Warning: Full spoilers follow for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 1.
With Star Trek: Strange New Worlds having just finished out Season 1, the best new Trek show in town has left us with a variety of questions about where things will go in Season 2 for Captain Christopher Pike and his crew, as well as the whys and hows of certain storylines in these first 10 episodes. From Pike’s ultimate fate and whether or not he ever truly had a chance of avoiding it, to Spock’s rage, to the death of Chief Engineer Hemmer, man are we still thinking about this show.
Co-showrunner Henry Alonso Myers jumped on the communicator (definitely the kind that flips open) to discuss these topics and more. And yes, that includes Paul Wesley’s Captain Kirk!
Captain Pike Has Accepted His Fate
Throughout Season 1, Anson Mount’s Pike struggled with the foreknowledge (gained during his stint on Star Trek: Discovery) that he has less than 10 years before he will be tragically injured in an accident that will leave him trapped in a life-sustaining machine, unable to speak or even move really. At the same time, he also knew that he would save the lives of a bunch of cadets during that accident, and so he was presented with the question of whether or not he could alter his fate without dooming those young men and women.
In the season finale, "A Quality of Mercy," this plot seemingly came to a head as Pike encountered a future version of himself who had changed the timeline to avoid the accident… but caused a dark future for the galaxy as a result.
Alonso Myers says that Pike has “more or less” accepted his fate after that encounter, but that doesn’t mean he’s not going to continue to deal with it in Season 2.
“We don't want it to loom quite as large as it did this season,” says Alonso Myers. “Because you can't keep going back to that well. So the goal was to see him reckon with it in a big way and then come to a conclusion and a decision about the kind of person he is. Which doesn't mean that we won't potentially wrestle with him in the future.”
The showrunner promises that Season 2 embarks on a completely different arc for Pike, and while he’s not ready to reveal what that is quite yet, he says the writers did at least discuss the possibility of altering Pike’s predetermined trajectory in Season 1 – a trajectory that has been locked since the Original Series two-parter, “The Menagerie.”
“Well, we talk about everything,” says Alonso Myers. “My own philosophy as a writer, and I dare say I think [co-showrunner] Akiva [Goldsman] agrees with me on this, is that if you say something's going to happen and then you don't make it happen, it's cheap. What makes something feel real is that you reckon with the consequences of it, not just the things you want. And obviously we all love Pike and we all want to see him survive and we all want to see him live through every challenge that he's going to live through.”
Alonso Myers says that having worked in genre TV for years, he’s learned that when a writer makes up a rule, it “almost has to be more hard and fast than a real rule.” That’s because if the show doesn’t live by those rules, it devalues the reality of the show’s world. “Then the show has no value, no meaning, nothing, no consequences. And if it has no consequences, the emotions don't matter.” And hence, ultimately it was important for Pike to live with and feel the consequences of the choice that he makes in regards to the accident happening as he has foreseen.
“I think he wouldn't have it any other way,” he says. “As a character, he's choosing to make a sacrifice because of who he is.”
Captain Kirk, Sybok, and Canon
In the season finale, Paul Wesley debuted as the latest actor to play James T. Kirk. We’d known he had been cast as the character as Paramount Plus had previously confirmed he would be in Season 2. But when he showed up in "A Quality of Mercy," it was as a somewhat different version of Kirk in so far as that story thread depicts a slightly altered timeline onboard the USS Enterprise, one where Pike is still captain and Kirk is the skipper of a different starship.
The episode is also an alt-future reimagining of the TOS episode “Balance of Terror,” and Alonso Myers explains that Wesley based his performance partly on the version of Kirk who was depicted in that original episode back in 1966.
“[That version] is a little more of a shrewd, serious Kirk,” he says. “What I really love about his performance is there's a kind of public persona that people imagine Kirk being that really isn't totally present except in big, big, broad moments from the Original Series. And he really tried to build it around who the character was in that moment.”
That said, once Season 2 comes around, we won’t even be dealing with Captain Kirk. Since the season is set seven years earlier than “Balance of Terror,” this will be a different, more green Jim Kirk.
“He's younger, he's in a completely different series of circumstances,” says the showrunner. “He's a lieutenant. In the same way that our [Ethan Peck version of] Spock is not yet the Spock of [Leonard] Nimoy's performance, Kirk is not yet the Kirk that we have come to know through William Shatner.”
