Yesterday, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds was announced – a brand new Trek TV series that will spin off from Discovery season 2, featuring Anson Mount back as Captain Christopher Pike, alongside Ethan Peck’s Spock and Rebecca Romijn’s Number One. The show will follow the adventures of the Enterprise in the years before Kirk took command, so naturally it’s going to be harking back to classic Trek in a big way. This includes both its tone and its story structure.
While speaking to Variety about the new series, exec producer Akiva Goldsman confirmed that Strange New Worlds will have a much more optimistic tone than the darker Discovery and Picard, something that was also alluded to by Mount in the announcement video. What’s more, he revealed that SNW will also be episodic in nature, as with the original network-broadcast shows.
“We’re going to try to harken back to some classical ‘Trek’ values, to be optimistic, and to be more episodic. Obviously, we will take advantage of the serialized nature of character and story building. But I think our plots will be more closed-ended than you’ve seen in either ‘Discovery’ or ‘Picard.’ I imagine it to be closer to the original series than even ‘DS9. We can really tell closed-ended stories. We can find ourselves in episodes that are tonally of a piece.”
Having said that, Goldsman was keen to stress that they would be keeping the increased emphasis on the characters’ emotional journeys from DIS and PIC, with the aim being to carry their experiences from episode to episode while telling self-contained tales.
“I think what we would want to do is keep the characters having moved through and recognizing the experiences they’ve had in previous episodes, but to be able to tell contained, episodic stories.”
That sounds pretty much what every fan would want from this series, so Goldsman’s words should excite Trek lovers even more. After all, the announcement video made clear that Strange New Worlds only got commissioned thanks to the massive fan support for these characters when they were introduced in Discovery season 2. Calls for a spinoff flooded social media at the time and now, CBS has answered them.
There’s no word yet on when we can expect Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, but we can maybe infer that it’s ready to go whenever the TV industry starts up again. So, a release sometime in 2021 doesn’t seem too far-fetched.
