This Star Trek: Strange New Worlds review contains spoilers for season 3 episodes 1 and 2. It’s been two years since we last saw Star Trek: New Worlds on our screens, and in the interim, it’s been a bittersweet time to be a Trek fan. Star Trek: Lower Decks wrapped up its five-year mission with its […]
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Every time a new season of a big tentpole science fiction rolls around, fans and critics tend to try to find the reason why this time things are different. New seasons often proclaim a new cast member or a shake-up behind the scenes in the creative team will change everything. But despite the two-year wait, the refreshing thing about Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 3 is that it’s essentially the same show it’s been since 2022. For the cast and showrunners of the mega-popular Paramount+ series, the edict for season 3 is very clear: If ain’t broken, don’t bring in Scotty to fix it.
“I think it’s the consistency of keeping it a different story, a different genre. Every episode we’re keeping it classic,” star Celia Rose Gooding says. “It’s a strange new world every episode, and I think that’s what keeps fans coming back.”
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But what kinds of strange new worlds can fans expect in a third season? And is the secret to this show’s success only found in its throwback vibes or is there something deeper? In addition to Gooding, we also talked to cast members Anson Mount, Carol Kane, Ethan Peck, Babs Olusanmokun, and showrunners Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers to look ahead at the future of the Final Frontier.
It’s Been a Long Road
Although Star Trek: Strange New Worlds seems, in some ways, to be a fairly new series (it launched in 2022), for Anson Mount and Ethan Peck, this mission has been going on for nearly a decade, beginning when they first took on the roles of Captain Pike and Mr. Spock in Star Trek: Discovery Season 2 seven years ago.
“There was a lot of discomfort that sort of turned into comfort over time,” Peck says of playing Spock since 2019. “And there are times when I’m on set and I’m not sure if I’m being Spock enough or if I’m being Ethan. And I’m like, ‘Where’s the line?’ We spend so many hours as these characters, and that line gets a little blurry.”
For Mount, the transformation of Pike—from TOS trivia question to beloved lead in Strange New Worlds—has also been a personal journey. And it’s fused him permanently to Pike.
“For whatever reason, this character is closer to me than a lot of other characters that I have played,” Mount admits. “But I think the whole tone of our show is a bit different [from Discovery]. We decided to bear down on the optimism of Trek and the planet-of-the-week, and in order to get there, Pike had to learn that the journey is the destination.”
A Strange, New Serialization
Despite its reputation for harkening back to the style and format of The Original Series, the success of Strange New Worlds isn’t really because it copies the self-contained nature of the classic Star Trek show. Instead like many other modern TV shows, Strange New Worlds does have a serialized style to it. But those arcs aren’t only connected to the science fiction stories. In Strange New Worlds, the serialization is the characters.
“There are certain kinds of relationship stories you can only tell over time,” co-showrunner Goldsman says. “So when we talk about this serialized character arc competent of the show, we’re doing something The Original Series couldn’t.”
Goldsman brings up the classic TOS episode “The City on the Edge of Forever” as the ultimate example of not only a great episode of Trek but also how it’s demonstrative of the limits of the classic series. We got to know the TOS cast fairly well from 1966 to 1969, but it’s not like the characters had complete arcs.
“Nothing frustrated me more than Kirk losing Edith Keeler one week and being fine the next week,” Goldsman considers. “But on our show, we actually can talk about relationships having beginnings, middles, and ends. They couldn’t. So they were sort of trapped in stasis in a strange way. But we’re not.”
One perfect example of how this kind of character evolution unfolds in season 3 is the transformation of Gooding’s take on Nyota Uhura. Thanks to Strange New Worlds’ character-driven episodic arcs, she’s had much more development with her younger Uhura than Nichelle Nichols ever had on The Original Series, to say nothing of Zoe Saldaña’s Uhura in the reboot movies. As iconic as the two previous Uhuras are, Gooding’s is the one we’ve gotten to know the best. In fact, the journey of her humble Uhura in seasons 1 and 2 will start to fully morph into the more ebullient Uhura of The Original Series during the forthcoming season 3.
“I think with season 3, we’re now getting an opportunity to show her more playful, flirtatious side,” Gooding says. “In the previous seasons, she was a character with so much depth and history and trauma. Now we get to see how she can still find lightness, joy, and playfulness. It’s very reminiscent of the Lieutenant Uhura we see in TOS. That’s a change from what we’ve seen of her in previous seasons.”
On the other side of the Starfleet biographical coin is Dr. M’Benga as played by Babs Olusanmokun. A minor character who appeared in just two TOS episodes (as played by Booker Bradshaw), Olusanmokun’s take on the man has been one of pure invention rather than reinvention. When it comes to M’Benga, canon hardly matters. The character was basically a blank slate. So while he started out as a sympathetic doctor with a mysterious past in Strange New Worlds’ first season, in season 2, we discovered a more physical, action-adventure version of M’Benga, a trend that Olusanmokun ensures will continue in season 3.
