Watch: Trailer For “Calypso” Jumps The Next ‘Star Trek: Short Treks’ Into The Future

There are four Star Trek: Short Treks mini-episodes being released leading up to the January 17th premiere of the second season of Star Trek: Discovery. The first, “Runaway,” was released earlier this month. The second, “Calypso,” arrives in November and the trailer for it, along with a new promotional image, was just released.

Jump forward to the 33rd century with “Calypso” trailer

Of the four Short Treks, “Calypso” stands out as it doesn’t focus on one of the characters of Discovery but instead introduces a new character named Craft played by Aldis Hodge, who wakes up on a deserted ship with his a computer AI as his only companion.

IGN was given an exclusive first look at the “Calypso” trailer.

One thing that stands out in the trailer is the title card stating “1,000 Years After Discovery,” which sets this Short Treks episode very far into the future. We see an empty USS Discovery that is seemingly long-abandoned (and dusty), and onboard is a new AI interface which is much more advanced than anything we’ve seen in a 23rd-century starship, leading to lots of questions.

Aldis Hodge in Star Trek: Short Treks “Calypso” (CBS)

The story was written by Discovery writer Sean Cochran and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon. Chabon, who wrote the script as well, is also a writer and executive producer on the new Picard show in development, set in the year 2399. It was directed by Olatunde Osunsanmi, a director and executive producer on Star Trek: Discovery who helmed the episodes “The Butcher’s Knife Cares Not for the Lamb’s Cry” and “What’s Past is Prologue.”

Michael Chabon - Star Trek: Discovery

Michael Chabon on set for his Star Trek: Short Treks episode “Calypso” (Photo: Instagram/Michael Chabon)

“Calypso” will arrive on CBS All Access and Space in Canada Thursday, Nov. 8.

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And just like that this has become very, very interesting to me.

Might wanna NOT spoil that in the headline?

Considering it’s a spoiled in the trailer, I don’t see the issue.

Well, there are people who avoid trailers, but still visit websites like Trekmovie.

Tough. That’s just getting to the level of stupidity catering for them sort of people and not the vast majority of us

Excuse me?!
How hard is it to make a headline “major twist revealed in new Calypso trailer, click for details”?
“It’s in the trailer” is not a great argument. Plenty of stuff gets spoiled in trailers that would work better seeing it unfold.
Star Trek Beyond had its major twist spoiled in a trailer.
The trailer for Bad Times at the Royale reveals WAY too much about the movie (having just seen it yesterday after a self-imposed trailer blackout). I was at the edge of my seat the entire movie rather than waiting for trailer moments to show up.

Looking forward to it. I wonder if we’ll see anyone or anything beyond Craft and the abandoned Discovery. This would be the farthest TREK has ever ventured into the future, or am I forgetting something?

I think the flash forward at the end of the Voyager Episode “Living Witness” S04E23 might be the same or farther, but it only has a planet in the Delta Quadrant and the Doctor, and not the Federation or Alpha Quadrant

Time travel to a thousand years into the future????

An advanced A.I.????

Now THIS is Star Trek!!!!! THIS is the kind of stuff I love and want to see more of. My guess is this will happen through the mycelial network. If so this is exactly why I LOVE the spore drive, because it can open up stories exactly like this. I mean I thought maybe we might jump into 100 years to the 24th century with it. To jump a thousand is just surreal! And it could be opening up a story line on the show since we know the character in the short will be back.

This is Michael Chabon’s story, the same one working on the Picard show, this guy now has my FULL attention! :)

The possibilities! The possibilities!

I thought you might be happy as soon as I saw the headline!

LOL really? Wow, that’s pretty funny. I guess I do talk a lot of about what kind of Trek excites me. And yes, my mouth literally dropped when I saw 33rd century lol. It never occurred to me we would get a story this far ahead on ANY show tbh. I think the farthest we seen into the future was the 29th century in Enterprise.

