As we head into the new week and the back half of Strange New Worlds‘ first season, it’s time to round up some bits of franchise news that have beamed down in recent days — all are minor spoilers, so steer clear if you’re trying to stay completely safe!

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Starting with the current series, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds co-showrunner Akiva Goldsman responded to a fan comment about the future of Nurse Christine Chapel’s love live this week, telling readers to ‘stand by’ for the arrival of her future fiancé, Dr. Roger Korby.

Korby appeared in the Original Series episode “What Are Little Girls Made Of?,” where the scientist discovered an android production facility on planet Exo III, and was eventually replaced by an android himself after he was critically injured.

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Strange New Worlds brought the ‘boogeymen’ Gorn into the series in last month’s “Memento Mori,” and franchise boss Alex Kurtzman strongly hinted this week that viewers will get a close encounter with an updated take on the reptilian race at some point in the show’s future.

Speaking on The Ready Room with Wil Wheaton this week, Kurtzman described the challenges of bringing the 1960’s rubber-suited creature design into the modern era as a combination of practical builds and digital enhancement.

“The game you play with the Gorn is: okay, we can’t actually afford to do full CG characters, because that’s a wildly expensive proposition on a television budget. So how do you you merge the two? Ho do you use puppetry and how do you use CG — and in what way — how do you light it?

And all of those things play into hopefully creating an experience where you can’t tell the difference between them, and it feels vivid and real and scary.”

(Also? Without providing any details, Kurtzman confirmed that a future Star Trek Universe crossover event is in the works — so start your speculation engines running!)

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Star Trek: The Next Generation actor LeVar Burton spoke to Yahoo! Entertainment about his return to the franchise in Star Trek: Picard’s third and final season, sharing a few bits of character detail about Geordi La Forge’s life in the early 25th century.

“[Our ‘Next Gen’ crew got] to put on our space suits and play these characters again! We all thought the ship had sailed on a conscious goodbye. When me made our last movie, ‘Nemesis’ in 2002, we expected there to be another one, and then things changed. So this was a great gift to us. This season of ‘Picard’ is a love poem to ‘Next Generation’ and we get to see these people that we grew to know and even love at this new point in their lives.

It was a lot of fun on so many levels. I also get to work with my kid: my daughter, Mica, plays one of Geordi’s two daughters. So the whole storyline really is about the next generation of ‘The Next Generation’ in many respects.”

It’s nice to see that the infamously-single La Forge found the family life in the decades since we last saw him aboard the Enterprise-E, and having Mica Burton portraying his in-universe daughter — seen here together at Star Trek Day 2021 — is a perfect choice.

The other bit of info of note in Burton’s comments is his mention of putting on “space suits,” a term the Next Gen cast has often used to refer to their Starfleet uniforms — meaning La Forge may still be in active Starfleet service, as he was seen in the alternate “Timeless” future.

Keep coming back to TrekCore for the latest in Star Trek franchise news!