Star Trek is bringing back Captain Kirk‘s forgotten son in the show’s new season. The new season will air ahead of the franchise’s 60th anniversary. As the new show prepares to premiere, its promotions are already underway. In a recent interview, the showrunner revealed the return of a new, long-forgotten character.
What Star Trek TV show is Captain Kirk’s forgotten son returning in?
In an interview for SFX magazine, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ showrunner Henry Alonso Myers revealed that Captain Kirk will be seen interacting with his son, David Marcus.
Marcus is the son of Kirk and Starfleet medical officer Carol Marcus. He is often known as the forgotten character because he has appeared only twice in the entire franchise. He first appeared in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and then in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.
Based on the timeline, Marcus will appear as a younger version in Season 4. Nothing more is known about Kirk’s son besides his brief appearance in the two films. However, the new season may see more depth to his character.
In The Wrath of Khan, he was portrayed as a scientific genius with a strained relationship with his father. He helped create the Genesis Device, which could engineer dead worlds into suitable habitats for life. Using this device, the tyrant Khan Noonien Singh creates a new planet at the moment of his death.
Marcus meets his tragic end in The Search for Spock when Klingon Kruge uses the new planet’s secrets against the Federation. In the process, he is killed by Kruge.
That said, his new appearance in Season 4 will not end tragically. As Myers discussed, the new season will feature an episode in which the father-son duo builds their relationship before Kirk takes the captain’s role.
As per Collider, he stated, “I don’t want to call it a rewrite, but it’s like a rethink. The experience of David was not a part of the series because they didn’t really figure David out until the movies….Kirk is heroic, and none of us wanted to imagine that he is a lousy father, so that offered a lot of opportunities about how to get into his mind, emotionally.”
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds will premiere globally on Thursday, July 23, 2026, on Paramount+.
Originally reported by Christie D’Silva on SuperHeroHype.
