. No end date has been given.
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