How Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Found the ‘Venn Diagram Between Puppeteers and Star Trek Fans’

[Warning: The following contains spoilers for Season 4, Episode 5 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, “Level-Five Transporter Accident.”]

The crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise has faced its fair share of bizarre transformations over the course of four seasons of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, but perhaps the strangest metamorphosis of all — stranger than going full Vulcan, scarier than becoming a Gorn, more shocking than communicating only in song — came in this season’s fifth episode, “Level-Five Transporter Accident”: an unexpected transmogrification into puppets.

And let’s get our terminology squared away up front: While the puppets featured in the episode were indeed created by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, founded by the legendary Jim Henson, who combined marionette and puppetry techniques to create Muppets, these aren’t, technically, proper Muppets. That designation is now owned by the Walt Disney Company and used in reference to Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, and rest of their cohorts, as well as being licensed to Sesame Street for Big Bird, Cookie Monster, Bert and Ernie, et al. The SNW creations, akin to the creatures of Fraggle Rock and The Dark Crystal, are designated as puppets.

With that clarification, TV Guide can proceed on a deep dive into the creation of one of the most ambitious and risky installments in the 60-year history of the Star Trek franchise, a big swing that originated in the mind of executive producer and co-showrunner Henry Alonso Myers.

“Honestly, Henry’s a great believer in puppets: I have said over and over again, as a kind of suggestion about the parameters of our creative expansion, you could make it with puppets somehow, but Henry meant it,” revealed executive producer and co-showrunner Akiva Goldsman. “And I think it was a tremendously heavy lift. In some ways, the heaviest lift the show has done. And I think that it is surprisingly and wonderfully successful, especially considering the fine line it has to walk.”

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Myers’ notion was inspired by “Smile Time,” the widely beloved 2004 episode of Angel, which saw its titular vampire turned into a puppet — a wild twist that proved shockingly effective. “[Henry] used to say to us, ‘There’s that Angel episode,’ in the same way he used to say to us about the Buffy [musical] episode, that there are places where this has been done beautifully and has been integrated canonically, or in terms of continuity, in a way that [works], and I think it’s really true,” Goldsman continued. “It was a joy to make because there’s a Venn diagram between puppeteers and Star Trek fans. And I think that it’s a really good Star Trek episode, which was not simple, but, for me, it’s sort of lovely.”

“Really the core of it was [to] make sure it’s a Star Trek episode,” Myers explained to TV Guide. “Try to find some central core of it that speaks to the kind of people who understand a Star Trek episode. There has to be a reason it exists in the universe that makes sense in Star Trek. And then on top of that, you have an emotional story that you want to play.”

“The other part is, if you’re going to bring this transformation into your episode, how can you have as much fun? How can you push it as far as you possibly could push it?” Myers continued. “My big goal was do a thing that you will find delightful and that people who wouldn’t like the very nature of it would have to reluctantly agree that, ‘Oh, you did a pretty good job.’ Because you’ll never win those people over — and I’m fine with it. Meaning it will feel like Star Trek; it will be Star Trek. The goal was to do it as well as you possibly could… It’s one of those things where, like the musical, I don’t think the sheer amount of labor that goes into it is very clear to the folks who watch the episode.”

Creating “Level-Five Transporter Accident” came with significant challenges, and no small amount of trepidation, particularly for actor Ethan Peck, who as Spock was frequently the sole humanoid in his natural state, on the Starfleet side, left to interact the the transformed crew — casting the half-Vulcan officer as the straight man for the bulk of the episode.

“I was really intimidated by the possibility of performing with puppets and playing it as depthfully and as truthfully as I could, and not really knowing what to expect on set,” Peck admitted. “‘What are they going to feel like? What are they going to look like? What’s it going to seem like to me as the actor?’ And there definitely was some adjustment and it was just totally insane — I can’t believe we did it!”

Before too long, Peck discovered that he was relating directly with the puppet characters on set, seeing past the puppeteers and treating his fabricated co-stars as if they were living, breathing members of the cast. “As you do,” Peck laughed. “Not only do you have to, but it becomes quite easy to because the puppets are so alive. They really come to life. The puppeteers were just brilliant, and they’re also just doing their speaking voices on set, so it’s not like that’s not there. Then of course the live action actors went through the episode and did a lot of dialogue replacement for their characters. And I’m glad I didn’t have to do that myself.”

“Sometimes you would film the in-between shots when the puppeteers standing there have to get into the mood the same way actors do — they’re still doing puppet things in between takes,” noted Myers. “And Ethan is having a conversation with a puppet for about 20 minutes. None of it’s on screen, but it’s a delight.”

