Star Trek: Chronological Timeline Order > TV + Films

Star Trek: The Complete Chronological Timeline

Every series and film in the order it happened, from the NX-01 to the 32nd century

The Star Trek franchise spans more than a thousand years of in-universe history across a dozen television series, fourteen films, and at least two complete timelines. To help navigate this expansive canon, this guide organises every major entry in strict chronological order, based on events as they occur in the universe, not by real-world release dates. Where the two orders diverge wildly, and in Star Trek they diverge constantly, the difference is noted.

The journey begins with the foundational days of Starfleet in Enterprise, moves through the golden age of exploration with Pike and Kirk, wades into the dense, politically charged 24th-century arc shared by The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager, and concludes in the far-flung 32nd century of Discovery and Starfleet Academy. The branching Kelvin timeline is noted exactly where it diverges, and the long-empty "Lost Era" between the original cast films and TNG finally has an on-screen entry of its own.

Whether you are plotting a comprehensive rewatch or seeking the historical context for a specific episode, this timeline brings structure to one of science fiction's most enduring and complex mythologies. And because this is a franchise that treats causality as a suggestion, several entries below loop back into their own history, the kind of closed and broken loops we dissect across our wider time travel paradox analyses.

Captain James T. Kirk and Mr. Spock in Star Trek: The Original Series

Kirk and Spock. The five-year mission sits almost exactly in the middle of a timeline that now stretches from 2151 to 3191.

The Timeline at a Glance

Every entry in chronological order. Note how violently in-universe order scrambles release order: the 2026 series sits beside the 1966 one, and the newest film slots into a gap left untouched for forty years.

Entry	In-universe	Format	Released
Enterprise	2151–2161	TV	2001–2005
Discovery (S1–2)	2256–2258	TV	2017–2019
Strange New Worlds	2259–	TV	2022–
The Original Series	2265–2269	TV	1966–1969
The Animated Series	2269–2270	Animated	1973–1974
The Motion Picture	2273	Film	1979
The Wrath of Khan	2285	Film	1982
The Search for Spock	2285	Film	1984
The Voyage Home	2286 / 1986	Film	1986
The Final Frontier	2287	Film	1989
The Undiscovered Country	2293	Film	1991
Star Trek (2009) †	Alt. 2258	Film	2009
Into Darkness †	Alt. 2259	Film	2013
Beyond †	Alt. 2263	Film	2016
Section 31	2324	Film	2025
The Next Generation	2364–2370	TV	1987–1994
Deep Space Nine	2369–2375	TV	1993–1999
Generations	2371 / 2293	Film	1994
Voyager	2371–2378	TV	1995–2001
First Contact	2373 / 2063	Film	1996
Insurrection	2375	Film	1998
Nemesis	2379	Film	2002
Lower Decks	2380–2382	Animated	2020–2024
Prodigy	2383–2384	Animated	2021–2024
Picard	2399–2402	TV	2020–2023
Discovery (S3–5)	3188–3191	TV	2020–2024
Starfleet Academy	32nd century	TV	2026–

† Kelvin timeline. The branch point is 2233, the day the USS Kelvin is destroyed and James T. Kirk is born.

Era I: The Founding Era • 22nd Century

Before the Federation, before the Prime Directive, before anyone had worked out the rules.

Star Trek: Enterprise
TV Series • Set 2151–2161 • Aired 2001–2005

Captain Jonathan Archer commands Earth's first Warp 5 starship, the NX-01. The series chronicles humanity's clumsy first forays into deep space: navigating a hostile Temporal Cold War, preventing the destruction of Earth by the Xindi, and brokering the early alliances that lead directly to the Coalition of Planets. Unlike the polished utopia of later eras, Enterprise explores the messy, dangerous reality of being the new kids on the galactic block, with Season 3's Xindi arc channelling raw post-9/11 paranoia and the ethical growing pains that eventually produce the Prime Directive.

