Strange New Worlds Season 4’s Noir Episode Was Secretly Shot in Color — Here’s How They Pulled It Off

There’s so much going on in “A Case of Chiaroscuro,” the fourth episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’s fourth season, it’s hard to know where to begin breaking it down.

There’s the film noir-stylized black-and-white cinematography, the Casablanca-inspired intrigue, a turning point for Una (Rebecca Romijn), a significant heretofore unrevealed mission trauma for Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding), and the surprise appearance of a formidable familiar face from both The Original Series and Deep Space Nine, the Klingon commander Kor, played with cat-and-mouse coolness by Canadian actor Demore Barnes. Luckily, TV Guide received plenty of insight from the episode’s key players, including Romijn, Gooding, Barnes, and executive producers Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers.

The notion to venture into an immersive black-and-white environment, logicked out with some slick technobabble, came unsurprisingly from one of SNW‘s central cinematic collaborators: director of photography Glenn Keenan, who shot the series pilot and a dozen key episodes in SNW canon.

“He has always asked for us to do a black-and-white episode, and we were like, ‘We want to do something to make this interesting, both for Glenn and for us,'” Myers told TV Guide. “A lot of what we try to do is ‘Don’t do the same thing every week. Give the actors, give the crew something that allows them to try something that they hadn’t tried before.’ And Glenn had such a great eye that we really wanted to find a way to give that to him because we knew he would deliver something great. The trick for us was in how do we tell a story that is black-and-white that isn’t just a gimmick? That actually has either a scientific purpose or an emotional purpose. And this is a rare one where I want to say we kind of ended up with three of those things kind of crashing into each other at the same time and we just tried to do our best to hold it together.”

“Like real life, what is compelling about the way this episode is produced is it is not produced in black-and-white,” revealed Goldsman, who said that the episode followed usual production procedures, even the lifelike digital soundstage ARvWall that produces the show’s high-tech environs and alien landscapes week to week. “Neither the AR Wall nor the wardrobe, none of it was black-and-white. It’s all color — and color built specifically based on how it reads in black-and-white. And that was fascinating. That was a really interesting experience and really cool. So I think that there was a lot of real creativity when it came to how to make something up here noir, especially with the tools we have today.”

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“A lot of this was about what can we do that gives the vibe of Casablanca,” agreed Myers. “M’Benga’s suit was a deep green, but on camera it reads really well [in black-and-white]. And I actually think the AR Wall was uniquely suited to this one.”

“Our series is such a genre-bending series; it’s what we always do,” Romijn said. “And to get to do this gorgeous, highly stylized black-and-white noir episode, the art direction just knocked it out of the park. We get to work on these AR Walls, where we walk onto set and we can see the actual strange worlds that we’re working within. But then they also built the cafe set within the AR Walls, so it was really one of the most beautiful sets. And then our wardrobe department, they put those hats and our wardrobe and just the styling of it, we were really feeling ourselves. Celia and Babs [Olusanmokun] and myself, we just walked onto that set, took it all in, wearing these gorgeous costumes, and it all felt awesome. It was a really special episode to work on.”

For the actress, plunging Una into a noirish world was a welcome return to a genre she was more than a little familiar with. “I did a film with Brian De Palma called Femme Fatale, which was sort of a noir,” Romijn said. “It was loosely based on Double Indemnity, and I became really familiar with noir back then. And it’s been a while since I made that movie, but it’s a space that I love. It’s a genre that I really adore, and it feels good to work in it.”

Along with capturing the spirit of Casablanca‘s intrigue, the episode offered a specific nod to the immortal 1942 classic starring Humphrey Bogart as Rick Blaine and Ingrid Bergman as Ilsa Lund by paying homage to the famous “La Marseillaise” scene, in which the international refugees in Rick’s American Café in Morocco loudly sing the French national anthem with emotional defiance, drowning out their Nazi occupiers’ own German martial song.

Goldsman said “A Case of Chiaroscuro’s” parallel scene, with the occupied planet’s inhabitants out-singing the Klingons, intentionally echoed the seminal Casablanca moment. “We were looking to try to help Una individually, and so it’s a call to arms,” explained Goldsman. “‘I must take a stand. And maybe it’s not the stand I thought I was going to take at the beginning, but it is ultimately the stand that identifies me, that helps me individually.’ That’s so Casablanca — the essence of that is.”

