Back in 2018, when Star Trek received its first Hugo nomination during the CBS All Access (later Paramount Plus) era, I wrote a blog post chronicling the fortunes of Star Trek at the Hugo Awards from 1967 up to then. Well, this year, Star Trek received not just one but two Hugo Awards, so it seemed time to bring that blog post up to date by covering the last seven years.
2018: Discovery
As chronicled in my previous post, 2018 was the first time Star Trek had been a Hugo finalist since 2010. The 2018 nomination (in the category of Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form) was for the Star Trek: Discovery episode "Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad," which in my mind was definitely the best episode of Discovery's somewhat bumpy first "chapter"—and probably still is one of the best Discovery episodes over all, a clever time loop story for the postmodern era.
I was not surprised, however, that Disco did not win the award; the category was won by perennial Hugo darling The Good Place, and Star Trek placed down in fifth on the final ballot, below Black Mirror (a Star Trek–centric episode of it, actually), another episode of The Good Place, and Doctor Who. Most of those I can just about buy... though "Twice Upon a Time" was not, in my mind, a particularly worthy episode of Doctor Who.
Looking at the longlist reveals just one other Star Trek installment... but not an official one; an episode of the dull and mediocre fan series Star Trek Continues, "What Ships Are For," came in tenth. Fairly inexplicable, to be honest.
2019–21: Nothing
2018 was not the beginning of some kind of Star Trek Hugo renaissance, because in 2019, Star Trek didn't land on the ballot at all. The longlist reveals one Star Trek episode, down in fourteenth, so pretty far from making the ballot, the Discovery episode "What's Past Is Prologue." This is a pretty baffling choice; it was the finale of the mirror universe story arc of the first season... and like a lot of Discovery finales, long on spectacle and short on sense.
In 2020, there was no Star Trek on the final ballot or even the longlist. The second season of Discovery would have been eligible. I liked the first half of this season a lot, even though the second half got quite awful, but I don't know that there's an obvious standout for enthusiasm to coalesce around, so it's not very surprising.
2021 would also bring no Star Trek on the final ballot... but the longlist was replete with Star Trek! The Picard episode "Nepenthe" (a fan favorite where Picard catches up with Riker and Troi and their cute kid) came in seventh, just two nominating votes behind the sixth-place recipient, which did make it! Another Picard episode, "Remembrance," was down in fourteenth. Additionally, the longlist featured two episodes of Disco season 3, "Unification III" and "That Hope Is You." But on top of all that, Discovery season 3 was also on the longlist as a complete unit in Best Dramatic Presentation Long Form, though decently far down. Probably Star Trek was a victim of its own success here; as 2020 had new episodes in three different Star Trek series (Disco, Picard, and Lower Decks), nominating votes would have been diffused across a bunch of different stuff, making it hard for anything to end up on the ballot.
2022–23: Lower Decks
Finally, in 2022, Star Trek would land on the ballot again, this time for a Lower Decks episode; this one I remember I actually nominated myself! "wej Duj" is a cute episode showing parallel adventures of lower decks crews on three different ships (the title means "three ships" in Klingonese). It would not win, placing in third after episodes of The Expanse and Loki, but thankfully it did beat Arcane. Another episode of Lower Decks, "First First Contact," was on the longlist as well.
We should be skeptical of we're told about the 2023 Hugo Awards, but there was no Star Trek on the final ballot that year. However, there were three different Star Trek episodes on the longlist, from two different Star Trek series: Strange New Worlds's "A Quality of Mercy" and "Spock Amok" (which I nominated) and Lower Decks's "Hear All, Trust Nothing." If we believe the nominating data (and we should not), "Quality of Mercy" had one more vote than one of the actual finalists, but didn't make the ballot due to the way EPH redistributes nominations to increase finalist diversity.
Also, it's not branded as "Star Trek," but there was a finalist that was about Star Trek in the Best Related Work category in 2023, Wil Wheaton's memoir Still Just a Geek. This is, I think, the only Star Trek–related finalist in the history of the category; it finished in fourth.
2024: Strange New Worlds
After getting two on the longlist in 2023 for its first season, Strange New Worlds finally made the ballot in 2024 for its second, with two finalists. They are both the kind of thing Hugo voters love, with fan-pleasing premises. In "Those Old Scientists," two characters from Lower Decks come aboard Pike's Enterprise, transforming from cartoons into live action, while "Subspace Rhapsody" is a musical episode.
I loved both, but neither won; "Those Old Scientists" finished in a very close second, with "Subspace Rhapsody" down in fifth. The Last of Us seems a worthy enough victor, but I'm less convinced that Doctor Who's "The Giggle" was better than "Subspace Rhapsody"!
It was a very good year for Strange New Worlds, with two other episodes on the longlist: "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" and "Ad Astra Per Aspera."
I am a bit surprised, though, that no episode of the fan-favorite Picard season 3 was even on the longlist!
2025: Lower Decks, Lower Decks!
In 2025, Lower Decks got on the Best Dramatic Presentation ballot again... twice! The last two episodes of the entire series, "Fissure Quest" and "The New Next Generation," were both finalists. Honestly, this was a bit disappointing to me, in that when I caught up on the series, I found there were three 2024 episodes of Lower Decks I would have placed above either of these. To my surprise, "The New Next Generation" ended up winning; as I feel like often happens with the Hugo, it seems more like a vote for the series as a whole than for the specific episode per se. But series creator Mike McMahan gave a pretty nice speech about what the Hugos meant to him.
Season five of Lower Decks as a whole was also on the longlist for Long Form, and a nonfiction book about Star Trek, Nana Visitor's A Woman's Trek, on the longlist for Best Related Work.
But the real surprise was that a work of Star Trek fiction was a finalist in Best Graphic Story. An original tie-in graphic novel, Lower Decks: Warp Your Own Way by Ryan North and Chris Fenoglio, placed on the ballot.
Tie-in fiction has not often made the Hugo ballot. To the extent that it has, it's largely been confined to the Best Graphic Story category: comics based on The Dresden Files, Serenity, Doctor Who, Cyberpunk 2077, and the Dune movie have all been on the ballot. There was also one year where a Magic: The Gathering story made the ballot for Best Short Story. None of these have ever won.
But all that changed this year, when not only was a Star Trek tie-in a finalist for the first time ever, but Warp Your Own Way actually won the category! And justifiably so, in my opinion. Most tie-in fiction, in my opinion, is frankly not Hugo-worthy (the tie-ins that have made the ballot since I began voting in 2017 certainly haven't been), but Warp Your Own Way does genuinely clever stuff with the narrative form of the choose-your-own-adventure story.
So, thanks to Lower Decks, Star Trek not only scored its first Hugo Award in thirty years (it last won in 1995 for The Next Generation's "All Good Things..."), it actually scored two!
Final Thoughts
There have been five Star Trek shows of the streaming era. Of these five, two have never made the Hugo ballot: Picard and Prodigy. And while Picard made the longlist a few times, Prodigy never even did that.
I'll be curious to see if Star Trek makes the ballot again any time soon; with Lower Decks over and Strange New Worlds winding down, it seems like the opportunities are dwindling. But perhaps Starfleet Academy will surprise us all and produce some smashing episodes!
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