Star Trek Is Officially Rewriting ‘Strange New Worlds’ Winning Formula for Season 5 [Exclusive]

Editor’s Note: This interview contains spoilers for the Season 4 finale of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

Just like that, the penultimate season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has come to a close with an epic, time-bending finale that saw Lt. Uhura (Celia Gooding) teaming up with a future version of herself in a bid to save Scotty (Martin Quinn) from an untimely death. In “Tomorrow’s Enterprise,” we get a glimpse of the earliest days of James T. Kirk’s (Paul Wesley) time as the Captain of the USS Enterprise​​​​​​, teeing up the endgame of Strange New Worlds, which is expected to bring the timeline full circle to The Original Series. With gorgeous costumes and a wild plot twist, this episode takes audiences on a wild ride that reaffirms the show’s throughline of found family fighting for a hope-filled future.

Ahead of the finale, I sat down with Strange New Worlds showrunners Henry Alonso Myers and Akiva Goldsman to discuss the episode, while also looking forward to the future of Star Trek. We also discussed what audiences can expect from the show’s fifth and final season, which is expected to air sometime in 2027, following the second and final season of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy. Big changes are coming for Strange New Worlds as Myers and Goldsman confirmed they’ll be abandoning the show’s genre-hopping premise — to an extent — as they use every minute of their final six episodes to give this crew of the USS Enterprise a fitting send-off. Myers and Goldsman also briefly teased further exploration of the relationship between Kirk and La’an (Christina Chong), what to expect from the new Bones (Thomas Jane) and Sulu (Kai Murakami), and how they’ll bring the series to a satisfying end. You can read our full conversation in the transcript below.

COLLIDER: Much of this episode is anchored in Uhura and Scotty’s relationship, which is, I think, mentioned offhandedly in the movies, but I’m curious, what made you want to explore that dynamic for this finale?

HENRY ALONSO MYERS: Well, part of that was that there’s a lot of stuff that they kind of got into later, I think, in the films that imply that there’s a whole world of emotion that is not really explored throughout the series. It’s one of the fun things that we’ve gotten to do on this show was give those characters some things to play that they didn’t get to do in the original show, but that have been implied.

They had interesting chemistry. We wanted to find, you know, we were interested in, the romance between them, and also it’s an important episode where she’s exploring, trying to make a, you know, like a time travel adjustment, and these things are much better if you have some emotional core that you’re trying to save at the heart of it. And I think that because we felt that was there in the movies, it was something we could dig in and reveal more specifically.

It’s Officially the End of an Era for ‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’

Image via Jan Thijs/Paramount+

When I spoke with Paul a few weeks ago, he mentioned that there might be a little less genre hopping in Season 5, as you guys only have six episodes to really land the ship. Can you speak to whether Season 5 will play out, episodically still, or will it be a little more serialized?

AKIVA GOLDSMAN: It’s definitely still an episodic show, but to some people’s delight and others’ dismay, there will be essentially no genre hopping. Which isn’t to say the tones of the episodes aren’t different, but they are fundamentally a suite of episodes that are about our goodbyes to those characters.

Speaking of those goodbyes, there are several Strange New Worlds characters that we don’t ever meet in The Original Series. Can you tease anything about bringing their stories in particular to a satisfying end?

GOLDSMAN: We will bring those stories to a satisfying end. [Laughs]

That is great to hear. We do get a little mention of Bones in this episode, and we know you guys have already cast Bones and Sulu. I’m curious what made Thomas Jane and Kai Murakami the right guys to fill those two roles?

MYERS: Well, this feels like something we should talk about next season maybe, but I will say simply, they were both really great and they’re fun to work with and smart, and got to bring something that really, genuinely felt like those characters to us. But, if you really want to see that yourself, you should watch next season.

We do get also a little glimpse of a couple characters that are only seen in The Animated Series in this episode, which I thought was a really cool little Easter egg. How close is this alternate future that we see in this episode to where we end up in Season 5?

GOLDSMAN: So I don’t think this is an alternate future. I think this is an interstitial future. I think there is a…so, this exists in continuity as well. How close it is…

MYERS: Well, Scotty doesn’t die. That’s the only part that would change.

GOLDSMAN: Correct. So…close.

MYERS: Right.

‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Never Wants to Stop Surprising You

Image via Jan Thijs/Paramount+

Jumping back a little bit into this episode. I love that this sort of carries on the tradition of Starfleet delivering space babies. What made you decide to make that part of this finale’s central mystery?

MYERS: I mean, usually what you do in a writers’ room, I will say globally, is you keep playing with something until it surprises you. And I think that we kept taking it to what felt like an ordinary place. And that’s never a great way to have an act out. What you want is an act out that twists the story in some way and makes it, like, genuinely, “What? Oh, my God!” Like, you want to give something to the audience that you look for in a story. And we were genuinely surprised and thought it was not where people expected to go with each turn in this episode. And that’s really what we were going for. I mean, that’s just a global writing thing that we stick to in the room.

I love any time that this sort of trope comes up in Star Trek. I think it’s so much fun. When Uhura mentions La’an in this future, Kirk has a pretty strong but sort of unexplained reaction. I’m curious, is this a hint about where her story goes in Season 5, or is it simply a reference to their star-crossed nature?

GOLDSMAN: You will have to watch Season 5.

I will be there with bells on.

MYERS: I promise you, there will be surprises and emotion to come.

I really, really enjoyed their alternate universe-ish episode in Season 2, so I am excited for more of that relationship — if it’s there!

GOLDSMAN: It very well may be, my friend.

‘Strange New Worlds’ Showrunners Only Have One Regret Ahead of the Final Season

I know that with Star Trek, the possibilities are truly endless. And I know that with you guys having this shorter run of episodes in Season 5, you may not have gotten to check off everything on your Star Trek bucket list. So I’m curious if there’s anything else that you would like to see come to fruition in a future comic series, or another series down the line?

GOLDSMAN: I mean, I think we’re going to have, you know, we, as Henry says, we leave behind a bunch of ideas every year. I think I regret that we were unable to get Shatner on this show. That would have been wonderful. But otherwise, for me, I feel pretty fulfilled.

MYERS: I think if you get to do five seasons of a show and you get to come up with the actual ending, that’s a win. You know, I’ve worked on a lot of shows, and sometimes you get to say goodbye, and sometimes it just ends. This is the best of all those worlds.

With Star Trek sort of coming to the end of an era, on television for the time being. I am curious if you guys have any advice that you would give to Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, who are sort of working on bringing back the franchise to the big screen?

GOLDSMAN: I wouldn’t dare. I know them. You know well enough to know that they love Star Trek and that is the only prerequisite in my book. And then the imagination is the limit.

MYERS: I mean, they’re great writers. I just hope that they get to have as much fun as we did, if not more. Because I feel like that’s usually the sign that things are going well. You get to enjoy it.

Seasons 1–4 of Strange New Worlds are now streaming on Paramount+. The fifth and final season is expected to air next year. Stay tuned at Collider for more.

Release Date

2022 – 2027-00-00

Network

Paramount+

Showrunner

Henry Alonso Myers, Akiva Goldsman

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