We’ve finally reached a hiatus in the months-long Paramount+ Star Trek marathon, and as the dust begins to settle following yesterday’s Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season finale, it’s time to catch you up on all the news that’s arrived out of subspace over the last few days.
SPOILERS FOR “A QUALITY OF MERCY” BELOW!
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Introducing ‘The Port Galley’ Set
As part of the special coverage in this week’s episode of The Ready Room, host Wil Wheaton travelled to the Toronto-based Strange New Worlds production stages to interview star Ethan Peck (Spock) and showrunner Henry Alonso Myers — but the most interesting part of his visit is the unveiling of a brand-new Enterprise set we’ll come to see in the show’s upcoming second season.
Guided around “The Port Galley” by series production designer Jonathan Lee, The Ready Room spends nearly 8 minutes (start at timecode 22:30) exploring this new bar/lounge set which is essentially replacing the AR Wall-based crew lounge seen in the early episodes of Strange New Worlds Season 1, which was cumbersome to manage (though Lee doesn’t say that set won’t ever return).
The new location — which features cozy seating, a small performance stage, two video-display walls and a central bar — was desired to make things easier to film for the Strange New Worlds production crew, and was designed without windows to avoid having to worry about what’s happening outside the Enterprise when developing moments in the lounge.
Risk Is Our Business
As our reviews mentioned a few times this season, despite the fun performances and mostly-enjoyable outings we’d hoped that Strange New Worlds might take some bigger storytelling chances over the last ten episodes — and co-showrunner Akiva Goldsman told The Hollywood Reporter that Season 2 will up the stakes in new ways.
“I feel the job of this show is to take big swings. And by the way, season one will look like a lot of bunting compared to season two. Star Trek is, in my view, most useful when it is emotionally connecting, which includes joy, wonder and sentiment. I think big swings are how you get there — and by the way, “big swings” just means “not as expected.”
A big swing can be small, it can be a small story. So, when we say big swings, I think we mean atypical. And that is our job right now. [Season 2 will be] bigger and better.”
More Kirk, More Engineers, and MOrtegas
Actor Paul Wesley talked with Variety about his continued participation as James T. Kirk in Strange New Worlds, after his debut appearance in “A Quality of Mercy.” While the Captain Kirk introduced in the season finale lived in an alternate 2266 future, Season 2’s Kirk will be contemporary to Captain Pike’s 2259 present.
“The ‘A Quality of Mercy’ Kirk] hasn’t been influenced by Spock, by Uhura. In many ways, he’s the same Kirk. But he’s not really the Kirk that we know, because he’s had a completely different life. So [the was] room in Season 1 for exploration of Kirk in a different way. It allowed me to put less pressure on myself, at least for that particular episode…. we didn’t explore Kirk as much as we will in Season 2.
Ultimately, ‘Strange New Worlds’ is pre- the Enterprise that we know, and I really think that that’s what this show is. Kirk is coming in, and he’s a part of that universe, but this really is Pike’s show in terms of him being the captain.
Ultimately, I don’t know what their plans are. All I can say is that I’m really enjoying being a part of this storyline, because it’s a Kirk that we’ve never seen. This is a younger Kirk. It’s before he was fully developed as a man.
I can’t talk about it too much, but man, I had such a blast on Season 2. The writing is so good. It’s so fun. Season 2 is where we get to really let loose and explore Kirk. I can’t wait for everyone to see it.”
You can read the rest of Wesley’s comments on his portrayal of James Kirk, along with his experience landing the role and meeting William Shatner over at Variety.
After the unexpected death of Aenar engineer Hemmer (Bruce Horak) in “All Those Who Wander,” fans have already started speculating about who will lead the Enterprise maintenance team in Strange New Worlds Season 2 — especially after the voice-only Montgomery Scott cameo in “A Quality of Mercy,” set seven years after the current timeframe.
Strange New Worlds co-showrunner Henry Alonso Myers told SyFy.com today that the show isn’t quite ready to bring the Scottish engineer into the series, but Season 2 will introduce a new Enterprise tech guru when the series returns next year.
“We will meet a new chief engineer — it’s not going to be Scotty. There will be a new character who I’m excited for you to meet, but I’m not going to tell you who it is. It’s going to be a very different person, a completely different type of engineer.”