Captain's log: The series ends in 2161, the year the United Federation of Planets is founded, meaning the whole show is a ten-year run-up to the franchise's founding document. Its abrupt cancellation ended an unbroken 18-year run of Star Trek on television, and the much-debated finale "These Are the Voyages..." frames the entire last mission as a holodeck simulation watched by Riker during a TNG episode, making it simultaneously the earliest and one of the latest entries in the canon. The pop-rock theme "Faith of the Heart" remains the most contested two minutes in franchise history.

Era II: The Pike & Kirk Era • 23rd Century

The golden age of exploration: one ship, two legendary captains, and six films of consequences.

Star Trek: Discovery (Seasons 1–2)
TV Series • Set 2256–2258 • Aired 2017–2019

A decade before Kirk's five-year mission, Specialist Michael Burnham's mutiny triggers a devastating war with the Klingon Empire. The USS Discovery deploys a classified experimental Spore Drive for instantaneous travel, before facing down a rogue Starfleet AI known as Control. These seasons deliberately stress-test Federation idealism, asking whether utopian values can survive existential threat, and drag the covert intelligence agency Section 31 into the light.

Captain's log: Burnham is Spock's adoptive sister, a sibling the franchise had kept secret for fifty years. The Season 2 finale does double duty as canon repair: Starfleet classifies all knowledge of Discovery and its spore drive, neatly explaining why nobody in the next 140 years of already-filmed Star Trek ever mentions either. The fan response to Anson Mount's Captain Pike was so overwhelming it spawned a spin-off before the season had finished airing.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
TV Series • Set 2259 onward • Airing 2022–present

Following the defeat of Control, Captain Christopher Pike leads the USS Enterprise on classic missions of deep space exploration, contending with the Gorn Hegemony while privately carrying the foreknowledge of his own inescapable fate. A triumphant return to episodic, planet-of-the-week storytelling, the show argues that true leadership means serving others even when you know exactly what it will cost you.

Captain's log: Pike's doom is a forty-year-old plot point paid forward: the delta ray accident and beeping wheelchair come from the 1966 two-parter "The Menagerie", making SNW a prequel to a flashback. The series also hosts a young Lieutenant James T. Kirk years before he takes the centre seat, and pulled off a fully animated-to-live-action crossover with Lower Decks in "Those Old Scientists", a first for the franchise.

Star Trek: The Original Series
TV Series • Set 2265–2269 • Aired 1966–1969

Captain James T. Kirk, Mr Spock and Dr McCoy lead the USS Enterprise on the iconic five-year mission. They establish the Romulan Neutral Zone, enforce the Organian Peace Treaty with the Klingons, and face down omnipotent beings, rogue computers and ancient anomalies. Conceived as a "Wagon Train to the stars", the show used allegorical science fiction to tackle 1960s social issues head-on, presenting a radically progressive future in which racism, sexism and global conflict had been eradicated.

Captain's log: This is the foundation of the entire mythos. It gave network television its first scripted interracial kiss in "Plato's Stepchildren" (1968), and Leonard Nimoy improvised the Vulcan salute on set from a priestly blessing he had seen as a child. Cancelled after three seasons with the five-year mission incomplete, the show left a gap that animation would quietly finish four years later. Within this era also lurks "Space Seed" (2267), the single episode that detonates eighteen years later as the franchise's greatest film.

Star Trek: The Animated Series
Animated Series • Set 2269–2270 • Aired 1973–1974

Completing the final year of the five-year mission, the Enterprise crew encounters bizarre non-humanoid life and cosmic phenomena that live-action budgets could never have achieved, including alien crewmembers Arex and M'Ress. Despite airing as a Saturday morning cartoon, TAS kept the mature, philosophical tone of its parent series intact.

