WIRE Buzz: Spock, Number One beam to Star Trek shorts; Stan Lee book; more

It looks as if Star Trek is making it so once again. Thanks to an under-the-radar social media tease, fans are connecting the dots left by a Star Trek director about the upcoming new batch of Short Treks episodes — and two of the franchise’s biggest names look like they’ll be heading back to the bridge.

Rebecca Romijn and Ethan Peck — the actors who play Number One and Spock in the current Trek cycle — showed up posing alongside Short Treks director Mark Pellington in a recent post to Pellington’s Instagram account that was picked up by fan sites, and it came with a pretty solid confirmation from the director himself that we can expect some fresh face time with Spock and Number One sometime soon: “Romijn, Pellington, Peck. Trek Shorts,” Pellington reportedly wrote.

While it’s not quite the news of a spinoff for either character that die-hard fans might be hoping for, it’s definitely a heavy hint that neither actor is fleeing the Star Trek universe anytime soon. Pellington also reportedly posted a photo from the set that appears to confirm previous fan buzz that the Short Treks episode he’s directing is titled “Chaos Theory.”

Executive producer Alex Kurtzman recently revealed that we can expect six new Short Treks episodes in total to arrive at CBS All Access, and that two of them will be animated takes that differ from each other in style. CBS hasn’t revealed a premiere date for any of the new shorts, but they’re likely to warp our way sometime before the still-unannounced arrival date for Season 3 of Star Trek: Discovery.

One of the last projects from the late, incomparable Stan Lee has grown beyond its first steps as an audio-only story and reportedly will smack and pow its way onto bookshelves as Lee’s first and only hardcover superhero novel aimed at an adult audience.

Entertainment Weekly reports that Stan Lee’s Alliances: A Trick of Light, one of the projects the Marvel icon was working on when he passed away last year, will debut as a full-on book this fall, with posthumous finishing assistance from co-author Kat Rosenfield. “The book will be classified as Lee’s first-ever novel for adult readers,” reports EW, “and marks the first foray into his new Alliances universe, which was created in partnership between Stan Lee’s POW! Entertainment, Ryan Silbert’s Origin Story, and Luke Lieberman.”

Set in a new, connected superhero universe Lee spent years creating just for the project, A Trick of Light will spin an origin and team-up story about Cameron — its telekinetically gifted hero who uses mind power to communicate with machines — and Nia, a programming whiz whose past remains shrouded in secrecy.

Thanks to this newly expanded Alliances project, A Trick of Light will now get both an audiobook and a physical release — with the audio version set to arrive on June 27, followed by the hardcover later this fall.

Finally, we know the date when FX will let us get our retro creep on. Via The Wrap, American Horror Story: 1984 will make its debut this September, serving up its ninth season with a seriously deranged throwback style of 1980s horror, if series creator Ryan Murphy’s jump-scary Instagram tease earlier this year is anything to go by.

AHS: 1984 will return series veteran Emma Roberts, alongside first-time actor and Olympic medalist Gus Kenworth, who’ll play the boyfriend to Roberts’ still-mysterious character. Even with a 10th season of AHS already locked down to arrive in 2020, Murphy has remained as tight-lipped as ever about details for the upcoming 1984 season — but at least this year’s AHS will be arriving just in time to get us good and freaked out for Halloween. American Horror Story: 1984 premieres on FX starting Sept. 18 at 10 p.m. ET.