‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Bosses on Bringing in [Spoiler], That Cliffhanger & More

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[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 finale “Hegemony.”]

The good news: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has already been renewed for a third season. The frustrating news: No matter what the wait is for it, it’s going to seem like too long after the Season 2 finale cliffhanger.

When Batel’s (Melanie Scrofano) crew — which includes Chapel (Jess Bush), on her way to her fellowship — runs into some serious trouble (the Gorn!), Pike (Anson Mount) and the Enterprise rush to their rescue. Along the way, they meet a certain Montgomery Scott (Martin Quinn), Spock (Ethan Peck) and Chapel save each other, Batel is infected, and La’an (Christina Chong), M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun), Ortegas (Melissa Navia), and Sam (Dan Jeannotte), along with others, are taken by the Gorn … and that’s how the finale ends.

Below, executive producers Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers break down the Season 2 finale.

Why end on that major cliffhanger and that one in particular?

Henry Alonso Myers: There are a lot of reasons, some of them have to do with production because just designing the Gorn was going to take a huge amount of the season and we couldn’t have done it in the first five. It would’ve taken longer to build it. So that was the practical part of it. The emotional part of it was “The Best of Both Worlds” was always one of my favorite moments in TNG, and when that happened, it was like, “Oh my God, I have to see next season.” We were trying very hard to give every episode its own version of a familiar but unique to itself storyline that we had seen before, and doing the big two-parter is a classic Trek move, and we wanted to do that.

Of course Pike won’t just leave members of his crew despite orders, but how much is he struggling with what’s the best course of action to save them? The Enterprise isn’t in a good position either right now.

Akiva Goldsman: Henry’s script does this very beautifully, right? It leaves you with no good options. And that’s ideal for creating a dilemma for a protagonist. It’s also ideal for getting people to come back 17 years later when we resume. So I think that a good script with a good cliffhanger lets you know that there seems to be no right choice.

Michael Gibson/Paramount+

Myers: Also, if we don’t know what happens? The audience won’t know what happens.

Things aren’t looking so great for Batel at the end of the finale, and that comes after things haven’t been so easy for her and Pike’s relationship. What did you want to do with those two this season, especially considering he hasn’t told her about his future?

Myers: This season really was about them falling in love and figuring out how a relationship is going to work. If you expected a right turn, we were trying to do a left turn, doing something longer and deeper. So, from my perspective, that ending is more about trying to get the audience to wonder what the hell’s going to happen. Because we love her and he loves her and she loves him and they’re in a very, very, very bad situation.

Did you ever consider having him tell her the truth about his future this season?

Goldsman: No, not this season. We also wanted to explore this idea — which is not typical in Star Trek — that, actually, committed relationships can form in space. Captains can have them. We’ve seen the other a lot. So with that, we want to understand or imagine how those things might develop in that circumstance. So we’re kind of thoughtful or try to be about when and how people disclose and how intimacy develops. It’s a paradigm that is probably, to some degree, like ships at sea in the olden days, as my children would say, but with warp travel and transporters. So it’s not the same. We’re trying to figure it out.

Scotty — talk about bringing him in now.

Myers: I wrote this like a year ago, so I’m trying to remember the exact specifics of it because there was so much work that ultimately came into it. We knew that we wanted a moment to bring in Scotty, that we had an opportunity, and it was a chance to do something interesting. We knew we had to introduce a new character at one point and as we were working on it, we were just sort of like, this seems like an opportunity to do Scotty, but we also wanted to — well, there were two things we knew. We knew that we would want to cast someone who was actually Scottish, and we knew that they were not yet the Scotty who they would become. And so we had an opportunity to try to discuss who that character would be now, who is not yet the person who he is. We honestly met a lot of really amazing Scottish actors on the way.

Paramount+

We heard his voice in the Season 1 finale in that alternate timeline, so I was waiting for him to show up.

Myers: That was 100 percent Akiva, I have to say.

Is the plan for Martin Quinn to be a series regular in Season 3? Was that the plan when you brought him in in the Season 2 finale?

Myers: He will return in some fashion, and everyone knows that Scotty doesn’t die, but he will go through some stuff.

Spock and Chapel don’t have the chance to address their relationship in the finale, understandably considering everything going on. But how did you want to use their personal relationship to explore what the future holds for both of them? Boimler’s (Jack Quaid) conversations with both in the Lower Decks crossover were so good.

Goldsman: I think that this love story between Spock and Chapel is a really central component of our show and it’s push-me-pull-you and its now kind of inevitable — within the season and series, not just TOS — sort of impending doom. It ain’t going to work. We know that. And yet somehow they both want it to at different times and in different ways. Despite the fact that time itself tells them it can’t, they still have the feelings they have. It’s in the same way that Pike lives, even though he knows his death is coming, and we all do to some extent.

So it feels a lot like love. It feels a lot like that kind of connection that occurs that shouldn’t but does. And what do you do? That’s something that’s very relatable. And interestingly enough, I would say that both Spock and Christine Chapel are not two characters that we have, before this show, related to when it comes to their romantic landscapes, particularly deeply. We’ve understood them pretty simply when it comes to sort of romantic connection. And so as Henry says, they’re not the people they will become, and in these earlier times, these things are still forming. And so we get to sort of try to tread this before unexplored territory.

So you’ve played with a few different versions of Kirk over not even a handful of episodes that Paul Wesley has been in. Is there anything you can say about what we could see from him in Season 3 or what you’ve wanted to do with that character up to this point?

Goldsman: I think that obviously we drive imminently towards the literal TOS continuity, although we’re still a ways off. We try to see the characters through a modern lens, which basically just means we get to tell more character scenes because now storytelling tolerates it in a way that certainly it didn’t on broadcast in the late ‘60s. But Season 3 is not yet real. Season 3 is all imagining right now, and we’re imagining — or we were until we had to stop imagining.

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What about plans for doing more out of the box episodes, like the crossover and the musical this season and the fairytale one in the first? Is your plan to stick to one or two like that a season?

Goldsman: Well, it’s interesting because out of the box is definitely a way of perceiving it, but for us, we just love moving through genre. So we have an insatiable thirst to try the thing we haven’t tried in terms of genre because it lets you see the characters differently and because we’ve somehow stumbled into this show that lets you do that. So there are definitely more boxes to come to be outside of.

Would you want to not return to doing another animated crossover or musical and just do something different, or are you open to whatever?

Goldsman: I think there are literally no rules. I mean, now all I want to do is only musicals, so… [Goldsman and Myers laugh]

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Season 3, TBA, Paramount+