The production team behind “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” took to the stage at 92NY in New York on Tuesday to dig into what fans can expect from Season 4 of the Paramount+ series.
Series stars Anson Mount (Captain Pike), Celia Rose Gooding (Lt. Uhura), Melissa Navia (Lt. Ortegas), and Carol Kane (Lt. Peria) joined co-showrunner Akiva Goldsman in a conversation hosted by Variety’s Joe Otterson. You can read the full conversation below.
After fans watched a special sneak peek at the season 4 premiere, Goldsman said that season 4 would feature episodes that spanned a variety of genres (similar to how the show had successful musical episodes in season 2).
“There’s a rhythm between the kind of classic TOS sci-fi thriller and what really makes us a ‘Strange New World’…I mean, our world is a genre,” Goldsman said. “They’re our strange new worlds. They’re lenses that allow us to tell stories in ways that haven’t been commonly, or at least consistently, done in Star Trek before.”
Mount said Goldsman and fellow showrunner Henry Alonso Myers asked the cast what genre they had always wanted to play, and it was a great experience to actually get to do it.
“It got to the point where we said, ‘What can we do for them?’ ‘What can we give them that they can’t do?'” Goldsman said. “And it became a kind of extraordinary circus of imagination, and everyone was hooked.”
And while Goldsman didn’t want to spend too much time talking about the show’s upcoming final season, he promised it would be a thorough farewell to the show that would be “more unique” for fans.
But when it comes to genre, it has already been revealed that this season will feature an episode in which the Enterprise crew members are transformed into dolls. Yes, it’s a doll made by the famous Jim Henson’s Creature Shop. Gooding said being able to use the doll was “a great gift as someone who grew up watching all the dolls that came out of that studio.”
“To think that our characters would be immortalized in the same way. It’s quirky and silly, but also incredibly serious and heartwarming,” she said. “It’s very nostalgic but futuristic. That’s what Strange New Worlds has been doing since season one.”
Also, everyone on stage agreed that making Peria a puppet was almost “redundant.”
Cain, a living legend of television and film, famously said during his appearance on the show that he had never seen a Star Trek series or movie before joining Strange New Worlds. When asked if that has changed, she answered cautiously. “I’ve seen some of them, but not all of them. But enough to make me realize how lucky I am to be a part of this world.”
“People are really interested in the stories being told,” she says. “And at the heart of the story that’s being told, there’s hope, and it’s so hard to feel hope in today’s society. So I’m so grateful to be a part of that. It’s not easy, it’s not pretty, but at the base of it is hope and heart, because without that there is no future.”
Mount and Gooding also touched on the fact that while Star Trek lore has well-established characters, they and the writers are still looking to break new ground rather than simply rehashing what’s been done to them before.
“What’s weird about this character is that he’s so rare in the canon, yet he’s so revered in canon,” Mount said of Pike. “But it was great to be a part of, and it was a strange challenge. I’ve never played a character before where I knew the first act, I knew the third act, but I didn’t know the second act. And it was so much fun to be able to come in and flesh that out.”
Gooding once again paid tribute to original “Star Trek” cast member Nichelle Nichols, who played Uhura in three seasons and six movies of the original show. “As a loving audience, we know who Uhura is going to be, but she’s not, and we get to see her figure that out. And we get to see her have these canonical experiences that establish her as the person she’s going to be. My job was just to fill in the blanks.”
Next, taking questions from the audience, the cast was asked about the qualities of the characters they would like to see more of in the world.
Navya said she would like to see more of her love of aviation and exploration, and said one of the joys of working on the show is meeting real pilots and people who watched the show and decided they wanted to become pilots.
“I started digging deeper into the history of aviation and started collaborating frequently with members of the space community,” she said. “I got to work with NASA, and we were able to do some pretty amazing things. And if you look at the beginning of aviation, it was all about people taking risks. They took risks, they collaborated… We were actually talking about this the other day. Our friend and astronaut Dr. Sian Proctor always says, ‘What you solve for space is what you solve for Earth.'”
Gooding said she would like to see more “fun curiosities.”
“I think Uhura has a really beautiful way of embracing the unknown with joy and curiosity rather than fear and division. I think we need a little more joyful curiosity in the world right now,” she said.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 will premiere on Paramount+ on July 23, with new episodes released weekly.
