Inside ‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Puppet Episode: ‘Wrath of Khan’ Nod, Explained

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds meets the Muppets? Sort of. Jim Henson‘s Creature Shop created the puppets for the absolutely absurd, completely entertaining episode, which sees Spock (Ethan Peck) the only one to not become a puppet. TV Insider spoke with the cast about the latest out-there installment. Warning: Spoilers for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 Episode 5 ahead!

The basis of everyone turning into a puppet is a transporter accident — Scotty (Martin Quinn) attempting to beat an academy classmate and send an object further than he did and using a puppet his brothers hid in his room to scare him — while Spock is off-ship.

“When I saw that, I was like, ‘You gotta be kidding me,'” Peck tells TV Insider of being the only character to not change, which was also true of the murder mystery episode.  “On the group chat, they’re like, ‘Oh, look at this cool costume.’ And Spock was just Spock. And this time again, it was just like, ‘Spock is just Spock again.’ I got left out of the fun transformation and then I’ve got to deal with it.”

He praises the puppeteers. “The puppets were on set for quite a while before the puppeteers arrived, before we filmed the episode. And so there was all this great sort of suspense and lead up to the production of that particular episode,” he says. “And a lot of mystery for me because I didn’t know what it was going to be like to perform with these puppets. And my plan was to play it as straight and with as much depth as I do with the live action versions of the puppets.”

Celia Rose Gooding admits to being “really emotional” seeing puppet Uhura, having grown up watching Jim Henson’s Creature Shop creations as a kid in the 2000s: “And so when I saw my likeness through the creation of his work, I was really misty. I’m such a big kid, and I just think puppets are cool. And so to see puppet Uhura, I was giddy. We were shooting another episode at the time in which our puppets were getting screen tested. And I remember in between shots, I was spending as much time with my puppet as possible, just taking pictures with it, getting to know it, seeing the intricacies of how hard that team worked to making our puppets unique to ourselves.”

She praises the team’s dedication to little details. “For example, I am someone with naturally two-toned lips. My top lip is always darker than my bottom lip. And my puppet had the same thing. And no one told them that that was the thing. I didn’t go to anyone and I said, ‘Hey, make sure they do this,'” she reveals. “Me and Melissa [Navia], who plays Erica Ortegas, we spent a lot of time together just sort of fooling with our puppets and seeing the level of detail. I remember because we were shooting out of order, there was a key difference between my puppet’s costume and the costume that I just so happened to be wearing. And when I walked in, the puppet team were like, ‘Did we make a mistake?’ And we’re like, ‘No, no, no, no, no, you guys are perfect. We’re at a different time right now.'”

In the midst of trying to stay under the radar as puppets, the Enterprise crew, of course, run into trouble, in the form of Orions, led by the captain played by Rachael Harris and her second-in-command, played by Joe Lo Truglio. At one point, they threaten to throw Puppet Pike out of the airlock to try to force Spock to share the ship’s control codes. Pike tells him not to, and they each put their hands to the glass, Spock’s in a Vulcan salute, before the captain is ejected into space. Don’t worry, he lives, because he’s a puppet, as does Pelia (Carol Kane) even after being cut in half. It’s puppet logic. It’s not serious. Enjoy it.

Pike and Spock’s farewell moment is a nod to Kirk (William Shatner) and Spock’s (Leonard Nimoy) goodbye as the latter dies in the 1982 film, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. But it was a last-minute addition.

“Honestly, that was literally me on the day going, ‘Wait, wait, what if we…?'” executive producer Akiva Goldsman shares. “It has no deeper meaning than that, which doesn’t mean that now it won’t have a deeper meaning than that. But it seemed in a world of utter delight, impossibly delightful. So we did it.”

Something that Strange New Worlds does so well with these out-of-the-box type episodes is give an explanation for what’s happened. In this case, Spock wakes in his bed at the end of the episode after having seemingly been unconscious for several hours when the transporter accident damaged his shuttle — and no, no one turned into a puppet.

Executive producer Henry Alonso Myers, who wrote the episode with Dana Horgan, explains, “We spent a lot of time trying to basically make sure that it worked and felt genuinely like a Star Trek episode. Yes, we were going to have fun. Yes, we were going to do all of these things, but if it doesn’t feel like Star Trek, what are we doing? That was what we had to hold to throughout the entire episode. I mean, one, we had not done a transporter accident episode yet, and we felt like this was an opportunity to do a transporter accident at a level which it had not been done before in Star Trek. And then the other thing was if you just had one puppet, that wouldn’t be, I feel like, us rising to the occasion. We really wanted to try to make it as big and as bold and push the edges of it as much as we possibly could. And as for the dream, dreams are dreams, I don’t know, sometimes they’re real. That I’ll say.”

Early on in the episode, La’an (Christina Chong) breaks up with Spock, telling him they’ve been heading in different directions for a while and their romance has reached its natural conclusion. Chong agrees with us that that’s about everything she’s been dealing with this season.

“Also she sees in Spock that he’s heading more into the logic side of things as well. She can see they’re both going on separate paths, so it just makes sense,” she says. “What we had was great, but now it’s time to move on so that we could both evolve how we’re supposed to. And I think in real life, sometimes you have to split up with people — friendships, romantic relationships — in order to grow to be the person you’re supposed to be.”

Watch the full video interview for more with the cast and producers on the puppet episode, including whose puppet was everyone’s favorite.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Thursdays, Paramount+