The Once and Future Captain, the new Avalon Universe film from showrunner Joshua Irwin, is the best Star Trek released this year, and Paramount had nothing to do with it. In Star Trek’s 60th anniversary year, it delivers the anniversary special the franchise’s owners never gave us.
It runs the length of a real episode and plays like one. The USS Excalibur, which Starfleet nicknamed the ghost ship after the incident that wrecked her, heads out on a test of a refit and a new computer system. Romulans and rogue Klingons are plotting against Starbase 6. The extradimensional beings from the cosmic stream are back, and the crew has to work out what they want before the shooting starts. There are aliens and a space battle with real stakes, plus a story that tightens as it goes. It feels like Star Trek.
Tyler Dunivan returns as Captain Mason, and he has progressed a great deal as an actor since the early films. It shows every time he sits in the command chair. Alexandra Rexford is a standout as Commander Michaela Allenby, the first officer who was handed a chance to prove herself and now has to use it. Both get top billing, and the film earns it.
Anyone who has followed Avalon from the beginning gets paid off for being a fan. Mason, Allenby and the ship herself arrive carrying arcs that the earlier films built, and this one cashes them in. Spoiling any of them would cost you the moment, so they stay off the page.
Avalon has earned its audience support with this one. The series started in 2018 with Ghost Ship, which put zombies aboard a starship. Irwin has kept releasing films since, set in a parallel timeline with its own uniforms, technology and aliens. He shoots them on detailed recreations of the original series sets in Arkansas, the same kind of sets that served Star Trek Continues and Starship Farragut. In December 2023 came Crisis on Infinite Excaliburs, a multiverse crossover built by nearly 75 fans that pulled in clips from more than two dozen other fan films. Avalon builds up the community around it instead of walling it off. Fans have answered by funding the films through crowdfunding campaigns and showing up for every release.
That is how independent creators work. There is no studio budget and no marketing machine, only an audience that finds the work and stays loyal to it. Irwin has spent eight years earning that audience, and this film rewards it.
The film is loaded with cameos. One arrives at the end, and we are not going to say who. I cheered out loud while watching it. That is the right reaction to a payoff that has been eight years in the making, and you should get to have it yourself.
When the best 60th anniversary Star Trek comes from the fans, what does that say about who is keeping the franchise’s promise?
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