Paul Wesley and Ethan Peck, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
Jan Thijs/Paramount+
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds executive producers and showrunners Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers have closed the logbook on the fourth season of the series with this week’s finale episode “Tomorrow’s Enterprise,” an ambitious, emotional time-spanning tale that sees one incarnation of newly promoted Lt. Nyota Uhura — the version serving aboard the Enterprise under Chris Pike — connecting with another Uhura, the one under the command of James T. Kirk a year in the future, to unravel a cosmic mystery while also racing against the clock to save the doomed Montgomery Scott, with whom she’s been resisting entering a fledgling shipboard romance.
The episode is the culmination of an equally ambitious season, one that has been distinguished by adventurous forays into exploring diverse genre forms in a Star Trek format — horror, fantasy, film noir, daytime drama, and Muppet-style delights among them — as well as deeply character-centered narratives that have particularly pushed forward the series-long arcs of the crew, with special emphasis on Pike, Kirk, La’an, and Uhura.
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And given that Season 4 was shot two years ago, the producers are also in a singularly unique conversation with past, present, and future. The series-culminating six-episode fifth and final season, which, as long pledged, will bring the Enterprise directly up to The Original Series‘ starting point, actually completed filming before Season 4 began airing.
Goldsman and Myers joined TV Guide for one last season-closing conversation, offering up insights as to how the finale came to be, how they had to proceed as if it just might be the series endgame itself, and the reverse-engineered elements to save for later after the swansong season became a reality. They also delve into making Trek TV without the benefit of immediate audience response (and how they approach the oft-fraught notion of venturing onto the internet to gauge reactions) and offer a few tantalizing hints about the final frontier ahead.
Henry, as you have a writing credit with Robbie Thompson on “Tomorrow’s Enterprise,” tell me about where the germ of the idea came from, the directions you considered and didn’t go in, and how you ended up with Uhura at the center of this particular story.
Henry Alonso Myers: Well, as Akiva has pointed out before, and I wholeheartedly agree with, the pilot that he wrote kind of starts with her as the new character, and as we did Season 1, we were kind of having her be the fresh eyes. She’s the ensign who arrives on the ship and gets to be the point of view in some ways for the audience of this is a new, fresh place. And the goal, by the end, was to have her point of view be the journey that we go on.
When we initially wrote this episode, when we were breaking the episode, we didn’t know if we would have a Season 5. And so part of it was what is a surprising different way to come to what could possibly be the end for the show that would track on that journey that we started.
Also, I think that when people expect you to go right, it’s sometimes nice to go left. We try very hard to give every character their own episode, and hers was one that we kind of held off on because we thought it would be a great way to go out.
And it was sort of a great culmination for this kind of stealth Uhura season: Uhura got a lot of great character development from the beginning on through the finale. Was that part of the plan or sort of a lucky happenstance?
Myers: It was a mix of both. Part of it is we don’t want to leave anything on the table at the end. We did want to hold back on some stuff when we realized that we were going to have a chance to end the show in Season 5. But the goal was to give her something surprising, and it really is a straightforward episode in its own way: it’s a buddy adventure, with a person being both buddies. She gets to learn from her future self, her future self gets to learn from her past self. They each get to look at their life differently afterwards and show us that there’s always something to learn from your future and from your past about who you want to be and who you are. So that was the journey we were going for.
Akiva, I felt like there was such a subtle, different feeling about the scenes on Kirk’s Enterprise that I felt genuinely evoked The Original Series vibe. And I’d love to hear the lengths you guys went to in order to achieve that effect.
Akiva Goldsman: Well, I think they are in large part the result of the actors. I mean, certainly, obviously we shifted wardrobe to some extent. We did a lot of hair hazarai, as my mother would’ve said: just it was hair adventures right and left.
But we always talk about who these characters aren’t yet, and now we got to talk a little bit about who they might be just becoming. And I think that because TOS canon is embedded in the consciousness of everybody who makes the show and all the actors necessarily either were inundated or inundated themselves with it, it’s the thing you’re not doing. And suddenly they could do the thing they weren’t doing. It’s four years of straining at the bit and suddenly the bit is gone. So I think that that was really them.
Obviously the changes are there, but they’re superficial, that really what you’re reacting to are performers and writing and directing that understands we get to be a little closer to that which we knew coming in.
