Michael Chabon's far-future Star Trek short takes some intriguing cues from WALL-E

As the reinvigorated Star Trek franchise prepares for the launch of its Next Generation continuation series, CBS All Access is whetting appetites with a series of short films based around Star Trek: Discovery. While three of the four shorts focus on established Discovery characters, the one written by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon has piqued interest by carving out a new corner in the Trek timeline. Set 1,000 years after the events of Discovery, “Calypso” follows a lone soldier on an abandoned starship with only a HAL 9000-like computer for company. And, as of last night, it’s currently streaming on CBS All Access.
That time jump—the biggest in Star Trek history, from what we can gather—is discussed in a new interview IndieWire conducted with Chabon. When asked why he made the leap, Chabon says it was to conjure an atmosphere of loneliness. “If it’s 1,000 years, you know the crew’s not coming back,” he says. “I tried to do a draft where it was less time, or it was a much more reasonable period of time. All of the pathos went away as soon as I shortened the time into something that you could somehow, maybe, account for in a 50-minute episode… I just put it back and I went with 1,000.”