“Now obviously Rick starts more broken than Una, so it’s not a one-to-one correlation,” he continued. “But Una starts more, for lack of a better word, by the book. And that’s a harkening back to [her origins]. Even though we have moved to and fro when it comes to the canonical source material of Number One there has been this constant: She likes a rule, she likes a rule, she likes a rule. And so now she’s going to transgress, and she’s going to transgress because her heart will become engaged in a way that will then have her reevaluate how she moves forward.”

“Because she’s on a journey to her own captaincy, arguably,” Goldsman added. “Certainly she’s under consideration for that now. Where that leads, we will see. Canon suggests where it leads. And so her journey required a lowercase version of what Rick went through in Casablanca, which is put behind him that which he thought he knew and in his case, rejoin; in her case enjoined a set of more personal, creative, and noble aspirations.”

Uhura’s Communications Near-Breakdown

Uhura, too, experiences a significant moment of evolution in the episode, as she must endure what is likely the most harrowing experience of her Starfleet career when she’s brutally interrogated by Kor — harrowing for the character; daunting for Gooding to play such a crucial benchmark in the beloved character’s history.

“I think Season 4 is chock full of meaty Uhura moments,” Gooding told TV Guide. “There’s almost one thing in every episode for Uhura to really sink her teeth into. But for Episode 4 — when I read what she was going to have to persist through and survive, I was like, ‘All right — a little more trauma for our girl. OK, interesting.’ I was really intimidated, truthfully. I had never played a scene with that type of labor-intensive storytelling before. I think that the nature of what she’s put through on this planet is very unique out of all the experiences that she’s had thus far.”

She continued, “I think in TOS, while it’s not often we get to see it, it’s established that Uhura is a take-no-nonsense, defending-herself-if-necessary type of… I use the word ‘battlecat,’ but she’s not really that battle-forward in TOS, but she also knows how to fight and she’s not scared to put a hand on a man or two.”

“The experiences that she has in Episode 4 sort of give her that instinct,” she added. “This is the moment that a future version of herself can look back on and say, ‘I will never put myself in that situation again. I will never find myself in that situation again,’ because she has the practice of how to defend herself, or how to avoid that situation entirely. I think that all my job as a younger version of Lieutenant Uhura is to provide context for the person she’s meant to become. And her experiences in this episode in Episode 4 I think are exactly that.”

Spending four seasons essentially reverse-engineering a character so fixed in the popular culture has led Gooding to carefully study how Uhura was presented in TOS, and map out the roads she travelled to get there.

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“Uhura is Uhura is Uhura is Uhura: She will always be the person that she’s meant to become at every iteration of her life,” she explained. “She is a reflection of the person that she has been, and she just has little pieces of her personality now, in Strange New Worlds, that I think are very reminiscent to TOS Uhura. And so while it was very important for me to keep the character recognizable, it was also just as important to me to give her some unprecedented energy, some sort of unheard of, unfathomable experience for her that with a little bit of conscious effort can remind audiences of who she’s going to become.”

Gooding got the opportunity to play an entirely different, and equally heretofore unseen, aspect of the communications officer in the previous episode, “Human Best Friend,” in which Uhura takes advantage of the intoxicating atmosphere of a shore leave planet to embark on a bliss-centered psychedelic “journey.”

“‘Rave-hura,’ as I call her, she is the person that in the crossover episode in Season 2, the Lower Decks crossover episode, I think she becomes the person that Mariner was inspiring her to be or guiding her towards,” Gooding said. “Rave-hura is a much more extreme version of what Mariner would’ve ever asked of her. But Uhura, as we know her through my work, is the very Capricorn-coded individual. She’s very work-centered. She’s an intense professional. She is not fond of a break or two. She’s someone who is really devoted to her work and how she can free herself in her devotion to linguistics — because linguistics is her safe space, her confidence in her ability to communicate and advocate for not only herself, but for others. Connection is where she shines.”

