STAR TREK: STRANGE NEW WORLDS

WORLDS BEYOND

WITH GHOSTS, PUPPETS AND FILM NOIR, STRANGE NEW WORLDS SEASON FOUR IS CONTINUING ITS MISSION TO PUSH STAR TREK INTO NEW FRONTIERS – AS SHOWRUNNERS AKIVA GOLDSMAN AND HENRY ALONSO MYERS EXPLAIN

WORDS: RICHARD EDWARDS

THE TITLE OF STAR TREK: STRANGE New Worlds is informative. The prequel series is, of course, undeniably Star Trek, but of all the many spin-offs to come out of the final frontier, few have put more emphasis on the strange and the new.

Since the show debuted in 2022, the voyages of the pre-James T Kirk USS Enterprise have repeatedly gone where no one had gone before. As well as the now-traditional time travel and holodeck episodes, we’ve seen a crossover with Trek cartoon Lower Decks, Spock turning fully human, and a musical episode in the spirit of classic Buffy The Vampire Slayer outing “Once More With Feeling”.

That willingness to experiment isn’t going anywhere as Strange New Worlds sets co-ordinates for its fourth season.

“One of the things that is both interesting and sometimes controversial about Strange New Worlds is that we’re not the Original Series,” co-showrunner Akiva Goldsman tells SFX. “We like to move around genre and still retain what we think is essential Star Trek storytelling. I think we’re definitely trying to stretch, expand and flex Star Trek – fortunately, I don’t think it is very easy to break Star Trek.”

The four episodes SFX has seen so far certainly fulfil those mission parameters. That quartet of adventures includes a fun homage to pulpy, Edgar Rice Burroughs adventure serials, a bona fide Trek ghost story, a The Hangoveresque shore leave romp, and a noir-ish thriller that goes as far as offering a sci-fi explanation for its moody, genre-appropriate monochrome.

Perhaps most out-there of all, one episode will see the Enterprise crew transformed into puppets created by the legendary Jim Henson Company. “The thing that we really tried to do was make 10 different movies, but still have them feel like Star Trek,” explains Henry Alonso Myers, the other half of Strange New Worlds’ showrunning command crew.

“The thing that connects me and Akiva very deeply is we both love different types of Star Trek. We have a wild, crazy list of Star Trek episodes we want to do. There’s too many for us to do in 10 episodes, but we do as many as we can, and try to find ones that fit with the character stories that we want to tell.

“[The puppet episode] is as classic a Star Trek episode as any other episode,” he continues. “The question we always ask ourselves is, ‘How can we do a real Star Trek episode and do this thing?’”

GHOST SHIP

Compared to puppets on the Enterprise bridge, that aforementioned ghost story, “The Griffin Incident”, really doesn’t feel so much of a stretch. In the episode, Spock (Ethan Peck), Jim Kirk (Paul Wesley) and La’an Noonien-Singh (Christina Chong) find themselves on a long-abandoned, possibly haunted Federation starship that’s attracted the interest of Division 12, Starfleet’s answer to the X-Files. Needless to say, things really do go bump in the night, as the episode turns into psychological terror.