What were some of the Easter eggs you got to layer in for the diehard fans, after you had broken the story and knew where you were going with it? The delightful moments of, “Oh, the fans are going to get a kick out of this!”
Goldsman: So the reason I’m not going to answer that question is I will mix it up with what we did for Episode 6 in next year! Because as we’ve all said, it’s Kirk’s first day on the Enterprise, so we made a series of modifications and planned a series of modifications for the finale that you just watched, because we thought that was going to be the final episode; then during the break, we discovered we had six more.
We reversed modifications, pulled out a bunch of things that were definitive because they were definitive in a rushed way in order to solve what seemed to be an emergent problem, and then put them back again in Episode 6 next year. So it’s a long way of saying I’m too old to remember!
Myers: At the time when we broke the episode, we thought this was going to be the end of the show and that we need to find a way that would be both open and optimistic and satisfying and then suggested that there’s a future that they’re heading into. But as we were working on the script, that was right around when we found out that we were going to get a Season 5 and a chance to end it. So there were things that we had kind of put in the script initially that we altered because we wanted to save something for what we knew to be the ending of the show.
I want to ask about one fun element, which was the Scotty-Uhura romance, something that was hinted at all the way back in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, and a great, fun thing to pick up and really play with here. Tell me about the a-ha moment of including that, the joy of giving this material to Celia [Rose Gooding] and to Martin [Quinn] to play with.
Myers: Well, part of the thing that’s fun about that in particular is that I think a lot of the characters in The Original Series didn’t always get to reveal these sort of relationships. It’s something that we do on the show a lot more than they did, that is internal relationships between different characters on the show. There was certainly a lot of relationships for Kirk every episode. And you’d occasionally learn about other people, usually from places that they were going, “Oh, we’re going to meet my ex-girlfriend here. We’re going to meet my husband-to-be,” for instance, with Chapel. But they didn’t get to explore a lot of this.
And it’s not something that Uhura got to do very much at all, and so part of that was I loved personally that this comes out in one of the movies that people are familiar with. And so we wanted to imply that this has been a journey that has been happening for some time, that these things are real, that these characters have been a work in progress.
Goldsman: It’s interesting, Scott, if you think about TOS and you’ll think, well, “Klingons” and “Warp Speed” and “Kirk and Spock,” and the first few things that come to your mind aren’t “Nurse Chapel and Spock,” “T’Pring and Spock,” “Scotty and Uhura” — in the movies — “Carol Marcus and Kirk,” and yet for us, those are kind of the hallmarks of our show that we really chased the promises of relationships that were seeded in, and that became right up at the forefront for us because we’re relationship writers as well as science fiction writers. And so Henry took a deep cut with the mention of the Scotty-Uhura thing and did the thing that we like to do, which is to say there’s something beautiful here that has yet to be revealed.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
Jan Thijs/Paramount+
I’m curious about the journey that you went on from what you had planned at the outset of the season and where you ended up at the end, whatever dramatic shifts may have happened. Give me a little sense, especially because you guys do it in a vacuum without being able to rely on a weekly response from your audience as you’re working so far ahead, of what the journey for Season 4 felt like to you, beginning to end.
Goldsman: Because we didn’t live in a world where we had real-time feedback, we fundamentally just let each season talk to the other. And so to some people’s delight and other people’s dismay, there are no genre swings in Season 5. And there’s some in Season 4 and some in Season 3 and some in Season 2 and even in Season 1.
But the truth is what happens is it’s not for, again, for better or for worse, it’s not because people are shouting “more of this” or “more of that” because we don’t really know what they’re shouting when we’re breaking. What it is is what seems to be compelling us and the characters and the shape of the show. And beginnings and endings are one thing and middles are another, and so part of what was interesting about Season 4 was we didn’t know.
And so it carries with it this sort of feeling of, “Yes, but what if it’s over?” in certain places, especially in the last episode. We got to satisfy ourselves knowing it wasn’t, and as Henry said, sort of re-engineer. But just as you launch in Season 1, next season we land, for lack of a better word. And so the show tells you how to write the show.
There were a lot of ambitious creative swings this season, and almost episode to episode, I think you alternated from a lighter touch to a more, I guess, traditional Star Trek touch. Was that conscious, or did it just sort of evolve that way because that’s the way it evolved?
