Did ‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Just Set up a New Spinoff With Chilling Episode?

Not for the first time, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds mentions a division we’d really love to see onscreen in its own series in the Thursday, July 30, episode, one of the most chilling of the four seasons thus far. The concept — Spock (Ethan Peck), La’an (Christina Chong), and Kirk (Paul Wesley) confront their fears when they come across the Griffin, which went missing nine years ago. TV Insider spoke with Anson Mount, Peck, Chong, Wesley, and executive producers Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers about the episode. Warning: Spoilers for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 Episode 2 ahead!

As the three begin investigating onboard — the crew of 300 is gone, there’s no record of unusual discoveries or experiments or anything being wrong — Spock says that only Division 12, which investigates unexplained phenomena, can find answers. And in the end, that’s exactly where the starship is taken. So, is this setting up a new Star Trek (meets The X-Files) spinoff?

Jan Thijs/Paramount+

“I want to see that show,” Goldsman told TV Insider. “You would really have to ask Paramount. As far as I know, there are no Division 12 series on the boards, but I think that no one would be happier than Robbie Thompson and us.”

Added Alonso Myers, “I think the thing that we really tried to do for every episode is treat it as its own different universe. Every episode you want to create the idea of space being bigger than you, wider, different, full of things that you did not see before. That’s the whole idea of Strange New Worlds. And so if every episode leads you to thinking that that could be a spinoff, then we have done our jobs.”

In their time on the ship, each is faced with a horrifying scenario. Spock sees his ex-fiancée T’Pring (Gia Sandhu), then Pike (Mount) and Una (Rebecca Romijn), cutting off his Vulcan ears then Una into herself and Pike his own fingers as part of really disturbing meal prep. As he realizes, however, he cut off his own ears; Chapel (Jess Bush) fixes that once he’s back on the Enterprise. La’an, who’s been worried about herself since realizing she didn’t feel her broken arm and her body has felt more attuned, loses control, much like the security officer on the Griffin appeared to, and stabs Kirk — who, in his hallucination, sees his brother Sam (Dan Jeannotte) die.

“When I first read the episode, I was like, ‘Wow, this? This?'” Peck admitted. “Because it’s so dark. It really pushes the boundaries of I think what Trek can be.”

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Wesley enjoyed it and shared that it made him think of the Season 2 episode, “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow,” in which La’an encountered an alternate universe and its version of Kirk.

“It just felt very singular and separate from the other episodes,” he explained. “I felt like so much of it was going to be contingent upon the environment feeling like the environment is a character, the ship is a character, the noises, what you don’t see. It’s like classic horror. … Your imagination is obviously much more powerful than anything you can see on screen.”

Chong agreed. “It took us a little while to get into the rhythm of it because it was so different to anything we’ve done. There’s our usual Trek kind of style of walking even. How do we walk down a corridor when we’re in Strange New Worlds on the Enterprise? It was completely different for this horror movie because we had to build the tension and the suspense,” she explained.

For Mount, to play the hallucination version of Pike in Spock’s head, “That’s one of those things, playing that level of mania, that you show up on the day and you go, OK, I got to figure out how to make this happen. And then you just play.”

Watch the full video interview above for more from the cast and the executive producers.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Thursdays, Paramount+