Having pushed the franchise in new directions with Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Picard, Paramount+’s next Star Trek offering is set to take the series back to its earliest roots as the original pilot episode crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise return for new adventures in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.
It’s not just the characters and visual aesthetics that will hearken back to classic Trek either, as producer Akiva Goldsman has confirmed to THR that Strange New Worlds will be “really episodic” and “very much adventure-of-the-week”, as opposed to the sterilised storytelling of Discovery, Picard, and latter episodes of Deep Space Nine and Enterprise.
“It’s unlike the other shows in that it’s really episodic,” states Goldsman. “If you think back to The Original Series, it was a tonally more liberal – I don’t mean in terms of politics, but it could sort of be more fluid. Like sometimes Robert Bloch would write a horror episode. Or Harlan Ellison would have ‘City on the Edge of Forever,’ which is hard sci-fi. Then there would be comedic episodes, like ‘Shore Leave’ or ‘The Trouble With Tribbles.’ So [co-showrunner] Henry Alonso Myers and myself are trying to serve that.
“We’ve all become very enamored, myself included, with serialized storytelling,” he continued. “And I’m talking to you from behind the stage where we’re shooting Picard, which is deeply serialized. But Strange New Worlds is very much adventure-of-the-week but with serialized character arcs… you can drop in, watch one, drop out, then watch another one later. It’s a fine line because obviously, we want to keep continuity with the storytelling and the style, but we also want Strange New Worlds to be a different show. It’s not Discovery. There are a few more reach-backs (to The Original Series) and the uniforms have been adjusted slightly, the sets are slightly different. Remember the Enterprise existed as a little piece of [the show Discovery], but now it’s its own object. When you close your eyes and think of the key sets and situations that you think of The Original Series, that’s what we’re looking to do.”
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds sees Anson Mount, Ethan Peck and Rebecca Romijn reprising their Star Trek: Disocvery roles as Captain Christopher Pike, Spock and Number One respectively, while the cast also includes Babs Olusanmokun (Dune), Christina Chong (Black Mirror), Celia Rose Gooding (Jagged Little Pill), Jess Bush (Skinford) and Melissa Navia (Billions).
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