Captain's log: Its canon status was fiercely disputed by Roddenberry himself for decades, yet TAS introduced staples the franchise never let go of: the first depiction of a holodeck (the "rec room"), Spock's childhood on Vulcan, and Kirk's middle name, Tiberius. It also won Star Trek's first ever Emmy Award, something neither the original series nor TNG ever managed in a major category.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture
Film • Set 2273 • Released 1979

Admiral Kirk reassumes command of a refitted USS Enterprise to intercept a vast energy cloud on a direct course for Earth, absorbing and digitising everything in its path. Deliberately slow and awe-struck in the mould of 2001, the film asks what it means for a machine to seek its creator and achieve consciousness.

Captain's log: V'Ger turns out to be Voyager 6, a NASA probe returned home swollen into a god, which makes the antagonist a piece of 20th-century space junk. The film began life as the pilot for a cancelled television revival, Star Trek: Phase II, hastily upgraded to a feature after Star Wars rewrote the economics of science fiction in 1977.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
Film • Set 2285 • Released 1982

A vengeful Khan Noonien Singh, the genetically engineered tyrant Kirk exiled in "Space Seed", returns to seize the Genesis Device, a terraforming weapon capable of creating or destroying entire worlds. A meditation on aging, mortality and the inescapable consequences of past decisions, it climaxes with Spock's sacrifice in the radiation-flooded engine room, the single most iconic death in franchise history.

Captain's log: The tense, submarine-style starship duel saved the franchise commercially and set the template every even-numbered sequel chased for decades. We make the full case in our essay on why The Wrath of Khan is the greatest sequel ever made. Curiously, Khan and Kirk never share a physical scene; their entire war is fought over viewscreens.

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
Film • Set 2285 • Released 1984

Following Spock's death, Admiral Kirk and his crew risk careers, freedom and lives to steal the Enterprise and return to the Genesis Planet to recover their friend's body and katra. A story of loyalty and grief, it asks how far one is willing to go for a loved one, and answers: as far as it takes, including the self-destruction of the Enterprise herself and the murder of Kirk's son David at Klingon hands.

Captain's log: Leonard Nimoy directed, launching a genuine second career behind the camera and giving him control of his own character's resurrection. Our full review of The Search for Spock looks at why the middle chapter of the Genesis trilogy is better than its reputation.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
Film • Set 2286 and 1986 • Released 1986

To save Earth from an alien probe attempting to communicate with extinct humpback whales, the crew slingshots their stolen Klingon Bird-of-Prey around the sun and back to 1986 San Francisco to retrieve a breeding pair. A lighthearted comedic detour with a sincere conservation message, it became the most financially successful of the original cast films.

Captain's log: The time travel here is gloriously loose: Scotty hands the formula for transparent aluminium to the very engineer who may have invented it, a textbook bootstrap loop of the kind we catalogue in our time travel paradox guide. His on-screen shrug, that maybe the man invented it anyway, is the franchise admitting it does not care.

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier
Film • Set 2287 • Released 1989

Spock's long-lost, emotionally liberated half-brother Sybok hijacks the new Enterprise-A on a messianic quest to the centre of the galaxy to find Sha Ka Ree, the supposed home of God. Directed by William Shatner, the film grapples with religious zealotry and whether our pain defines us, and gives Kirk the best line of the run: "What does God need with a starship?"

Captain's log: Plagued by a writers' strike, budget cuts and effects that fell far short of ambition, it nearly killed the film series. It remains the only original cast film never to receive a director's cut, despite Shatner's repeated campaigning for one.

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
Film • Set 2293 • Released 1991

After the explosion of the moon Praxis pushes the Klingon Empire toward collapse, Kirk is tasked with escorting Chancellor Gorkon to peace talks, only to be framed for his assassination by a conspiracy spanning both governments. A taut political thriller mirroring the fall of the Soviet Union, it forces Kirk to confront his own prejudice and let go of a lifetime of hatred.