Near the end of "A Quality of Mercy," a nice little Easter egg pops up as Kirk tells Pike about how his father served onboard the USS Kelvin, which is of course a reference to the 2009 Star Trek movie where Chris Hemsworth played George Kirk.
“At the end of the day, we are all Trek fans on some level,” laughs Alonso Myers. “And the fun of doing a show like this is the embracing and the tying together of it all. To me, the heart of our show is an excitement and a love of Trek. We're not the people who want to shut the doors. We're people who want to open doors on parts of Trek for people.”
Speaking of which, Episode 7, "The Serene Squall," introduced two very memorable characters to the Strange New Worlds mythos, one new and one old. Jesse James Keitel debuted as the space pirate Captain Angel, and in a final-moment twist we learned that Angel’s lover is none other than Sybok, Spock’s brother from the oft-maligned movie Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. It’s a pretty ballsy power move by the Strange New Worlds team to bring in a character from one of the more unpopular corners of Trekdom.
“As you are pulling pieces together to build something that is a prequel, you don't look at the movie you're pulling from, you look at the character,” says Alonso Myers. “And that character is connected to Spock and that character exists. It all started with us talking about Angel and how to do a twist with Angel, why do a story with Angel, how Angel's character would speak specifically to Spock's arc. And so Sybok was the way in. And then we ended up creating this relationship idea.”
The writers knew they wanted Angel to show up again after that episode, and Sybok is also part of that plan, but where it all goes remains to be seen.
“We knew that we were delving into a part of Spock's past that hadn't really been touched on [and] was just as much a part of canon and the history of the show as all the cool new stuff that they found for Spock in Discovery,” he says. “Honestly, that was a little bit of a… It's a jump ball. We're throwing it up into the air for us to catch in later episodes. Sybok is a great character. Angel is a great character. And we want to leave room to meet up with them in the future.”
Speaking of Spock, by the end of the season we saw a version of the character who had given into his emotions… and was realizing how hard it was to contain them. For some, it might seem surprising for the famously emotion-less Vulcan to be acting out of rage like that, but of course deep down Spock is just full of all types of feels.
“Spock feels things,” says Alonso Myers. “As a Vulcan, as a half-Vulcan, as a half-human, he feels things. Let's tell a story about how he feels those things now, not about how it's irrelevant because later on he's going to suppress all those emotions.”
RIP Hemmer
One of the great things about Strange New Worlds has been how good the ensemble cast is, and that includes Bruce Horak’s Hemmer, the blind Aenar engineer who was killed off in Episode 9, "All Those Who Wander." It was a surprising twist and a hard one for fans who had come to love the prickly yet soulful character. And yet, Alonso Myers confirms that Hemmer’s death was always part of the plan.
“One of the challenges of doing an episodic show is, I think they did this a lot on the Original Series, it became a joke that you'd have people who were red shirts,” he laughs. “It was an immediate way to not have an emotional connection with them. So we had this idea at the beginning of the series: Let's introduce a new character and have them die in a way that is emotionally significant and somewhat devastating, partly to see our characters go through that. Partly to show that life has value in this universe and that we're not necessarily just going to come in and kill the person of the week. We wanted it to feel like things matter.”
During the audition process, the SNW team spoke to Horak about Hemmer’s planned demise. But still, Alonso Meyers says that even after an actor is cast, it’s hard to know how well they’ll “pop” or not onscreen. Based on fan reaction to Hemmer, obviously Horak popped big time.
“He embodied the role in this wonderful way,” says the showrunner. “We didn't plan to create a character that people would love and then hurt them by killing him. We planned to try to craft a genuine emotional experience for the viewer and for our characters. … And it succeeded so well. So as a result, it was as devastating as we could have ever hoped for, perhaps more so.”
Hemmer’s death also opened up new doors for the writers to explore. “This is the business of conflict,” Alonso Meyers says.
“As a writer, you think, ‘Well, it opens up this wonderful character arc for Uhura,’” he says. “It really helps show how she starts to face death. It opens up this really intense emotional journey for Spock because he, in losing Hemmer and losing the other two members of the crew who they lose in Episode 9, opens up a dam in his heart, lets out this anger. And that's something that we're going to see him wrestling with, trying to get his emotions back under control.”
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 is currently in the works, though no release date has been announced yet. Maybe we’ll get the date at San Diego Comic-Con next week!
Talk to Executive Editor Scott Collura on Twitter @ScottCollura, or listen to his Star Trek podcast, Transporter Room 3. Or do both!