And its not about going into the future so much that it shows they can just think outside the box again. I don’t really expect much in a 15 minute story but it REALLY opens up the possibilities going forward now. They are showing us just how crazy it can get. Just the fact this story is even happening proves these guys ARE starting to get it and hopefully it won’t just be a show of boring prequel filler to learn why Spock smiles or how Klingons got cloaking technology. I just don’t care about that stuff, its fan minutiae. I can’t even pretend to care.

I want Star Trek to awe and wow us and to quote what someone once said to show us the unknown possibilities of existence. THATS Star Trek for me.

Given the smaller scale of the Shorts I wonder if we’ll really see anything of the 33rd century. But like you say: It could indicate that they are willing to experiment a little more.

Honestly I seriously doubt it! I think it’s going to be exactly like Tilly’s short and just him on the ship. BUT I’m hoping we at least get to hear cool details about the state of the universe in this era. It would be weird to set the story so far into the future and give us no details of it, almost like a cheat. I would assume the Federation is around or maybe the alpha quadrant has been totally over run by tribbles. ;D

But yes I think it proves if nothing else they are willing to step out of their comfort zone. This is the kind of stuff a lot Trek fans crave for so it bodes well for future stories at least (no pun intended ;)).

Haha yes – Klingon hair and now 33rd century Trek, it’s been a good week for you! To be fair I’m quite excited by this too, well as excited as somebody who lives in a country that so far has no plans to air Short Treks can be!

Well its been a good week for a lot of us! Yeah that sucks they don’t have a deal to run outside of America yet but I’m guessing it will come. Netflix may just want to air them all at once. But yes you will probably already be spoiled on what happens with them.

Yeah I’m loving all the announcements! Hopefully, I will be surprised if they don’t air them eventually.

“I want Star Trek to awe and wow us and to quote what someone once said to show us the unknown possibilities of existence. THATS Star Trek for me.”

It was Q who said that. And I can totally sign up for this. Stop the self-referential canon p0rn and the divisive political p0rn and make it about this. Make it so!

Don’t get too excited, this is just a meaningless 15m clip that will never be revisited again.

Its not about the short in itself, its that it proves they are willing to think outside the box with this show and come up with unique off the cuff stories which I felt they didn’t do in season one at all. And maybe we will see more stuff like that in season 2.

At least that’s the hope.

Do we know that Craft, the character from the Short, will return on regular Discovery?

No there’s no indication of that. Every thing we know about it says this is a standalone story.

I can’t remember where I read it from but it was an article talking about Short Treks stating the character was actually in the second season. Could’ve been rumors. So how true that is, I guess we’ll see but will probably hear more after this episode runs.

I seem to recall that as well.

Honestly I remembered hearing that from somewhere. I could’ve gotten it confused but I just remembered reading it. I did look up the actor’s IMDB page to see and there is nothing there though, at least not yet.

You got your post Nemesis story quicker than you thought…

Trailer tells you nothing! But I’m super intrigued. This is the kind of blank slate sci-fi Trek rarely gives us. I hope we’ll get it in Europe eventually.

My hope is that Netflix will release them in bulk once all of them are out on CBS All Access. But nothing’s been confirmed.

Netflix refused for the right reasons. Les Moonves wanted Sort Treks to pay for all of S2. Netflix told him to take a walk. Only SpaceTV has the international broadcast rights.

The possibility Discovery has become some sort of derelict ghost ship that far into the future is very compelling stuff. That, is good sci-fi, as well as having a tinge of horror to it.

I totally agree!

Sounds like a backdoor pilot done for a price – interesting way for them to test spinoff ideas, at least less expensive than most others. Not really interested in a far-future TREK unless it is a After-or-During-the-Fall-of-the-Federation, as superteching everything to make it seem more futuristic seems a creative and dramatic dead-end to me. Don’t take a ship to the Magellanic Cloud, just beam there! Put more limitations on the storytelling instead of teching it up with doubletalk. Find out that replication is ruining space-time (something I’ve been hawking since 1990) so you’ve got to go back to carrying your materials and can run out.

But TREK doesn’t seem to follow the more realistic notion of three steps forward two steps back of human history (and in some cases, about a million steps back, as evidenced by one act in the brilliant DECONSTRUCTION OF FALLING STARS)

So it takes Trek a thousand years to acknowledge AI, something we have now (in its infancy)?

