Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Entertainment
  3. News

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds trailer embraces the unknown

Blair Marnell
By

The opening credits of the original Star Trek promised a journey that would “explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no man has gone before!” However, there are only so many times that we can see Klingons, Vulcans, or Romulans before they just aren’t “new” anymore. Later this year, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is rolling back the clock to the earliest days of the Enterprise. And from here, the sky is the limit in terms of races and worlds we’ve never seen before.

Only hardcore Trekkies remember that Captain Kirk and his crew weren’t the original main characters of Star Trek. A single pilot episode, “The Cage,” was produced with Captain Pike, Number One, and a young Spock. Pike and Number One would have remained in obscurity if they hadn’t resurfaced in Star Trek: Discovery season 2. They, along with Spock, will be back for Strange New Worlds. In the first teaser trailer, Pike rediscovers his sense of purpose.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | Teaser Trailer | Paramount+

Anson Mount is reprising his role of Christopher Pike from Discovery season 2 alongside Rebecca Romijn as Una Chin-Riley/Number One, and Ethan Peck as Spock. Surprisingly, two of the characters from Kirk’s Enterprise will also have roles in the series. Celia Rose Gooding will portray Nyota Uhura, while Jess Bush steps into the part of nurse Christine Chapel.

Recommended Videos

The new characters on the ship include Dr. M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun), Erica Ortegas (Melissa Navia), and Hemmer (Bruce Horak). Christina Chong is set to play La’an Noonien-Singh, a woman who is somehow related to Kirk’s ultimate foe: Khan Noonien Singh.

Anson Mount in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds was created by Akiva Goldsman, Alex Kurtzman, and Jenny Lumet. The first episode will premiere on Paramount+ on May 5.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Blair Marnell
Blair Marnell
Blair Marnell has been an entertainment journalist for over 15 years. His bylines have appeared in Wizard Magazine, Geek…
The 10 best Star Trek: Voyager episodes, ranked
Captain Janeway gives a speech on the bridge of the Starship Voyager

As much as fans love to praise Star Trek as groundbreaking science fiction, it’s important to remember that, for most of the franchise’s history, Trek was weekly procedural television. Until the streaming era, each series was churning out roughly 26 episodes a year, and by the later seasons of Star Trek: Voyager, some of the creative crew had been in the business of making Star Trek for over a decade. The franchise was a crossover commercial success, the kind of success that the money men like to leave exactly as it is for as long as it’s doing steady numbers.
The operation was essentially on rails, and there was a lot of pressure from the studio and the network to keep it that way, which accounts for the general blandness of Voyager and the early years of its successor, Enterprise. The waning years of Trek’s golden era were plagued by creative exhaustion and, consequently, laziness. Concepts from previous series were revisited, often with diminishing returns, and potentially groundbreaking ideas were nixed from on high in order to avoid upsetting the apple cart.
That’s not to say that Star Trek: Voyager isn’t still a solid television show, and even many Trekkies’ favorite. The saga of Captain Kathryn Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) and her gallant crew finding their way home from the farthest reaches of the galaxy may not be as ambitious as it could have been, but it is steadily entertaining, which is why new and nostalgic fans alike enjoy it as cozy “comfort viewing.” For our part, however, we tend to enjoy the episodes that have a certain emotional intensity or creative spark, that feel like conceptual or stylistic risks. As such, you might find that our list of the 10 best Voyager episodes differs greatly from some of the others out there. We like when Voyager dared to get heavy, or silly, or sappy, or mean. So, without further ado, let’s raise a glass to the journey ...
Like Star Trek? Then check out how do I get into Star Trek?
10. Counterpoint (season 5, episode 10)

