CURIOSITYJonathan Frakes Has Become the One Star Trek Can’t Live Without5 min read
The School That Kept Giving
What Nimoy and Frakes started became a genuine institution. The Star Trek set functioned as a professional development program for actors who wanted to direct. Robert Duncan McNeil and Roxann Dawson came through it and are now among the most consistently employed directors working in American television. The tradition held across TOS, TNG, DS9, Voyager, and into the streaming era.
Frakes himself was one of the first calls producers made when Star Trek returned with its third wave of series. He directed at least one episode of every live-action show in that era, including Starfleet Academy. His presence on those sets was not just directorial competence. It was institutional memory — a living reminder of what this franchise is supposed to feel like when it’s firing on all cylinders.
The Ambassador Defends What He Built
Fan response to the new Trek series was ugly at times. Frakes pushed back, firmly and publicly. He had seen it before. When The Next Generation debuted, fans of the original series declared it fake Trek before a single episode aired, even with Roddenberry directly involved. Frakes knew that cycle because he had lived through it firsthand.
After Starfleet Academy, Frakes acknowledged something sobering: for the first time since Discovery launched, he had no new Star Trek episodes scheduled. No new shows were in active production. The streaming era had churned through more new series in a decade than the previous 50 years combined, and now it had gone quiet. When Nimoy appeared in the 2009 reboot, he told fans to follow where “Star Trek wants to take you now.” That kind of diplomatic authority — the ability to validate a new direction without abandoning what came before — is extraordinarily rare. Frakes has it now.
The Torch Stays Lit
Nobody replaces Nimoy. Frakes would say so faster than anyone. But if the rumored new feature film doesn’t materialize — and more than a dozen movie plans have collapsed since 2009 — Paramount should hand him the director’s chair anyway. He knows the franchise cold, understands the budget pressures, and has proven he can make it feel real on a tight schedule.
He has directed across eras. He has defended casts and crews under fire. He has sat in editing bays, built the craft from scratch, and produced some of the most beloved work in this franchise’s history. If Star Trek is going to survive a Paramount-Skydance merger, another generation of streaming upheaval, and the eternal pressure to deliver a new blockbuster, Frakes is the person most equipped to help it get there. He has been doing exactly that, quietly, for 35 years.