Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 4 is the beginning of the end for the prequel series. Beginning in July, these 10 episodes will pave the way for an official handover of the storied Starship Enterprise from Captain Christopher Pike (Anson Mount) to Captain James T. Kirk (Paul Wesley), which won’t actually happen until the show’s six-episode final season. But if you assumed those two seasons are really just one story spread over multiple batches of episodes, showrunners Akiva Goldsman and Alex Kurtzman are here to dissuade you. Strange New Worlds seasons 4 and 5 are going to be very different.
“Season 4 is what I would call very pure Strange New Worlds,” Goldsman tells Polygon. “We move around in terms of tone, we move around in terms of genre, and then we drive it to the last six episodes, which is pretty singular.”
This season will be even more episodic than usual since Goldsman says it won’t have a “big bad” like the Gorn in seasons 1 and 2 or the Vezda in season 3. Instead, season 4 will focus on character-driven stories, particularly emphasizing the crew members who don’t appear on Kirk’s enterprise like helmsman Erica Ortegas (Melissa Navia) and La’An Noonien-Singh (Christina Chong).
“It was an interesting handoff narratively and really emotional, weirdly, because we’ve been making the show for the better part of a decade,” Goldsman says.
Season 3 ended with Spock (Ethan Peck) and Kirk mindmelding, and that connection will have big consequences for both characters.
“It is one of the more iconic relationships in modern entertainment, for us and for genre fans certainly, and the joy is we can keep building that,” Goldsman says.
“We know what they’re like in The Original Series, but we don’t know how they got there,” Kurtzman adds. “You don’t want to just come in and give people exactly what they expect at the end. It would get really boring. We wanted to give each of them something to strive for as a character, something to learn about each other, something to be surprised by. That continues this season in a big way.”
While the showrunners can’t say much about this season’s plots, they teased one of the episodes last year when they revealed an image of a Pike puppet created by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop. Pike is the victim of “an unexpected and terrible transporter accident” in an episode directed by Jordan Canning (Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock).
“It is more work than any episode that we have done,” Kurtzman said. “It’s more work than the animated one. It’s more work than the musical. It’s more work than a giant VFX episode. It’s a lot of prep. It’s a lot of work on the day. It’s a lot of post.”
Despite the difficulty, Goldsman and Kurtzman said the episode was “a delight” to make because there was so much enthusiasm from both the Strange New Worlds crew and the Creature Shop puppeteers, who turned out to be big Star Trek fans.
“If you go to work on Star Trek, the odds are it’s one of your favorite things,” Goldsman says. “You don’t stumble into Star Trek. You race to Star Trek. That’s been so true for so many folks that we’ve gotten a chance to work with, and boy was it true for the folks who were the puppeteers. It was moving and profound.”
As they look towards the end of their own time aboard the Enterprise, Kurtzman and Goldsman say they still have millions of ideas for stories they could tell. Goldsman’s biggest regret was not being able to bring William Shatner back to play a version of Kirk who decided to stay in Depression-era New York with Edith Keeler (Joan Collins), a soup kitchen operator he fell in love with in the episode “The City on the Edge of Forever.” The showrunners tried to make that happen every season and even worked on several scripts for an episode.
“I think if you get to the end and there’s nothing left for you to want to do, then that’s more of a disappointment,” Kurtzman says. “I’m proud of every episode we’ve done, but I feel like the best dinners you come to don’t leave you feeling stuffed. They leave you wanting more.”
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 4 premieres on Paramount Plus on July 23. New episodes will release weekly on Thursdays through Sept. 24.