“And whether it was intentional or not, I think that raves are also a way in which you can connect with strangers,” the actress added. “There is something really powerful about going to a party or a concert or a rave and just connecting with the people around you, even if it’s not verbalized. It’s just like ‘We’re in this together, you and I, this is our connection, this is where we shine.’ And she is so professional about her partying in ‘Human Best Friend.’ I think that when Scotty and Uhura come to her door and are trying to, like, infiltrate her journey, she’s very protective of it. She’s like, ‘No, no, no. This is my space. My job right now is party. My job is let go. My job is release. My job is not perform, save, protect. My job is self-liberation.’ And so it still is very Uhura dedicating herself to her job, but in ‘Human Best Friend,’ her job is to free herself on the dance floor.”

Creating the Clean-Shaven Kor

For actor Demore Barnes, playing one of the Star Trek franchise’s most iconic Klingon characters — originated by actor John Colicos in TOS‘s first season episode “Errand of Mercy” in 1967 and reprised in both Star Trek: The Animated Series (voiced by Scotty actor James Doohan) and a trio of DS9 episodes, with Colicos returning, in the 1990s — was an unexpected, but very welcome, surprise.

“Despite being a self-proclaimed Trekkie and huge Next Generation fan, when I auditioned for Kor I did not know the special place he held in the Star Trek canon and lore,” Barnes told TV Guide. “In fact, when I auditioned for the role, the script was stripped of any specific indication that the role I was auditioning for was even Klingon, but IYKYK. So I approached the audition itself with this intention and assumption in my preparation, choices, and performance. The veil of secrecy lifted, and my hunch was confirmed only after I landed the role. To play on Star Trek was on my acting bucket-list from more than 30 years ago. So I was blown away to quickly discover, given the production team’s excitement and during my research, the immense honor I had stepped into three decades later and the task before me.”

Once his role had been revealed to him, Barnes resisted looking at the previous incarnations, by design. “I intentionally chose not to reference John Colicos’ performance,” the actor said. “My primary performance mandate, which I believed aligned with the writers’ and producers’ approach to Strange New Worlds, was to ensure that while clearly anchored in and honoring the history woven throughout the series, my take on Kor would be fresh, surprising, compelling, and bear my unique fingerprints for our audience and fans.”

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Given the latitude to make the role his own, a distinct new element was added with Barnes’ input. “We noted that Kor is significantly younger than Klingons are typically depicted,” he explained. “Early on, during one of the three-and-a-half-hour makeup tests, I thought it would be interesting to see this prominent, young, powerful, and up-and-coming Klingon without a beard. I sensed it would highlight both his young promise and, unexpectedly, his surprising power, menace, intelligence beyond his years — and unpredictability. I wanted to create a sense within our audience that while they are familiar with Kor historically, in canon, they have also never seen a Klingon quite like this before.”

Barnes admitted he was willing to sweat the details he knew his fellow Trekkies would have their eyes on. “I was very stressed about my dialect work and wanting to ensure I nailed Kor’s Klingon for our discerning and deserving fanbase and I am hopeful they will find I hit the spot,” he admitted. “This was so much fun. The producers were so very open and willing to collaborate with me. Ironically, and perhaps by design, their trust in me and my instincts only increased the pressure I felt to ensure I approached the role with the honor and reverence the show’s history and our audience deserve.”

“He was fantastic in that role and he brought a lot of different levels to it,” said Myers. “Part of it is you introduce someone who only someone who knows the original show would have a sense of, but we wanted to imagine him as… The best villains are not one-note. The best villains are people who have depth and reveal something about, both good and bad, where they come from.”

“So part of it was just about take a thing that exists, try to deepen the sense of how did they become the person they were and imagine them as the person you have to deal with,” Myers continued. “That’s really one of the best examples of when you have an actor who really delights in what you’re handing them and finds ways to explore and try different things. There were just a couple of glances and little bytes that he made that just were delightful and they ended up really working on screen.”

“And you could call him ‘Frank’ and it would be great,” Goldsman added. “But if he’s Kor, it’s just a little greater for those of us who go, ‘Oh, that’s Kor! That’s Kor!'”

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