Captain's log: Praxis is Chernobyl with a cloaking device; the allegory was deliberate and pointed. The film closes with the original cast's signatures sweeping across the screen, a farewell our review of The Undiscovered Country ranks among the most graceful exits in franchise cinema. The same year, 2293, Kirk is presumed killed aboard the Enterprise-B, a thread Generations picks up 78 in-universe years later.

Timeline Branch: The Kelvin Timeline

An alternate reality created in 2233, when the Romulan Nero arrives from the prime timeline's 2387 and destroys the USS Kelvin on the day of Kirk's birth. The prime timeline continues unbroken alongside it.

Star Trek (2009)
Film • Set Alt. 2258 • Released 2009

In the altered reality, an orphaned, rebellious James T. Kirk must rise to the occasion and team up with a young Spock to stop Nero destroying the Federation's founding worlds. A nature-versus-nurture argument at feature length, it insists Kirk and Spock are destined for each other regardless of the tragedy that reshaped their lives.

Captain's log: The inciting event is prime canon: the supernova that destroys Romulus in 2387 and sends Nero and Spock Prime back in time is the same catastrophe whose refugee crisis drives Picard's resignation in Star Trek: Picard. One disaster powers a reboot film series and a legacy sequel show in two different timelines.

Star Trek Into Darkness
Film • Set Alt. 2259 • Released 2013

When a terrorist attack strikes Starfleet Command, the Enterprise crew is sent on a manhunt that uncovers a militarised conspiracy led by a superhuman from the past, a reinterpreted Khan Noonien Singh. The film critiques drone warfare and pre-emptive strikes, and inverts the Wrath of Khan engine room sacrifice with the roles reversed.

Captain's log: The decision to deny Khan's identity throughout the marketing campaign, then reverse the most sacred death scene in the canon within minutes, remains one of modern Trek's most divisive choices. Commercially the gamble worked; among long-term fans, the argument has never ended.

Star Trek Beyond
Film • Set Alt. 2263 • Released 2016

Three years into their five-year mission, the Enterprise is ambushed and torn apart by a coordinated swarm fleet, stranding the fractured crew on a hostile planet. Returning to core franchise values, the film argues the Federation's strength lies in unity and diversity rather than isolation and force.

Captain's log: Co-written by Simon Pegg, who also plays Scotty, and released for the franchise's 50th anniversary, the film carries a double dedication: to Leonard Nimoy, who died during pre-production, and to Anton Yelchin, who died weeks before release. It remains the Kelvin timeline's final voyage to date.

Era III: The Lost Era • Early 24th Century

The seventy-year gap between Kirk's farewell and Picard's first mission, untouched on screen for four decades until 2025.

Star Trek: Section 31
Film • Set 2324 • Released 2025

Emperor Philippa Georgiou, the former Mirror Universe tyrant deposited in the 24th century by the Guardian of Forever at the end of Discovery's third season, is recruited by Starfleet's black-ops division to neutralise a threat from her own past. Michelle Yeoh reprises the role in the franchise's first made-for-streaming film, a heist-flavoured spy caper operating well outside Federation space and Federation ethics.

Captain's log: Its stardate of 1292.4 places it in 2324, making it the first production set primarily in the prime 24th century since Nemesis in 2002, and the first ever to dramatise the "Lost Era" between the original cast films and TNG. Its young Lieutenant Rachel Garrett is destined to captain the Enterprise-C and die at Narendra III, the sacrifice at the heart of TNG's "Yesterday's Enterprise". Critically savaged, it nonetheless fills a hole in this timeline that had sat empty since 1987.

Era IV: The Next Generation Era • Mid–Late 24th Century

The densest stretch of the timeline: three series running in parallel, four films, and a quadrant-wide war.

Star Trek: The Next Generation
TV Series • Set 2364–2370 • Aired 1987–1994

A century after Kirk, Captain Jean-Luc Picard commands the Enterprise-D. The crew cements peace with the Klingons, navigates border wars with the Cardassians, and faces existential threats from the cybernetic Borg and the omnipotent Q. TNG is Roddenberry's uncompromised vision: diplomacy, science and philosophical debate over cowboy heroics, anchored by Patrick Stewart's career-defining portrait of intellectual leadership.