“’There are other pieces of him that we’re still unraveling,” Olusanmokun says. “But, yes, we leaned into that for season 2 and there’s more of that in season 3.”
For those who remember Olusanmokun in both Dune: Part One and Dune: Part Two, where he played the Fremen Jamis, the actor has the ability to bring equal parts warrior and monk to certain roles, something that is on full display for M’Benga in Strange New Worlds Season 3. But, is this character the most dangerous doctor in Star Trek history? Could this badass take Dr. Bashir or Bones in a fight? Olusanmokun hints at a connection between himself and the quiet strength of M’Benga, saying only, “Those that know what they do don’t talk about what they do, or glorify what they do. They just do it.”
Keeping Things Light
Despite the franchise’s reputation for self-seriousness and social commentary about the nature of humanity, the Star Trek phenomenon would be nothing without humor. And it’s here that Strange New Worlds Season 3 excels: it brings the fun to the Final Frontier without completely turning the show into a full-on sitcom (although one episode this season might qualify as a rom-com!). But this humorous element couldn’t work without certain characters. Hence in the second season, the producers enlisted the legendary Carol Kane to join the crew as the semi-immortal Pelia, a chief engineer with the irascibility of Bones and a sweetness that is all her own.
And no, we haven’t confused her with singer Carol King. “They thought I wrote the Tapestry album,” Kane jokes. “This is the first time I’m breaking it to them. Do you still love me?”
One thing that is new for Kane in season 3 is her pairing with Pelia’s old student, Montgomery Scott, better known to legions of fans as Scotty. Played by Martin Quinn in the season 2 finale, Scotty is back in season 3 as a full member of the cast.
“Oh, I love him. He is just adorable. He’s so fun,” Kane gushes. She also says that she feels that her character benefits from the company of the rest of the crew, something that comes across both in real life and on the screen.
“I was very moved by how I was accepted just right off the bat,” the performer explains. “My first scene was with Ethan who just accepted me. My instinct is to just try and dive into the writing and fulfill it as much with commitment and energy as I can, and that’s how she came out. I think they wrote a lovely character for me and I am very grateful.”
There’s also an episode this season directed by Jonathan Frakes, which Peck, Gooding, and Mount all say is “very funny.” Gooding also reveals that some bits in that forthcoming episode were teased out by Frakes. “Whenever Jonathan Frakes gets on set as a director, I feel so much more liberty to try new stuff and do fun things… it’s really, really fun.”
Mount agrees, saying with a sly smile: “Jonathan loves to be on set because he’s a fucking actor.” But relative to the process of comedy, Mount says the environment of the Strange New Worlds set often encourages humorous creativity. Sometimes on the fly. “Comedy happens when you find it,” he says. “And so you’re constantly kind of changing things just for the sake of seeing if you can find something new.”
Beyond the Five-Year Mission
Every episode of Strange New Worlds begins with Captain Pike echoing the familiar words of Captain Kirk, telling us that this is a “five-year mission” of the USS Enterprise. Just before we sat down with the cast and creative team of the show, it was revealed that this time limit is somewhat literal. Like two other contemporary Paramount+ Trek shows—Discovery and Lower Decks—Strange New Worlds will conclude after its fifth season, likely released sometime in 2027. And while this suggests a kind of endpoint for the series, there are still three whole seasons of the show that fans haven’t seen yet.
“I don’t feel like we’re doing the same thing each season,” co-showrunner Henry Alonso Myers says. “Without getting into specifics, there are some things in season 4 that people do that we have not seen those characters do. Every day is like that.”
Both Myers and Goldsman insist that the season 3—and season 4 and season 5—of Strange New Worlds will continue to deliver on what the promise of the series was originally; to make a version of The Original Series that could exist in today’s culture. But because Strange New Worlds uses classic characters who have been around for nearly 60 years, Goldsman agrees that on some level, the show is a bit like the various novels and comics based on the TOS cast, some of which satiated fans’ hunger when there was zero Star Trek on TV back in the 1970s and early 1980s. This isn’t fan fiction, exactly, but rather, a kind of expanded universe of The Original Series, previously only found in books and comics.
“It’s a good comparison, thinking about the books. I’ve never thought of it, but that’s very much what we are,” Goldsman says. “We’re behind the canon. We’re beyond what is apparent.”
So, outside of the next three years of Strange New Worlds adventures, what’s next? Could Strange New Worlds morph into a reboot of The Original Series, at least for a little while? Goldsman isn’t saying yes, but he’s not saying no either.
“Our plan, our aspiration has always been to get to TOS,” he says. “The plan was that we would have five years to move from the Strange New Worlds cast and crew to a TOS show. Whether we do or don’t, that’s the hope.”
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 3 debuts with two episodes on Paramount+ on July 17.
The post Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Really Is the Funnest Crew in the Fleet appeared first on Den of Geek.
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