STRANGER TREKS

Akiva Goldsman, the mastermind of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, talks about

BY RYAN BRITT

FOR FANS WHO LOVED Strange

New Worlds season one, there’s some good news: the second season isn’t trying to reinvent the show. In fact, in some ways, Strange New Worlds season two might feel even more like what the first season promised to be.

Debuting just two months after the conclusion of one of the most tightly serialized Star Trek seasons ever, Picard season three, Strange New Worlds returns with the same goal it had in its first season: to tell throwback, self-contained stories with a different tone, every single week.

But that doesn’t mean the scope is the same. In 2022, Strange New Worlds left two unresolved cliffhangers dangling—the departure of La’an (Christina Chong) and the arrest of Una (Rebecca Romijn) while also hinting at the idea that we will see way more of James T. Kirk (Paul Wesley) in 2259, well before he takes command of the Enterprise in 2265. More than any other ongoing Trek show, Strange New Worlds is playing with a lot of Star Trek toys at the same time, and within the first few episodes, fans will see a lot of familiar things, not just from The Original Series but the larger canon, too. For co-creator and co-showrunner Akiva Goldsman, the goal of Strange New Worlds isn’t just about doing cool Star Trek stuff, but instead, trying to use a more traditional Trek format to tell brave and interesting stories about our culture now. Den of Geek caught up with Goldsman to get a sense of the next ten episodes and the overall future of the series, including the tantalizing idea that this show could eventually “overlap” with the continuity of The Original Series.

“Season one was, if you really think about it, kind of an experiment,” Goldsman says. “Not for us, but you know, for the audience. We believed that hewing closely to that genrehopping thing that is very consistent in The Original Series, but also Star Trek in general, were good ideas. But there was some pushback when we were developing it. ‘What, they’re suddenly in a children’s story?’ Things like that. This type of TV isn’t exactly what people are doing today. So, because we got such a great response from people out there in the world, our brief for season two became: let’s do season one but bigger and better.”

Just like seasons of TOS in the ’60s or The Next Generation in the ’90s, the second season of Strange New Worlds will feel familiar, albeit with some surprising new characters and situations. For Goldsman, it’s within these self-contained morality tales that Star Trek continues to be unique. And, again, right off the bat, the new Strange New Worlds season tackles contemporary problems like war profiteering, performance-enhancing drugs, and biological discrimination.

“One thing we try to do is to use science fiction as a lens on a modern dilemma,” Goldsman says. “And in the ’60s, Star Trek was the first among equals to really do that well. But it owed a great deal to The Twilight Zone in that respect, creating these kinds of

O. Henry-style stories for science fiction. I think the original Star Trek owes a small debt to Rod Serling, and all the Trek series after that owe a debt to both.”

Unlike the vast majority of new prestige TV, and the majority of the rest of the Star Trek series, Strange New Worlds season two will continue to feel like a throwback, at least in terms of the format. In theory, a casual viewer could watch a random episode of Strange New Worlds season two, which isn’t even true of the kidfriendly series Prodigy. So, does that mean fans should expect Strange New Worlds to be totally disconnected from canon concerns? Well, no. This is still a modern Trek show, and in the first episode, two very familiar alien enemies are either seen outright or referenced. By episode three, a few more familiar names are mentioned while some very old canon questions are addressed. In fact, Goldsman tells us that several kinds of crossover episodes are always on the table when new seasons begin brainstorming.

“At the beginning of each season, we blue-sky the hell out of it,” Goldsman says. “And we always leave so many episodes on the table, and many of them are [crossovers]. I mean, there are different ways, depending on the species or technology, that folks from Enterprise [the prequel series] could still be around. Obviously, we could time-travel into the future. What if we brought back John de Lancie as Q… or as Trelane? We think about those crossovers all the time. And, as you know, this season, one of those episodes is coming.”

Here, Goldsman is referring to the much-talked-about crossover episode with Lower Decks directed by Jonathan Frakes, which will be partly animated, and partly live-action. Back in 2022, Frakes told Den of Geek he considered the crossover episode to be “proof of concept” that Star Trek could do a