The upcoming “Star Trek” spin-off series “Strange New Worlds” sounds like it will be the most old school of all the recent Trek shows according to producer Akiva Goldsman.
Aside from “Deep Space Nine” with its increasing serialisation over time and the latter half of “Enterprise,” all the Trek shows are noted for their episodic nature.
Sure there were callbacks, recurring characters, multi-parters, and character subplot arcs that crossed episodes and seasons, but essentially each of them allowed you to jump in and out of random episodes without having to keep up much with what came before.
The two most recent live-action series though, “Discovery” and “Picard,” have a much more serialised nature and both essentially follow season-long storylines that make jumping into random episodes prohibitive.
That won’t be the case with ‘Worlds’. Speaking with Heat Vision, Goldsman says:
“It’s unlike the other shows in that it’s really episodic. If you think back to The Original Series, it was a tonally more liberal – I don’t mean in terms of politics, but it could sort of be more fluid. Like sometimes Robert Bloch would write a horror episode. Or Harlan Ellison would have “City on the Edge of Forever,” which is hard sci-fi. Then there would be comedic episodes, like “Shore Leave” or “The Trouble With Tribbles.”
So [co-showrunner] Henry Alonso Myers and myself are trying to serve that. We’ve all become very enamored, myself included, with serialized storytelling. And I’m talking to you from behind the stage where we’re shooting Picard, which is deeply serialized. But Strange New Worlds is very much adventure-of-the-week but with serialized character arcs… you can drop in, watch one, drop out, then watch another one later.”
Anson Mount’s Captain Pike and his U.S.S. Enterprise crew were introduced in the second season of ‘Discovery’ and Goldsman says there will be some tweaks to the Enterprise set design and uniforms as this is its own show and a different one:
“It’s a fine line because obviously, we want to keep continuity with the storytelling and the style, but we also want Strange New Worlds to be a different show. It’s not Discovery. There are a few more reach-backs (to The Original Series) and the uniforms have been adjusted slightly, the sets are slightly different. Remember the Enterprise existed as a little piece of [the show Discovery], but now it’s its own object. When you close your eyes and think of the key sets and situations that you think of The Original Series, that’s what we’re looking to do.”
Rebecca Romjin and Ethan Peck return as Number One and Spock respectively, while Babs Olusanmokun, Christina Chong, Celia Rose Gooding, Jess Bush, and Melissa Navia also star in the series.
Goldsman serves as co-showrunner on the series which commenced production in February and will continue shooting through to July. No word on a release date as yet but it’s likely it will be either very late this year, or more likely very early 2022.
