“Worlds” S2 Has Kirk & Spock’s First Meeting

The recent first season finale of “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” saw a time jump that shook up the events of the famed “Balance of Terror” episode from the original series “Star Trek” series.

It offers a look at an alternate future in which Anson Mount’s Christopher Pike remains captain of the Enterprise and where James T. Kirk (Paul Wesley) is in command of a ship called the U.S.S. Farragut.

As a result of the temporarily altered timeline, the episode sees Kirk meeting Spock (Ethan Peck) for the first time. It marks the second alternate timeline meeting of the two we’ve seen, the other being the J.J. Abrams movies which unfold in the ‘Kelvin’ timeline.

Thus the original meeting of Kirk and Spock in the ‘Prime’ “Star Trek” universe has yet to be shown on screen. Now TV Line reports that the event will finally happen in the show’s upcoming second season as a still lieutenant Kirk on Farragut will meet Spock on Pike’s Enterprise.

The series has so far walked the line fairly carefully in terms of not overdoing it on fan service, with the finale being the only episode to outright indulge in it as a plot device. Speaking with the outlet, co-showrunner Henry Alonso Myers says treating the characters right takes precedence over everything and Kirk is: “not yet the person who he is going to be. He has some stuff to figure out before he becomes that person.” 

It also means not indulging the moment to make the first meeting to be something bigger than it should be, so the team had to approach it carefully: “We think about it every day. In the moment, when they finally meet, we absolutely make a big moment of it and hope people will enjoy what we come up with.”

He also spoke about the Scotty voiceover cameo, calling it a “little tease about the future” and how they weren’t yet ready to commit to the beloved engineer character just yet but is “something we’re looking forward to in the future at some point on Strange New Worlds”.

The second season of the series is already in production ahead of an airing sometime next year on the Paramount+ service.