The immersive effect came courtesy of bringing in the crème de la crème of Hollywood puppetry, Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, to craft puppet versions of Pike (Anson Mount), Number One (Rebecca Romijn), Scotty (Martin Quinn), and the rest of the crew. And as much as the SNW revered the Henson’s history, the fandom was certainly mutual.

“When it was brought to us, me being such a Star Trek geek, I was like, ‘Oh, yes, absolutely. We would love to work on that. Please let us do all of it,'” said Jason Weber, a longtime veteran of the Jim Henson Company who serves as Creative Supervisor and oversaw the SNW project. “That was very exciting. You don’t often get that kind of contact with the Star Trek world for us, for puppets. But yes, we were completely in!”

Myers loved seeing the parallel admiration at play. “The puppeteers who had to actually do the day-to-day work of the puppets, you had somewhere between one and three people playing each given character who were such deep lovers of Star Trek when you see them on set,” he said. “You catch them in a private moment, they didn’t know you were overhearing it. And they would be speaking to each other and they’d say, ‘We get to do Star Trek today, guys!’ They were so excited and elated to be there. That Venn diagram of people who love Muppets and Star Trek is a real thing. It’s a deep, real thing. These people belong to that.”

Weber quickly learned that tried-and-true Henson techniques, like employing multicolored skin tones and using fur, feathers, yarn, and the like, wouldn’t quite do when it came to puppet-izing the cast. “Right at the very beginning, we were already stretching the limits,” he said. “And what was fascinating was that the production team was game for whatever we wanted to propose. However, it did sort of turn back to, we’re really doing portrait puppets of these human actors, who [are] not [always] necessarily human characters, but they have hair follicles and things like that.”

Actor Martin Quinn, who plays Scotty, was stunned at the level of real-world detail the Henson craftspeople incorporated into the puppet doppelgangers. “Originally they’d given Scotty big black eye bags to match my own, which I accept, and I didn’t complain about it at all,” he revealed. “And then one of the execs pulled me aside and said, ‘Martin, we are so sorry about the dark eyes. It won’t be like that when it comes to shooting.’ And I was like, ‘No, shoot – I don’t care, I don’t care!” And I kind of wish they did. It made Scotty look very stressed. But no, they took them out in the final, whenever they started shooting the Scotty puppet. So that was my first experience of seeing the Scotty puppet was, ‘Oh, right: They’ve matched how tired I look.’ But they cleaned me up for final.”

“The design of the puppets was a long process,” said Goldsman. “You’re kind of narrowing down on that which is both puppet-like and the character. And you’re going, ‘More or less here than that.'” 

To create the most detailed, nuanced effects, SNW shared all of its considerable resources with the Henson team. “I really have to shout out their costume and makeup departments especially,” said Weber. “The costume department, they have their own fabrics that they use, they have a digital printing process where they put textures and patterns into the fabrics, and then those are on digital files where they can actually shrink them down to puppet scale. And they printed those fabrics out for us, sent them to us, so we could make our puppets wearing the same clothing in the right scale for our puppets.”

The attention to detail went all the way down to the Starfleet issue boots worn by characters seen head to toe, like La’an (Christina Chong) and Pike. “We didn’t have legs on all of [the puppets] because most of it was the half-body, but for those people who had boots, they actually made them for us,” said Weber. “We gave them measurements and stuff like that, what we need to function as puppets’ boots, and they made them! They made the communicators, and all the insignias, and stuff like that. They were so helpful. They gave us reference of, ‘This is how they’re wearing their hair in this season. This is what we need you to match.'”

Amid all the intense accuracy, the producers allowed some creative leeway on one crewmember in particular: Pelia, as played by actor Carol Kane. “They decided, ‘Pelia — she’s outside the norm,’ so we got to play with her,” revealed Weber. “Her eyes were crazy big. Her hair was out of a synthetic fiber that we got to coil like curls. And they were game for it. So we have all of these portrait puppets — and Pelia.”

“[When] the Pelia puppet arrived, we just discovered that [perfect accuracy was] redundant: that Pelia and a puppet are the same things,” chuckled Goldsman.

“I have a photo from the time of Carol looking at me with the puppet in the background after having been chopped in half, and she just has this delightful joy on her face,” said Myers.

Streamlining the puppet invasion of Star Trek was director Jordan Canning, who, along with being a regular director in the SNW stable over the past few seasons, also had extensive experience with the Henson team. “[Jordan] directed most of our Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock series that we did for Apple TV,” explained Weber. “She knew shooting with puppets, so that was amazing having them. And then some of her Fraggle Rock production teams, such as puppet captain and stuff like that, were also hired to be part of this experience, so they were the ones who were on the floor working with what they needed.”