My guess is that the ship has somehow lain dormant for a very long time. That AI may not be new.
TREK has featured AI in the form of several androids. My guess is, in order to make them stand out they couldn’t make every ship’s computer just as intelligent.

Data and the Doctor from Voyager are AI, so no.

Yeah I don’t really understand this argument? Data is an A.I. robot lol. The doctor on Voyager is actually a more advanced A.I. than DATA because he can express emotions and comes off much more human in his interactions.

A.I. has been part of Star Trek for decades now. Maybe he means he wants to see a ship controlled by A.I.? I always wanted to see something like that too and I imagine if and when we go farther in the future we’ll get something like that eventually. But A.I. has been part of Star Trek for awhile.

The thing is, we already have ships largely controlled by AI. Yes, some work has to be done manually, or at least people CHOOSE to do it manually, but we see commonly in Voyager and DS9 someone giving direct orders to a shuttle/runabout main computer, who then executes. “Computer, lock phasers and return fire” and “Computer, evasive pattern bravo 3” are both things we see happen.

The ship is certainly capable of being controlled by AI, it just can’t be maintained without people, which makes SOME sense.

I guess I’m really talking about sentient A.I. I don’t know what Phil means of course but I mean where the ship is basically like Data and its self aware. The computer system on Starfleet ships (at least the 23rd and 24th century) is obviously A.I., but it is controlled by people. It doesn’t make its own decisions like a Data or the doctor do. And if it does, it only does if someone tells it to.

But Star Trek does skirt around A.I. issues for the most part. That and cloning. There has been stories but they are pretty bare and its always more surface. As far as A.I. we have robots and holograms, but they haven’t shown sentient machines on a wider level even though the technology is sophisticated enough as the EMH proves.

I’m not saying it has to be done or anything, I would just like to see them go that direction some day or if the franchise goes into a post 24th century era.

The problem with having sentient AI everywhere is you get into “Measure of a Man” questions really quickly. I mean if your equipment is sentient does it also have rights?

But I think that would be interesting to see those type of issues on display. Of course they done it with Data as you mentioned and the EMH became even trickier since he was essentially a component of the ship and why the crew didn’t even think of him as a member of the ship originally even though he came off much more life like than Data. He was never even given a full name (although he was allowed to be given one).

But yes it also could be the reason why they shy away from harder A.I. and cloning stories because ethical issues can get complicated although that’s what make good Star Trek IMO.

If nothing else though I would like to see more A.I. stories in the future. Or even a story about an alien species that has created sentient A.I. but treat them like slaves. This is the stuff I live for in Trek. Let’s get back to stories like this!

Controlling the ship with AI was done in TOS, in “The Ultimate Computer.”

So are robot and android the same thing? Thought there was some kinda difference there,lol!

R2-D2 is a robot, but he is not an android.

Data is a robot but he IS also an android.

Bishop ( from Aliens ) is an android, but he is not a robot.

The Bishop thing is a huge error because Cameron apparently never understood the milk that spurts out of Ashe in ALIEN is the milk he drank earlier. The droids in the original ALIEN films — not sure about Winona in REZ, that is centuries later, presumably huge leaps in tech and aesthetics by then, even if they’re still dominated by contemporary western greed/avarice — always struck me as mechanical, not like some Nexus-9000 organic build.

I thought Ash and Data were both androids. I don’t think of Data as a robot though.

Wasn’t that other show associated with the Gene Roddenberry name, Andromeda, also controlled by an AI?, so its not a new concept in Roddenberry’s properties.

There was also an episode of TNG of an emergent AI that grew from the Enterprise’s main computer. I can’t recall the title. In fact, the episode is Emergence.

http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Emergence_(episode)

If this is one-fifth as good as what Chabon has brought to his craft as a novelist, Trek fans are in for a real treat. That’s actually a big if, especially given the time constraints. But I’m stoked anyhow.

Lock and load. The cheesy music made my dog bark angry. I wonder if it will be in the short trek.

