Star Trek Needs A Captain Riker Titan Show

Jonathan Frakes’ guest appearances on Star Trek: Lower Decks and Star Trek: Picard shows the franchise needs a show about Captain Will Riker commanding the USS Titan. Paramount+’s incredibly successful Star Trek universe now includes Picard, Lower Decks, Star Trek: Discovery (which Frakes directs episodes of), Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, and Star Trek: Prodigy. There is also a Starfleet Academy and a Section 31 series starring Michelle Yeoh in development. But each time Riker beams into Star Trek, he tacitly argues that a show purely about the bearded Captain needs to be made.

As Captain Jean-Luc Picard, Patrick Stewart was the top role on Star Trek: The Next Generation but there were numerous classic episodes centering around his Number One, Commander Riker. For 15 years spanning TNG‘s seven seasons and the four Next Generation movies, Riker remained aboard the USS Enterprise-D and E hoping to eventually take over as the starship’s Captain. Instead, Riker and his bride, Counselor Deanna Troi (Marina Sirtis), accepted the command of the USS Titan in Star Trek: Nemesis. But for the subsequent 18 years, fans never got to see Riker actually sit in the Titan‘s Captain’s chair until Star Trek: Lower Decks season 1, when Riker unexpectedly rode to the rescue of the USS Cerritos and revealed his relationships with Captain Carol Freeman (Dawnn Lewis) and Ensign Beckett Mariner (Tawny Newsome). In Star Trek: Picard, 20 years after Lower Decks, Riker and Troi are retired from Starfleet and raising their daughter Kestra (Lulu Wilson) on Nepenthe. But Riker returned to action as Captain of the powerful USS Zheng-He and he saved Picard from a Romulan invasion of Coppelius.

It’s clear that Will Riker has a lot of mileage left in him as a Starfleet hero and Jonathan Frakes should headline his own series as Riker, at last. A live-action Riker show would be great, of course, since Star Trek: Picard laid the foundation for it. A Riker show would also reunite Frakes with Marina Sirtis and Lulu Wilson. There’s a lot of drama (and comedy) to mine in a series about Riker balancing being a husband and father with the demands of being the Captain of a starship. A Riker series set in Picard’s early 25th-century era would be a great complement to Patrick Stewart’s series and it could continue to incorporate characters and iconography from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager.

However, Star Trek: Lower Decks shows an even more delightful Riker who’s still in his prime commanding the USS Titan. Lower Decks‘ Riker is confident, fun-loving, and willing to boldly do sci-fi action hero things to get the job done. It’s the Captain Riker fans have always wanted to see. Therefore, an animated Captain Riker show set aboard the USS Titan would be ideal. It would be far less demanding of Jonathan Frakes’ (and his other TNG co-stars’) time to voice Riker and it would continue to give fans the jazz-loving, wildman Riker leading the Titan.

Lower Decks‘ advantage as an animated series is that anything really goes and Mike McMahan’s comedy series follows TNG‘s episodic structure, which is something Riker’s show could also emulate. A Captain Riker animated series would not only show off what the USS Titan can really do and make it as iconic a starship as the Enterprise, but perhaps Riker’s show could be a blend of comedy, drama, and sci-fi that’s less ribald than Lower Decks that would truly encapsulate Riker’s winning personality.

Jonathan Frakes is enjoying a Riker renaissance where he gets to consistently steal the show in two Star Trek series playing his iconic character 20 years apart in both live-action and in animation. As a result, Riker hasn’t been this vibrant a character since TNG was still on the air. In some ways, the current version of Riker is even better than Will was aboard the Enterprise because fans are finally seeing his potential as Captain fulfilled. All in all, Will Riker is finally on the verge of becoming Star Trek’s Number One Captain, and his own Captain Riker aboard the USS Titan series is all it would take to push Will past that final frontier.

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