Captain Picard captured and tortured by Cardassians in the TNG episode Chain of Command

Captain's log: "The Best of Both Worlds" remains one of television's great cliffhangers, and "Chain of Command", pictured above, distilled the show's moral seriousness into four words of defiance: there are four lights. TNG eventually surpassed the original series in ratings and reach, proving Star Trek was a universe rather than a single cast, and its final two seasons run concurrently with the next entry on this list.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
TV Series • Set 2369–2375 • Aired 1993–1999 • Overlaps TNG and Voyager

Commander Benjamin Sisko takes charge of a battered Cardassian station beside the galaxy's only stable wormhole. What begins as a mission to help Bajor rebuild after a brutal occupation erupts into the Dominion War, a quadrant-spanning conflict against shape-shifting Founders and their engineered armies. DS9 deconstructs the Starfleet utopia from within, asking whether it is easy to be a saint in paradise, and what good people compromise when survival is on the line.

Captain's log: Decades ahead of its time in its embrace of serialisation and moral greyness, DS9 featured Star Trek's first Black lead and is now widely argued to be the franchise's creative peak, with "In the Pale Moonlight" its thesis statement: a Starfleet captain talking himself into complicity, one log entry at a time. Its first two seasons run alongside TNG's last two; its final years run alongside Voyager and Insurrection.

Star Trek Generations
Film • Set 2371, prologue 2293 • Released 1994

Picard and his crew face Soran, a scientist willing to destroy entire star systems to re-enter the Nexus, a temporal ribbon of pure bliss, forcing Picard to recruit a legendary predecessor preserved inside it. A literal bridge between the original series and TNG eras, the film meditates on time, mortality and what it means to leave a mark.

Captain's log: The film permanently kills Captain Kirk, twice in a sense, once presumed in 2293 and once definitively in 2371, and crashes the Enterprise-D's saucer into a planet. Both decisions remain contested to this day, and Picard Season 3 would eventually go to remarkable lengths to undo the second one.

Star Trek: Voyager
TV Series • Set 2371–2378 • Aired 1995–2001

Thrown 70,000 light-years across the galaxy by an alien entity, Captain Kathryn Janeway merges her Starfleet crew with a band of Maquis rebels for a projected 75-year journey home, through Kazon space, Species 8472's fluidic realm, and the heart of Borg territory. The core of Voyager is perseverance and found family, and the grinding difficulty of upholding Starfleet ideals when the Prime Directive is actively standing between you and home.

Captain's log: Janeway was the franchise's first female lead captain, and the arrival of liberated Borg drone Seven of Nine in Season 4 gave the series its defining arc, the slow reclamation of a stolen humanity. The two-part "Year of Hell" stands as the franchise's bleakest sustained vision of what the journey could have cost.

Star Trek: First Contact
Film • Set 2373 and 2063 • Released 1996

The Borg travel back in time to stop humanity's first warp flight and strangle the Federation before its birth. Picard and his crew follow them to 2063 to ensure Zefram Cochrane's Phoenix flies on schedule and catches the eye of a passing Vulcan survey ship. Widely considered the finest of the TNG films, it doubles as a study of Picard's unresolved trauma from his assimilation, his Ahab moment.

Captain Picard faces the Borg Queen in Star Trek: First Contact

Captain's log: The film rewrote Borg lore by introducing the Queen, giving a face and a voice to a previously faceless collective, a change every subsequent Borg story has had to reckon with. It also canonised First Contact Day, 5 April 2063, the closest thing the Federation has to a birthday. The crew ensuring a history they are already part of is another entry for the closed-loop file in our paradox guide.