Cheesy? That’s “In the Pines,” an American folk classic! Don’t you diss Lead Belly!

This seems like quite a major tie for the main series writers should they ever want to blow the Discovery up.

My first takeaway as well.

A shame too, because the thing looks so damn flat from nearly every angle … I’d like to see an Apollo-style lifeform just step on it and be done with it.

Either that or a refit with nacelles that come way up off the Flatland plane, but then you’ve got conflicting aesthetics.

Yarrrgh! Darn you, Netflix for not letting me watch this!!!
Okay, okay, sorry. I’m sorry about that. Gonna need to be a bit more “zen” about those things. Maybe there’s a chance, once all four “Short Treks” are out… we will see…
I already managed to avoid spoilers on “Runaway”, so this will be no different.
But hey, the trailer now answers the question that seems to have been on everyone’s minds: He does wear trunks when he wakes up.

Kurtzman has said in an interview that the Shorts will be released outside North America eventually. So my hope is also that Netflix will have them once they are all released. Three of them are directly related to Discovery. Combined with their short length it wouldn’t make sense to sell them to another service. The second option is they will be released on disc, possibly together with season 2 which would be a long time in the future.

It should be noted that this is LIKELY NOT THE DISCOVERY, but rather, another ship of the same class maybe? You can’t make out the hull name or number in the trailer. When they say he wakes up on a starship, it might not be Disco. Also, just my fun hunch… I think the character “Craft” might not be real, but instead, a hallucination the self-aware computer has to keep itself company. Just a guess. Also, a ship is a craft. Hmmm.

Hmmmm indeed. You may have something there.

Damn it, you’re probably right and that’s a good twist!

Yeah, you may be right. Wouldn’t be the first time Trek has used existing sets to play another ship.

Actually you can make out most of the name during the space lightning, you can see “…overy”.
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Ah! I see that now. Hmmmm.

Or the ship’s AI, has an android avatar that has forgotten it’s an android after centuries dormant. I tell ya with Roddenberry Entertainment involved they are laying seeds for an Andromeda reboot returning the concept to it’s Trek roots.

Yep, although could well just be a stock shot.

Geez, even 1000 years later, space still has this glarey fuzzy unstark look that has nothing to do with the actual environment? I’d settle for black-and-white imagery over those, why not do the series with exterior visuals that looked more Ansel Adams than Bigfoot’s-spaceship-on-The-Six-Million-Dollar Man or the ghastly interiors on the Cylon basestar that subscribed to that same sorry brightNfuzzy=future visual copout?

I totally agree with that, kmart. Former space shots in previous incarnations were so much more attractive, clear and compelling, imo. It’s just no fun to see, the way these showrunners are doing space visuals. You know it’s bad when the toy models they’re producing of these ships look better than they do on-screen.

Yeah, I don’t get this either, apparently you can’t do a good CGI space scenes on a TV budget. The Orville’s visuals are much more clear and crisp than Discovery. If this is a conscious choice to go for a more BSG aesthetic in the space shots, I don’t think its really working or appropriate for Trek.

I don’t know what you mean by going for a BSG aesthetic. If anything BSG’s space shots were much better than most of what we saw on Discovery. At least, that’s how I remember it. Haven’t seen an episode in years (I should rewatch the show sometime). I felt that BSG got worse towards the end – maybe they overstretched their budget – and some of Caprica was outright comical in terms of VFX.
The look we’re getting from Discovery is a creative choice. It’s not that you can’t do CGI space scenes on a TV budget. By the way: The Orville only used a physical model for some of their ship shots. All the space environments and other ships are CGI. Even the Orville is often CGI. And some of their CGI is pretty bad, as well.

You just take a look at the stuff being done for the NIGHTFLYERS show or pretty much any other space show on streaming or the tube and you’re going to see work that looks magnitudes more credible than DSC. The VFX companies work on lots of shows, you can see they are capable of more credible work, which suggests they are being instructed to make it look this way, which is a strong indication to me that the folks directing this series have got something seriously wrong with their thinking. It is like they’ve gone back to a zero-budget 70s approach, shooting thrpugh screen door mesh to hide the wires on models, figuring that messing up the whole image is a slightly better solution. Difference is that there is no justification/rationalization for this improving the image.