Counterpoint drops the audience into the middle of an ongoing story,in which Voyager is boarded and inspected by agents of a fascist government, the Devore. The Devore treat all travelers through their space with suspicion, but are particularly concerned with capturing and detaining all telepaths, who they view as dangerous. Despite the risks, Captain Janeway is attempting to smuggle a group of telepathic refugees to safety, all while putting on a show of cooperation for smiling Devore Inspector Kashyk (Mark Harelik). Much of the plot takes place in the background, obscured from the audience in order to build suspense. The real focus is on the evolving dynamic between Janeway and Kashyk, a rivalry that simmers into one of the Voyager captain’s rare romances. Kashyk works in the service of what are, transparently, space Nazis, but when he offers to defect to Voyager, can his intentions be trusted?
Beyond its intriguing premise, Counterpoint is a particularly strong production with a lot of subtle hints of creative flair. Director Les Landau and director of photography Marvin Rush, who had been both working on Star Trek since the 1980s, shoot the hell out of this story, breaking from Voyager’s even lighting and predictable camera moves to make some very deliberate choices that build a great deal of tension around what is essentially a bottle episode. The makeup team, supervised by equally seasoned Trek veteran Michael Westmore, supplies a memorable and imaginative makeup design for an alien astrophysicist who appears in all of two scenes in this episode and is never utilized again. Most of all, Kate Mulgrew provides what may be her most subtle, human performance in the entire series, embodying Janeway’s famous conviction and strength of will while also granting a rare glimpse at her more vulnerable side without ever straying into melodrama.

Read more
The 10 best Star Trek: The Original Series episodes, ranked
Captain Kirk, upset, buried waist-deep in Tribbles.

It’s hard to imagine today, but back in the late 1960s, the original Star Trek was not considered a hit. The ambitious science fiction series was constantly on the brink of cancellation and was cut short only three years into its planned five-season run.
However, it’s important to put Trek’s apparent failure into historical context as, given that most markets in the U.S. had only three television channels to choose from, even a low-rated show like Star Trek was being watched by about 20% of everyone watching television on a Thursday night, or roughly 10 million households. This year’s season of HBO’s Succession was viewed by roughly 8 million households a week, which makes it a hit by today's standards. Star Trek’s audience only grew once it went into reruns in the early 1970s, and by the time Star Trek: The Motion Picture hit theaters in 1979, it was a genuine cultural phenomenon. Today, the Star Trek franchise is considered one of the crown jewels of the Paramount library.
Though arguably outshined by its most prosperous spinoff, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: The Original Series holds up remarkably well for a vision of our future imagined nearly 60 years in our past. It’s a space adventure series that tackles social or political issues from what was, at the time, a daring and progressive perspective informed by the contemporary civil rights movement, sexual revolution, and backlash against the Vietnam War. Conveying these values through fanciful science fiction didn’t only allow its writers to get away with a lot of subversive messages, it also delivered them in a way that remains fun to watch decades later — fun enough that fans are willing to forgive when its ideas, or its special effects, crumble under modern scrutiny.
These 10 episodes, however, unquestionably stand the test of time, and thanks to the continuity-light nature of mid-20th century television, any one of them could be your first Star Trek episode. (Be aware, however, that the order in which classic Trek episodes are listed varies depending on the source. For our purposes, we’re using the numbering from streaming service Paramount+.)

10. Mirror, Mirror (season 2, episode 4)

Read more
The 10 best Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episodes, ranked
Captain Sisko brandishes a phaser rifle outdoors in the DS9 episode "Rocks and Shoals"

For decades, Deep Space Nine was “that other Star Trek show.” It debuted in 1992, during the run of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the first Trek series to achieve mainstream popularity. DS9 overlapped in first-run syndication with TNG until 1994, and then with Voyager — which ran on primetime network television — from 1995 to 2001. Throughout its seven-year run, Deep Space Nine was never a top priority for studio Paramount or franchise executive producer Rick Berman. While this was a source of frustration for the cast and crew, the studio’s neglect also allowed them to take greater creative risks.
Under showrunner Ira Steven Behr, DS9 gleefully subverted the Star Trek formula, pulling open the cracks in the franchise’s futuristic utopia and refusing to be bound by the episodic nature of weekly television. DS9’s serialized stories and long character arcs may have made it harder to keep up with when it first aired, but it’s perfect for the modern binge-streaming model, which has introduced it to a whole new generation of fans. Thirty years after its debut, Deep Space Nine is finally receiving the respect it always deserved.
Selecting just ten episodes of DS9 to showcase is a challenge, as many of its most compelling stories are spread out across multiple episodes. Some of the episodes below are totally standalone stories, some are standout chapters in multi-part arcs that can be appreciated on their own, and some are two-parters that we simply couldn’t separate and had to list as a single entry. We hope you don’t mind us bending the rules just a bit — after all, that’s part of what made DS9 great to begin with.

10. In Purgatory’s Shadow/By Inferno’s Light (season 5, episodes 14 and 15)

Read more