Star Trek: Insurrection
Film • Set 2375 • Released 1998

Picard defies a corrupt Starfleet admiral's orders to protect the Ba'ku, a peaceful, deliberately low-technology people whose homeworld emits regenerative radiation. A conscious return to the moral-dilemma format of the television series, it interrogates forced relocation and whether the needs of the many can ever justify dispossessing the few.

Captain's log: Set during the darkest months of the Dominion War, which the film references only glancingly, its smaller scope drew the "expensive TV episode" criticism that has followed it since. Our essay on the themes of Insurrection argues there is more going on under the surface than the reputation suggests.

Star Trek: Nemesis
Film • Set 2379 • Released 2002

The Enterprise is lured to Romulus under the guise of peace, where Shinzon, a discarded human clone of Picard, has seized the Senate and aims a thalaron weapon at Earth. A dark mirror on identity, the film asks whether we are made by our genes or our choices, and answers with Data's sacrifice, the android dying so his captain can live.

Captain's log: Shinzon was a 25-year-old Tom Hardy in his first major lead role. The film's critical and commercial failure froze the entire film franchise for seven years and denied the TNG cast a proper farewell, a debt that Picard Season 3 was built, two decades later, specifically to repay.

Star Trek: Lower Decks
Animated Series • Set 2380–2382 • Aired 2020–2024

Set just after Nemesis, the series follows the support crew of one of Starfleet's least important ships, the USS Cerritos. Ensigns Mariner, Boimler, Tendi and Rutherford handle second contact missions and carpet cleaning while the bridge crew hogs the glory. Beneath the comedy, it argues that genuine Starfleet heroism lives in the lower ranks just as surely as in the captain's chair.

Captain's log: The first outright comedy in Star Trek history is also one of its most rigorous canon stewards, resurrecting lore so obscure it borders on archaeology. Its live-action crossover with Strange New Worlds, "Those Old Scientists", pulled animated characters a century back in time and remains a high-water mark for the modern era. The series concluded with its fifth season in 2024.

Star Trek: Prodigy
Animated Series • Set 2383–2384 • Aired 2021–2024

A motley crew of enslaved alien teenagers in the Delta Quadrant discover an abandoned experimental starship, the USS Protostar, and are guided toward Federation space by a holographic Janeway. Aimed at younger viewers, the show's masterstroke is that its heroes know nothing about the Federation, so the audience rediscovers Starfleet's values through entirely fresh eyes.

Captain's log: A direct spiritual successor to Voyager, with the real Vice Admiral Janeway commanding the search effort in Season 2. Cancelled by Paramount+ with its second season complete but unaired, the show was rescued by Netflix, making it the rare Trek production to die and be resurrected mid-mission.

Era V: The Picard Era • Turn of the 25th Century

Old captains, old debts, and the long shadow of a supernova first seen in a different timeline's film.

Star Trek: Picard
TV Series • Set 2399–2402 • Aired 2020–2023

Decades after resigning in protest at Starfleet's abandonment of the Romulan rescue effort, Jean-Luc Picard is pulled back into the galaxy by a conspiracy involving synthetic life. Across three seasons he fights for Data's daughters, faces Q one final time, and reunites the entire Enterprise-D crew against a last Borg gambit. A melancholic study of aging, institutional failure and finding purpose at the end of a life, it gradually becomes a story about parenthood and passing the torch.

Captain's log: Season 1's inciting catastrophe, the Romulan supernova, is the very event that created the Kelvin timeline in the 2009 film, a single disaster doing narrative work in two realities. Season 3 became a cultural event for Trek fans: the lovingly rebuilt Enterprise-D bridge, Data restored, Seven of Nine promoted to captain, and the TNG farewell that Nemesis never delivered.

Era VI: The Far Future • 32nd Century

Nine hundred years past everything else on this list, where the Federation must be rebuilt rather than explored into existence.