I thought there was only one other ship of the same class and that was destroyed wasn’t it?

They could build another one. They have 1000 years to do so ;-) Although it looks like the ship in the trailer is really Discovery.

Has a very strong “Outer Limits” vibe to me.

I’m hyped

The trailer embedded above isn’t region-locked to the US and/or Canada. So no need for an unlocked version this time.

my anger is infinite that I cannot watch this televisual in my own country

Interesting stuff.

“Craft” may indeed be an AI avatar — possibly created from the Discovery’s computer records by the other advanced AI as a way to try to find out what happened on the derelict ship. Or “Craft” is from another ship entirely, perhaps the equivalent of a mobile EMH who ended up deactivated sometime after arriving on the Discovery but represents the other ship’s sentience.

Also, this “short” might be a trial balloon (or a semi-prequel) for a new Trek show set in the 33rd century. Didn’t someone recently say that *multiple* new shows are planned?

Some wild speculation:

This may have SOMETHING to do with Tholians.
The green-tinted shot of the Discovery (or another ship of the same class) reminds me of how the Defiant appeared in TOS “The Tholian Web”. And with the ENT episodes “Future Tense” and “In a Mirror Darkly”, we have precedence of connecting the Tholians and their webs with time travel…

In Greek mythology, Calypso was a nymph who found Odysseus shipwrecked on her island, fell in love with him, and held him as de facto prisoner for years. So this may be the kind of relationship they are going for with the AI and Craft…

“In Greek mythology, Calypso was a nymph who found Odysseus shipwrecked on her island, fell in love with him, and held him as de facto prisoner for years. So this may be the kind of relationship they are going for with the AI and Craft…”

Good catch. It probably is something like that.

AI will be based on Tilly.

International trailer??

Found an international version (at least from Canada) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x79Kcbis3z8&feature=youtu.be

The video Trekmovie posted is NOT geoblocked for me (in Europe). It’s a trailer for CBS All Access but unlike the trailers posted by CBS directly this one seems to be accessible internationally. There’s no different version for viewers outside North America because right now there’s no international distributor for the Shorts.

This Short is really exciting Finally we are going to the Future 1000 years into the Future, it’s Post Nemesis and the Best Part about this Time Period is Picard and the Next Gen Crew are Long Gone died of Natural causes Hundreds of years Prior, I am so going to love this I hope it comes out on the Star Trek Discovery Season 2 DVD set.

Is not there a recent movie that has the same plot? I wonder how this story helps the continuity of the series.

What recent movie is that?

Ooh, exciting! I love me a good time travel story.

So this 33rd century is from the same series of which the creators said that they didn’t want to go beyond 24th century, because they couldn’t imagine what the tech would be like so far away in the future?

OH OK THAT MAKES TOTAL SENSE

What we’ve seen of the Short so far takes place on Discovery (or a ship of the same class). If the previous Short is any indication we probably won’t see much outside the ship, so no need to design the 33rd century.

To be fair it was the old show runners who said that and they already fired those guys lol.

But yes that was really the most eye rolling thing they said. You work on STAR TREK, you can’t envision tech a hundred years later that THREE SHOWS decades ago had no problem doing??? No offense but then maybe Star Trek isn’t your thing. And of course the ironic thing is they were coming up with new and advanced tech that already went above what we saw in TNG, DS9 and VOY, they just decided to put it on their show from 100 years earlier lol. Another reason why that statement made no sense to me. You’re doing it right now, simply in the wrong era. Talk about about contradictions.

