‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Bosses Explain ‘TOS’ Crew in Finale & Tease Final Season

The title of the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 finale, “Tomorrow’s Enterprise,” invokes the The Next Generation episode “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” and for good reason: Both offer a look at different crews aboard the iconic starship and a change made due to an anomaly. TV Insider spoke with executive producers Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers about having that happen now, in the penultimate season’s finale, and more. Warning: Spoilers for the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 finale ahead!

Celia Rose Gooding‘s Uhura is at the center of the anomaly, thanks to a black hole (and, on the other side of it, a white hole). The Strange New Worlds and The Original Series versions at first are simply able to talk to one another, then end up switching places, leading to a particularly touching moment for the latter with Pike (Anson Mount). By working together, even once they’re unable to communicate, they’re able to come up with a solution.

Below, Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers break down the finale and tease the series’ farewell. (Plus, read what Celia Rose Gooding had to say about playing TOS Uhura and more here.)

Talk about having this glimpse of the TOS crew in this episode and having the focus be on Uhura because the title obviously makes you think of “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” but the change in this instance isn’t as major, it’s more character focused.

Henry Alonso Myers: I’d say that sums it up very well. [Laughs] I mean, the intention when we were doing it was we didn’t know if we would have another season when we first started breaking the idea for the episode, and the goal was to deal with the present and the future and think about how these things are going to connect and tell that story. That’s really the summary of it.

One of the best scenes of the episode was TOS Uhura and Captain Pike’s conversation because knowing his fate to give them that… What were the musts in that scene for you?

Akiva Goldsman: I mean, I don’t think we build them like that. I think that by now we have tremendous affection for the characters and try to be thoughtful about what might happen if those two individuals got to meet because it really is a meeting, a re-meeting, but in a way that is potentially poignant. So, for us, we just wanted the scene to be emotional with the wonderful Trek guidelines of temporal prohibition. So, it’s a good obstacle to write around, and I think the actors had a good real time doing it.

We’ve seen a glimpse at a Captain Kirk (Paul Wesley) already on Strange New Worlds, but what did you want to show with this one?

Myers: Well, we sort of wanted to jump forward as much as we could to indicate the kind of person he was going to become, but we also didn’t want him to be exactly the same as the Kirk that we know. So we tried to find this zone in between the two of them because there’s several years between the end of when Pike leaves the ship and when the original series starts. So, we were trying to hit that zone. The goal really, I mean, part of this is just to give the actors something genuine to try to do, to show the audience something that they hadn’t gotten a chance to see, which was Kirk before Kirk, but also Kirk as the captain.

Goldsman: We’re in this funny, we’re not in it much, but we’re in a funny continuity period. And so we’ve enjoyed the opportunity to try to play around with how relationships might’ve evolved, what they might’ve been during times when we’ve not seen the characters before.

Uhura and Scotty (Martin Quinn), it is canon. So how did you want to do that on Strange New Worlds and what can you say about that relationship in general and what could be next?

Goldsman: Well, I mean, that’s actually what I meant. I was actually talking about that, that there are wells. What do you do to a well? Unplumbed depths?

Myers: That’s about right.

Goldsman: Unplumbed depths.

Myers: I mean, in the movies, they reveal a lot of that to the audience and imply that there’s something that they haven’t touched on. And so we felt like that was good, safe, interesting material. And when something is revealed in the future, it’s nice to try to explore how it came to be. So, that’s what we wanted to get on screen.

Talk about what you saw in Celia — the episode relies on her to carry it and she does.

Myers: She’s had some good stuff this season. It’s been a real delight to write stuff for her. I mean, the goal was this is a buddy adventure and the buddy is yourself. So the goal there was really to have her learn something from her future self and have the future self really learn something that she’s forgotten about who she was. I feel like that’s really the simple on the nose and try to give her as much as possible so that she gets to play a little bit differently with each of them. I mean, I think the hardest part was probably determining the decent hair choices that would make them very clearly different.

Goldsman: Yeah. And as Henry said, in truth, we started this show in large part with Celia as the point of view character. And so as Henry said, we didn’t know whether this would be the last, and so we wanted very much to come full circle and let her be the point of view character for the episode.

Speaking of not knowing if it would be the last, so, as you were thinking ahead to what another season could look like, was there anything in particular you wanted to set up using this episode? Because this could easily have been the series finale, you were playing like it could have been. So is there anything you were keeping in mind in case you were coming back and then you were going to be building to?

Goldsman: Yeah, we made 11th hours changes that were significant. So it’s not like we shot it and then discovered. We knew in time to adjust the script. So the version that we had originally created was much more definitively the end. And now we went back already knowing that we were fortunate enough to be able to end it six episodes later. And so therein were the changes we made.

Can you say what you took out?

Goldsman: Heck no.

Myers: How could we do that? That might spoil some things yet to come.

Oh, so it’s things that we could see now going into Season 5?

Both: Yeah, yeah,

Myers: Yeah. I mean, part of it was just trying to figure out how do we want to end the series and then realizing that we didn’t have to end it now, what could we share and what could we hold onto? That was really what we were determining internally.

That aside, was there anything that you’d wanted to include in those TOS scenes that you just didn’t for any reason, not because of what you wanted to hold or just maybe it didn’t fit with the story that you were telling?

Myers: Usually if we finish breaking an episode and there’s still stuff that we want to do, that’s normally how we end up breaking things because we have walls and walls of cards that have suggestions that we put down saying like, “Oh, we want to do this, we want to do that.” I don’t mean to dismiss this, but we could do Star Trek for a long time, and we were really trying to go through this and hit all the big stuff that we wanted to do as much as we could, but there’s always something. There’s always some Star Trek thing that we didn’t get to do.

Goldsman: And remember you’re asking us about this era that Henry and I were sort of chasing, which was sort of this even more TOS adjacent. So yes, we probably will go to our deaths having many unmade episodes flitting across our closing eyes.

Speaking of going into the final season, what can you say about it and what can you say about as you’re building to when we say goodbye to Pike as captain and we build to Kirk as captain?

Goldsman: The only thing I will say which will delight some people and make others sad is no more genre swings.

Myers: We want to do a real classic sense of Trek as we exit, and that’s kind of what we do.

Speaking of, we’re going to be meeting McCoy — I like that he was mentioned in the Season 4 finale — and Sulu. What can you say about what we’ll see there and just casting Thomas Jane and Kai Murakami?

Goldsman: No, too early. Wait till next year, Meredith.

Even about casting them?

Myers: I will say that they were a delight to work with.

Goldsman: They were a delight. They’re great. They’re great. I would be stunned if you were not delighted by them.

Since you brought up no more genre swings, what were each of your favorite genre swing episodes?

Goldsman: We’re going to have the same one.

Myers: Yeah, I’m assuming you’re going to say the musical probably.

Goldsman: I’m assuming you’re going to say the musical probably.

Alonso Myers: Musical was up there for me. That was a special one.

And are we getting more Doctor Who references in the final season?

Goldsman: No, I think we’re done, aren’t we, Henry? I think we’re done.

Myers: Forgive me because we shot these so closely.

Goldsman: Yeah, back to back.

Myers: Yeah. I think that there isn’t one, but we could be wrong.

Goldsman: Yeah, that’s true.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Fifth and Final Season, TBA, Paramount+