‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’: 9 Burning Questions for Season 3
The good news after that cliffhanger: We know Star Trek: Strange New Worlds will be back for a third season. (It was renewed in March, three months before Season 2 premiered.) It’s just a question of when (pending the ongoing writers’ and actors’ strikes.)
The Season 2 finale, “Hegemony,” saw Captain Pike (Anson Mount) and the Enterprise come to the aid of Captain Batel (Melanie Scrofano) and her crew, which also included Nurse Chapel (Jess Bush), on her way to a fellowship. But they were facing a familiar enemy — the Gorn — and there was a major twist just as it seemed like everything, aside from Batel being bitten, might just work out: The crew members we thought were beamed back to the Enterprise were taken by the Gorn. And Admiral April (Adrian Holmes) ordered an immediate withdrawal. The episode ended without Pike giving his orders to his crew.
Below, we take a look at the burning questions we have for the third season.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Season 3, TBA, Paramount+
Will Pike disobey April's orders?
That’s an easy one: Yes. We know Pike won’t leave behind anyone from his crew, let alone to be at the mercy of the Gorn, and La’an (Christina Chong), Ortegas (Melissa Navia), M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun), and Sam (Dan Jeannotte) were taken along with the colonists. But the Enterprise had sustained some damage, and staging a rescue mission on a Gorn ship is a lot easier said than done. The others are going to have to come up with a plan of attack before they can do anything, and it’s the time they’ll need to do it that has us worried…
Will all of the Enterprise crew be rescued from the Gorn?
Listen, we’re worried. The crew lost Hemmer (Bruce Horak) to the Gorn in Season 1. Yes, Batel’s life is in serious danger at the end of Season 2, and losing her would no doubt devastate Pike, but she’s not a member of the Enterprise. Ortegas had been so eager to go on a mission, and it’s not hard to imagine that when she finally does, it might be on one that results in her death. Season 3 could explore how losing Sam affects James Kirk (Paul Wesley), should he die in a way that’s different from TOS. We’re not too worried about La’an since it would be much too interesting to see how the Gorn affects her this time; she previously tragically encountered them when she was younger. And we refuse to even entertain the idea of anything happening to M’Benga, though we do hope this means we see more of his warrior side; if ever it needed to come out, it’ll be in this situation.
Will Batel live?
Soon after Pike thought he might have lost Batel, he learned that remains a strong possibility. Though she’d wanted to stay behind after revealing she’d been infected the day before — eggs mature in a day and a half — he instead insisted she return to the Enterprise with him; there, she was sedated and put in a stasis field. Still, Batel said that she needed to be taken out if they couldn’t stop it. Pike and Chapel refused to give up on her. But no matter how much they may want to save her, that doesn’t mean they’ll be able to.
How big of a role will Scotty play in Season 3?
After hearing Scotty’s voice in an alternate future timeline in the Season 1 finale, “Hegemony” brought him onscreen, played by Martin Quinn. He’d ended up in the same Gorn trouble on the planet where Batel and her crew were, and we saw why he’d one day be the chief engineer with what he can do.
“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,” executive producer Henry Alonso Myers told TV Insider. “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.”
When he boarded the Enterprise, Pelia (Carol Kane) said he was one of her best students. Last we saw him, he was going to work with her on tech that could hide them from the Gorn. But how much will he be a part of Season 3? Will he be a series regular or recur? “He will return in some fashion, and everyone knows that Scotty doesn’t die, but he will go through some stuff,” was all Myers would say.
Will Pike tell Batel about his future?
It was not an easy season for Pike and Batel’s relationship — and that was before the events of the finale. “This season really was about them falling in love and figuring out how a relationship is going to work,” Myers said. “So, from my perspective, that ending is more about trying to get the audience to wonder what the hell will happen. Because we love her, and he loves her, and she loves him, and they’re in a very, very, very bad situation.”
Particularly of note is that Pike has yet to tell Batel of the grim future he knows awaits him. They didn’t consider having him do that in Season 2, executive producer Akiva Goldsman said, explaining, “We also wanted to explore this idea — which is not typical in Star Trek — that, actually, committed relationships can form in space. … 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.” We’ll have to wait and see if Pike will even need to worry about telling Batel, considering what happened to her in the finale.
Will Sybok return?
Spock’s (Ethan Peck) half-brother, a prisoner (or patient at a rehabilitation facility, depending on how you look at it), was briefly glimpsed in Season 1, said to be a full Vulcan who “has rejected the teachings of logic” and was someone the science officer “was told to avoid at all costs.” He hasn’t been seen or mentioned since, though Myers did confirm that the producers have been talking about bringing him back. It’s a setup “that we know we want to pay off over time,” Goldsman added. With Spock exploring his human side and emotions, something tells us that payoff could be coming sooner rather than later.
Is Spock and Chapel's relationship pretty much over?
The road has not been easy for the science officer and nurse, and not just because he was engaged or him exploring his human side (and comments from Jack Quaid‘s Boimler during the Lower Decks crossover). It came to a head when she was accepted for a fellowship in the musical episode. He went to save her during the finale, but they had to focus on the matter at hand, not their relationship, upon returning to the Enterprise.
Goldsman described Spock and Chapel’s love story as “a really central component” of Strange New Worlds but also noted “its now kind of inevitable — within the season and series, not just TOS — sort of impending doom” because we know “it ain’t going to work.” So while “they’re not the people they will become, and in these earlier times, these things are still forming,” and they’re looking at “this before unexplored territory,” will there be any joy or romance for the pair together in Season 3?
What will be the next out-of-the-box episode?
All of Strange New Worlds is fun, but there’s something extra special about a few episodes, like the fairytale one in the first season and the Lower Decks crossover and musical in the second. So what’s next? Anything, it sounds like.
“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,” Goldsman explained.
What might we see from Kirk?
We’ve seen Wesley as Kirk in an alternate future and past as well as the current timeline, not yet the man who will one day be captain of the Enterprise. The musical episode also revealed he is in an on-again, off-against relationship with Carol (Marcus, for those who know Star Trek history) — and she’s pregnant. Could we meet Carol in a third season? Could we see other versions of Kirk again?
“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,” Goldsman pointed out. “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.”