Goldsman: I mean, I think it evolves that way. I think that’s our rhythm. We futzed around with the first three, arguably, because we wanted to start on a particular trajectory, but otherwise we sort of write them, shoot them, and air them in a rhythm.
You might each have different answers to this: What stands out to you as an episode this season that you are proud to sit next to any Star Trek episode and say, “I feel like we did Star Trek right with this one.”
Myers: I’m particularly proud of the “ghost ship” episode [“The Griffin Incident”], because I feel like we’ve been trying to do something that really was a classic horror episode that came across through Star Trek, and I feel like it hadn’t been done like that. So I was very proud of that. I feel like there’s some classic straightforward episodes that I’m really proud of. There’s some really big twists.
Goldsman: I think if you were to sort by the narrowest definition of Star Trek, let’s say we wanted to go to the narrowest, everybody has to agree this is Star Trek, I’d say probably Episode 8 [“Orders of Magnitude”].
Myers: Episode 6 [“Off-Hour”] or Episode 8.
Goldsman: Six or Eight. Six, we still have a ticking clock — I love Six, by the way. I think Six to me is as emotional as any Star Trek episode has ever been. But if you want it to be like, “OK, this season is the one where nobody can say it’s not Star Trek,” which is a weird goal, but say that was the goal, then I think it’s probably Eight.
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I would also add the finale into that. They’re as pure a Trek execution in my mind as anything.
Goldsman: That’s nice to hear actually, because obviously we haven’t really had much response to it. This suite of interviews is the first time we’re talking to anybody who’s watched it.
Do you guys pay attention to the response? I mean, it’s too late to do anything about it, good, bad, or indifferent, but do you out of curiosity or have you learned not to go on Reddit?
Myers: I will take in the response, but I try not to take it a hundred percent as seriously. I feel like everyone’s response is, they own it. It belongs to them. They get to have the response that they have. It’s about their emotions. We get to have our own response early, and we don’t always land in the same place, but I feel like it’s been an interesting season. There have been some people who’ve had very strong feelings, both good and bad, about a lot of our stuff. I don’t know: You put this out in the universe for people to enjoy and take in, and so you hope that whatever they have, the feelings are big.
Goldsman: Look, we love it. And the internet is a terrible place. It’s not for the faint of heart. And I try to stay as much on the surface of it. It doesn’t mean I don’t look at it, but I ain’t going on a Reddit. But I’ll look at the general response, and I must say that what has become deeply amusing to me in both a delightful and sort of puzzling way is, unless it’s a 100% dead straight Star Trek episode in terms of the narrowest definition, there are literally people who say “It’s the worst episode of Star Trek I’ve ever seen” followed directly by, “It’s the best episode of Star Trek I’ve ever seen.” And I guess that’s better than “Meh.”
Myers: I take that as usually a sign that people want more Star Trek. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Meaning that if we had 22 episodes in a season, we wouldn’t be hearing some of the same things that we’ve heard. But again, the audience is the audience. The audience is going to have whatever reaction they have. We don’t control them. You put it out into the universe and let them experience it.
Goldsman: We try to entertain them and we hope they are entertained.
Give me your best tease for the season ahead, the lessons that you took into it, and the things you want to whet the appetite for your audience, knowing that we’ve still got six more episodes to luxuriate in.
Goldsman: Well, we fought hard for this because we wanted the opportunity to say goodbye. We know there’s a delta between our show and TOS when it comes to continuity, and we wanted to close that gap, and we wanted to do it thoughtfully and emotionally and with thrills and chills, all attendant to what is best about Star Trek. And I think it’s our best season.
Myers: I think all shows end. It’s just a question of when. It’s a real gift when you get to land the plane, you get to actually go through it and go through the experience of having the ending that you want. I mean, I’m so deeply proud of the show. Working with Akiva has been a delight. We’ve had this incredible cast that is honestly one of the best ones I’ve ever worked with. We’ve had phenomenal writers, a really, really, really great crew. It’s been, at this point, I think, I want to say six years for me, probably seven for Akiva on this alone. You don’t always get to end like this. So for that, I’m incredibly grateful, and we try to give that gift back to the people who would like this show.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Seasons 1-4 are streaming on Paramount+. The series has been renewed for a fifth and final season, expected in 2027.