As the lead Orion invaders in the episode (and the primary flesh-and-blood actors alongside Peck), guest stars and veteran comedy performers Rachael Harris (Lucifer, the Diary of a Wimpy Kid film series, Christopher Guest’s mockumentaries) and Joe Lo Truglio (Wet Hot American Summer, Brooklyn Nine Nine) said they felt like they lived out a major career milestone, working simultaneously within the Trek franchise and alongside Henson puppets. “All the boxes are checked for me,” said Lo Truglio. “Eight-year-old Joe is like, ‘We’re good to go!” 

Both actors were awestruck at the performance level of the puppeteers. “I was just marveling at the fact that they knew their lines so well, that they were choreographing all of these very intricate moments, and also had the dialect down,” said Harris. “Yes, the puppets are very impressive and they’re incredibly expensive, but I have to say that the puppeteers were so impressive as far as knowing the dialect. They would do it in character. They were pretending to be characters. So it wasn’t like whoever was playing T’Pring was just like [affects a Valley Girl voice], ‘Oh yeah, well, OK, so Spock…’ She was like [speaking with Vulcan formality], ‘Spock…’ And the effort and the time that they put into it made it pretty effortless for us to have to work with them, acting-wise.”

They each came to set with relevant prior experience. Harris was a Star Trek alum: Early in her career, she played the Ocampan Martis, mother of Kes, in “Before and After,” a 1997 episode of Star Trek Voyager (“I gave birth to her out my back,” Harris laughed, “Let your imagination go with what it looked like”) and felt emotional returning to the franchise nearly three decades later in a new role. She found the franchise’s signature technobabble — “the Star Trek of it all, just the dialogue, getting down some of the chunky stuff” — more challenging than working opposite the puppets. 

Lo Truglio, meanwhile, had recently appeared on Disney’s The Muppets Mayhem as Clark the Mo-Cap Maestro. “The first time I did that show,” he remembered, “the puppeteer that’s doing Dr. Teeth is talking to me with the puppet — I’m just looking at the puppet and the guy is right next to me — it’s very easy to get lost in your young part of yourself, they’re so good at what they do.”

The actors found themselves surprisingly eager to be subjected to lengthy makeup sessions to be turned Orion green. “Listen, I think it informed everything for us to be green. It was thrilling,” laughed Harris. Lo Truglio agreed: “I couldn’t imagine having done that with A.I. or anything post like that.” And both were proud of their suggestion, upon seeing their bondage-esque wardrobe, that there be a dominant-submissive dynamic between their characters.

“That outfit really helped inform Ejachi and Ch’Rol’s dominatrix submissive, bondage type of thing they had going that was kind of unspoken, but definitely there,” said Lo Truglio. ‘That’s something Rachel and I talked about: ‘Can we amplify this? Let’s lean into this. Let’s play with that.’ [The producers said] ‘Go for it — that’s a great idea!’ And then they called what they could. The focus is the Star Trek and the Enterprise and the crew and the puppets, but they were very, very cool to let us play like that.”

“I’m friends with Rebecca Romijn and Jerry O’Connell, and I just saw them at a con a couple of weeks ago,” offered Harris “And I loved it so much when Jerry and Rebecca were like, ‘You were so good.’ That was great, I was happy. But then the best thing was that Rebecca was like, ‘And you looked hot!’ And I was like ‘ Yes!‘…Joe and I are ready for our spin-off.”

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In an episode chock-full of insane moments, perhaps the wildest is a puppet-ized callback to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan’s classic Spock death scene, this time played out with Puppet Pike about to be ejected out of an airlock as Peck’s Spock watches helplessly. Goldsman revealed that the moment wasn’t scripted, but came out of some on-set inspiration.

“The decision and the shooting of it were concurrent — this wasn’t actually planned,” Goldman revealed, having noticed the similarity to the famous William Shatner-Leonard Nimoy scene from the 1982 film during lensing. “It was there and I was like, ‘But wait! I mean, isn’t it…? And the hands are right up there? Don’t we have to…?’ And so we did, and we liked it a lot. And it’s a dream, so anything’s possible.”

“That was a keeper,” chuckled Myers. “My broad theory about doing any kind of television, but this one in particular, is if you’re coming in and having fun every day, chances are that fun will be expressed through what you’re making.”

New episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds premiere Thursdays on Paramount+.