Myers also reiterated previous statements that while Hemmer is gone — a plan for the Aenar set in motion even before the role was cast — actor Bruce Horak won’t be leaving the Strange New Worlds universe.
“For Hemmer, the intention of bringing in Hemmer was to bring in a character who would die. We knew that when Bruce Horak came in for his first audition. The challenge of doing all these legacy characters is everyone knows that none of them die, so we worked on how to make people care about the fate of the story.
One of our ideas was to make someone that we cared about die. And, for better or for worse, I feel like we didn’t know that Bruce would be so great. We didn’t know that he’d do it so well and we didn’t know it’d be so heartbreaking. Sometimes you’re fortunate and you find the perfect person for the perfect role and Bruce was that guy.
I will say that while Hemmer is dead, it’s not necessarily the last that we will see Bruce on our show.”
Myers also talked to /Film earlier this week, where he confirmed that fan-favorite Erica Ortegas (Melissa Navia) will get her own focus episode in Strange New Worlds Season 2, after spending most of Season 1 adjacent to the other series regulars’ stories.
“Ortegas does have an episode in Season 2. We love Ortegas. One of the great things about Ortegas is that she fits so well into every story, because she’s always kind of in the center of it. You know what I mean?
I like to think of her as the person who gets to comment on every single story. Ortegas gets to do a bunch of things that she does in Season 2 that she didn’t get to do in Season 1, so I’ll leave it at that.”
Speaking separately to Inverse, Myers also noted that while there are still six-to-seven years until Captain Kirk is slated to take command of the Enterprise, there shouldn’t be an expectation that every season of Strange New Worlds will be equivalent to one year in space — though some more familiar faces from the future may not be that far away.
“We weren’t quite ready to cast our Scotty [for ‘A Quality of Mercy’]. That’s all I can say for now… we’re gonna meet some very interesting folks. We have seven years to play with here, and you know, there’s no reason that every season has to be a year. You could do a season that’s a week. You could do a season that’s six months.”
Anson Mount, Meet Admiral Pike
As part of a lengthy interview with Esquire, Strange New Worlds series lead Anson Mount spoke about his approach to playing the older Admiral Pike in “A Quality of Mercy,” a version of his character who travelled back in time from years (if not decades) into an alternate future.
“Mostly I didn’t want to overdo it, because if you talk to most people who are in their seventies or eighties, they will tell you that they still feel like they’re in their thirties, other than a few kinks here and there. For whatever reason, I’m what they call an outside-in actor.
I start with the body. I just wanted to find the places where the movement was not as easy and the voice was different. It was necessary to differentiate it a bit because I had scenes with myself. It was just necessary for the clarity of the scene.
I wanted a voice that sounded like it had given up a little bit after lots of emotional turmoil. So I thought, what would my voice sound like if I had spent a lot of time sobbing and screaming?”
Mount also shared his thoughts on Captain Pike’s outlook on life following his time travel adventure, as Strange New Worlds moves towards its second season.
“I would say he’s more resolute after the finale of Season One. He tried out the idea of having his cake and eating it too. It didn’t work, and strangely, when he realizes there’s no honorable way out, that’s a relief.
The older Pike made it very clear: you still have a choice. But to somebody like Pike, it isn’t a choice. So this is a choice that almost makes itself, and it is a tremendous relief. He doesn’t have to worry about it anymore.
His job now is to make every day count as much as possible. There’s a lot of freedom in that.”
Strange New Accolades
Finally today, the first season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds landed some major recognition on Thursday as the series was nominated for Best Streaming Series (Drama) by the Hollywood Critics’ Association — up there with such heavy-hitters as Severance and Squid Game.
The full list of nominees in this category are:
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- Loki (Disney+)
- Ozark (Netflix)
- Pachinko (Apple TV+)
- Severance (Apple TV+)
- Squid Game (Netflix)
- Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (Paramount+)
- Stranger Things (Netflix)
- The Morning Show (Apple TV+)
Here are the full list of nominees for the HCA awards; the winner will be announced at the Hollywood Critics’ Association awards ceremony on Sunday, August 14.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds will return in 2023 for an already-filmed Season 2, currently in post-production. The last five episodes of Season 1 will continue to roll out to the UK and Ireland on Paramount+ this summer; additional international distribution has not yet been announced.