But now with the Picard show and this short it’s proving people CAN go beyond the 24th century and my guess is we are gong to see tons more of it in the future (again, no pun intended. ;))

The ironic thing is that your comment proves their point. You berate them for coming up with tech that went beyond what TNG, DS9 and VOY had and putting it into the 23rd century. But that’s the problem: Quite a bunch of the tech that previous shows imagined for the 24th century has already been surpassed by our present. Even more so for TOS. It just shows that you cannot credibly extrapolate technological development centuries into the future. What you end up with is some stuff that is maybe a few years to decades (if you’re lucky) away, and some big, magical stuff that defies the laws of physics (as we understand them) and is probably never going to happen. Except for warp drive, transporters etc., our everyday tech is most likely going to be much more advanced by the end of this century than anything TREK has predicted for centuries later.
So sure, you can jump forward to the 25th, 26th or 33rd century, but there’s no way you can show a credible progression from either today or from what you presented on previous shows to that point. The period becomes completely arbitrary because all you can do is a “futuristic-looking show” that (realistically) isn’t more than a few decades ahead of the time it’s produced.

I have no idea how that proves their point lol.

I have said MANY MANY times here Discovery feels like a show that belongs in the 25th century not the 23rd. THATS exactly why it should’ve been put in a post Nemesis timeline from day one. It FEELS TOO ADVANCED! I don’t understand this argument, tell me one thing in Discovery that would feel ‘outdated’ in a post-Nemesis era? Just one. Because I can tell you plenty that would in TOS or ENT. Those ships actually look and feel antiquated.

And I’m talking about within THIS universe, not ours. DIS has spore drives, holographic communication and controls, HUD screens, etc. Everything on that ship looks or feel more advanced we seen Enterprise D or Voyager. So how would it feel out of place in a post Nemesis setting? A few examples would be nice.

And I have also said Star Trek is not our universe, at least not anymore. We’re not going to have hotel size ships that can time travel by the 23rd century. So I don’t bother trying to make sense of that show compared our own level of advancement. Nothing in those shows will reflect our future of space travel or technology. Yes some things we surpassed now but MOST things will never even come true. Its just a science fiction show set in its own universe and laws. Unless people really think we are going to discover warp speed in about 40 years and meet Vulcans?

What seems to be happening is that we’re quite rapidly surpassing Star Trek in the areas that it’s actually possible to do so but not surprisingly failing in areas that it isn’t.

Unless our current understanding of physics and cosmology turns out to be very, very off which I don’t think it is. And then even if there does turn out to be some way round what look like fundamental obstacles to interstellar travel (at least by organisms like us, I have wondered about machine civilisations for which long travel time might not actually be a problem), the universe will be a very different place from what we imagine.

I think part of it is also that we’ve had more than one generation of engineers look at Star Trek and related sci-fi and thought “I wonder how to do that”.

So maybe if Star Trek hadn’t existed then our technological priorities and outcomes might have looked quite different as well. Would we have smartphones if sci-fi writers hadn’t dreamt up communicators and tricorders or would it have gone in another direction?

W’re also doing a lot of stuff now that looks nothing like anything on Star Trek . . .

Oh and I (along with many others) have also just said call it a reboot then. Thats the other thing, if they simply just said its a reboot then we no LONGER have to worry about it trying to correspond with TOS, TNG, etc, which is really the main issue. Since it’s considered ‘canon’ to those shows, so you’re constantly trying to stick a square peg in a circle.

But if you just say you are starting over from scratch and this is simply what the 23rd century looks like strictly from a 2018 perspective, then I would agree with you completely. The show could be in the 22nd century or the 26th because then it’s just coming up with its own level of advancement and not trying to correspond with other shows from 30-50 years ago. Thats the entire problem IMO. Yes they call it a ‘visual reboot’ but it doesn’t fly with a lot of people for a reason if you are changing not just the look of the technology but the look of the universe overall.

But you suggest that and people make it seem like you’re crazy lol. I have no idea why people are so bothered by calling it a reboot especially since that’s how Fuller probably looked at it anyway.

Got me interested. I wish they would take Trek into the 30th century in an ongoing series.

Agreed. The ubiquitous and lazy “prequel” junk we’re being fed gets tiresome. But writing other stories requires more neurons firing, doesn’t it? ;)

I want a teaser for the Picard series set after Nemesis, when are we going to get one.

I remember reading that the plan is to start shooting by April next year. So it’s probably going to be a long time before a teaser is released – at least one with actual footage.