Star Trek: Discovery (Seasons 3–5)
TV Series • Set 3188–3191 • Aired 2020–2024

To hide the Sphere data from Control forever, the USS Discovery jumps 930 years into the future, arriving in a galaxy shattered by The Burn, a cataclysm that detonated most of the galaxy's dilithium and collapsed warp travel. Burnham and her crew must solve the mystery and stitch the Federation back together. The premise of Star Trek is inverted: instead of exploring outward to build a utopia, the crew is rebuilding a utopia that was lost.

Captain's log: The time jump was an act of creative liberation, freeing the show from the prequel canon corset of its first two seasons and pushing the franchise timeline further forward than any other entry. Programmable matter, detached warp nacelles and a Federation HQ hidden inside a distortion field gave the far future a genuinely alien texture. The series concluded in 2024, but its century did not stay empty for long.

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy
TV Series • Set 32nd century • Premiered January 2026

The newest entry on the timeline, and currently its endpoint. Set after Discovery's finale, the series follows the first new class of cadets admitted to a reopened Starfleet Academy in over a century, young recruits learning what the Federation means in a galaxy still healing from The Burn. Holly Hunter leads as the Academy's chancellor, with the cadets' coming-of-age stories carrying the franchise's founding optimism forward.

Captain's log: A Starfleet Academy series was first pitched in the late 1980s and has been killed and revived more times than Spock; it took nearly forty years to reach the screen. Filmed back-to-back with a second season already in production, it signals that the 32nd century, not the familiar 24th, is where the franchise currently sees its future.

Watch Order FAQ

Should I watch Star Trek in chronological order or release order?

For a first watch, release order or a curated entry point beats strict chronology. Starting with Enterprise means starting with one of the franchise's weaker openings, and the prequel shows are dense with payoffs that only land if you know the older material. Chronological order is best treated as a rewatch project or a reference, which is exactly what this page is for. For newcomers, Strange New Worlds or TNG from Season 3 onward are the most welcoming front doors.

Where does the Kelvin timeline fit in the Star Trek chronology?

It branches off in 2233, the moment Nero's ship emerges from the future and destroys the USS Kelvin on the day of Kirk's birth. Everything in the three Kelvin films happens in that parallel reality, while the prime timeline continues unbroken. The connective tissue is the Romulan supernova of 2387: it sends Nero and Spock Prime into the past to create the Kelvin branch, and its refugee crisis later drives the plot of Picard in the prime timeline.

Do The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager overlap?

Yes, substantially. DS9 begins during TNG's sixth season and the two run side by side for two years, with crossovers in both directions. Voyager then launches three months after TNG ends and overlaps DS9 for four more years. From 2371 to 2375 there are always two Star Trek crews active at once, plus two TNG films, which is why this stretch is the densest part of the entire timeline.

Where do Section 31 and Starfleet Academy fit in the timeline?

The Section 31 film is set in 2324, in the so-called Lost Era between the original cast's farewell in 2293 and TNG's launch in 2364, making it the first on-screen story from that seventy-year gap. Starfleet Academy sits at the opposite extreme: the late 32nd century, after Discovery's finale, currently the furthest point of the entire franchise timeline. Both are Discovery spin-offs, separated by more than eight hundred in-universe years.

Is The Animated Series canon?

Effectively yes, after decades of dispute. Roddenberry himself declared it apocryphal in the late 1980s, but modern productions have steadily re-canonised it: Kirk's middle name, Spock's childhood, the Edosian species and even specific TAS episodes are now referenced across Discovery, Lower Decks and Strange New Worlds. Treat it as the official final year of the five-year mission.

Laid end to end, the timeline now spans 1,040 years, from the NX-01's launch in 2151 to a reopened Academy in the 32nd century, and it is still growing at both ends and in the middle. That is the franchise's quiet structural genius: where most universes extend forward, Star Trek colonises its own gaps, dropping Strange New Worlds inside a 1966 flashback and Section 31 into a hole the canon left open for forty years. The final frontier, it turns out, was the timeline all along.