‘We’re Up to Try Anything’

Spoilers ahead for the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season-two finale “Hegemony.�

The first season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, according to co-showrunner and executive producer Henry Alonso Myers, was a process of “getting the thing moving and making sure it works.� It’s not necessarily the easiest series to get moving. It’s an episodic streaming drama, a deliberate and loving throwback to the earlier eras of Star Trek, and as a result, Strange New Worlds goes against current wisdom about what a successful streaming original tends to look like. It is brighter, more colorful, and often lighter than many hour-long dramas right now, and it’s built on an episodic model that has become a nearly endangered species of television, especially outside the network prime-time calendar. It means that every episode of SNW becomes its own little bubble of tone, style, and plot. Some episodes are horror-inspired, some are buoyantly goofy, and most can operate as a single, stand-alone story.

The success of SNW’s first season, though, meant that season two became a process of pushing for even bigger swings. The most obvious is a musical episode, “Subspace Rhapsody,� in which the crew of the Enterprise cross an “improbability barrier� that makes everyone burst into song at moments of extreme emotion. But even beyond that, season two includes a crossover with the animated Trek series Lower Decks, an episode about the continuing trauma after serving in a war, and a delightful comedy of manners in which Spock is accidentally turned into a human and forced to participate in an elaborate Vulcan engagement ceremony. The season ends with the first in a dramatic two-part episode, leaving a number of stories unresolved after a massive battle with one of SNW’s reimagined early Trek villains, a reptilian species called the Gorn.

That kind of tonal breadth and experimentation is precisely the point of creating SNW, as Myers explains, saying that “we’re kind of up to try anything.� Season-two finale “Hegemony� is in the exact mode Myers likes best for the series: modeled on a specific kind of Trek episode, but updated into what he and the other SNW producers imagine The Original Series would’ve been like if it were being made today.

The season-two finale is such a cliffhanger! Would you have ended the season that way if you’d known a strike would delay season three by a lot? 
The entire intent of doing this episode that way was that we were thinking about the great Next Generation two-parter, “The Best of Both Worlds.� It’s a fantastic end of the season, and it shocks the hell out of you, like, “I have to wait until the next season to see the next part!� That’s all we were trying to do. It was just, let’s surprise everyone, and have this be a “Best of Both Worlds,� let’s hold ourselves up to that level. We wanted people to be shocked and delighted, because I remember experiencing that when I was younger, being blown away and loving it.

When you were younger, though, Star Trek was on a network TV schedule and you only had to wait four months to see the resolution. 
At the time I felt like it was eight years, but it was probably yeah, between five and six months. But one thing I’ve learned as a writer is that if I don’t know what’s going to happen, the people who watch it also won’t know what’s going to happen. Now, in this case, I have actually done a bit of thinking about how it will move forward. But when we broke it, we tried to break it without committing specifically to it. It’s just better if you don’t, because that way you don’t leave obvious clues about what’s coming. You want the story to feel like it’s getting bigger rather than getting smaller.

Can you tell me about redeveloping the Gorn for this series? 
What we’re trying to do with this show is to say, if Gene Roddenberry were making this now, how would he do it? He wouldn’t apply exactly the same sense of character that they had in the ’60s. They absolutely, absolutely wouldn’t apply the same visual effects, and they would not make the Gorn today look the way they did then. Knowing the kind of person Roddenberry was, he would say, “Let’s make it as big and cool as possible.� People do have their own reaction to the classic image of the Gorn, and that’s totally fine. Some people think it looks cheesy, some people think it looks old-fashioned. I don’t feel that way — I love old Trek and I love new Trek.

But in the same way that we approach Nurse Chapel as a contemporary character, a character that would exist in the world of today, we wanted to approach the Gorn as they would be done today, which is big, expensive, and complicated. It took a long time to get it right. We designed them in season one, but it’s one of the reasons the Gorn episode fell near the end of that season, because we were doing design work for the whole season to work on it. We knew it would take six to ten months, it just takes forever. And I want to credit our visual-design folks at Legacy Effects, because it’s a lot of work and it takes a long, long time.

Are the Gorn wholly digital or are there practical elements? 
There are digital elements and practical elements. The best example from this season’s finale is the big zero-G battle, which I really wanted to do — a big fight in zero gravity. It was partly practical, because there was a guy in a Gorn suit. We would use a little bit of digital work to add a bit of a snarl to his face, but our people who did the design work were really phenomenal, and the actor who played him was great. The tail had to be digital because it didn’t move in a natural way, so the tail of the suit just stops at some point and then we add the digital tail when we need to see it. The feet are digital too, because a human in that costume doesn’t hold themselves the way we wanted it to be. For the fight of it, though, the practical is so important. It all depends on close-ups, and you can use them more easily.

The finale introduces a young Scotty, and it was so fun to see him, but it also made me wonder how you think through what characters you want to incorporate from other Trek series, and whether you worry about it being too focused on tie-ins to the rest of the franchise. 
One thing, first, is that we’re all familiar with how other people have played these characters. The thing I try really hard to do, though, is to read as much of it as I can, watch all of it, and then I stop. I think, What’s this person feeling right now? Technically it’s a prequel, but I actually try to really get my head out of the prequel way of thinking, because we’re not trying to make jokes or references to a thing that the only people who are already familiar with it will understand. We’re trying to tell this story about this person, who exists right now for the show. The goal with Scotty was exactly that. Let’s create a role for a new person, a person who’s younger, a person who’s experiencing things for the first time. They don’t know what their future is! They don’t know who they’re going to become. It’s a very simple idea, but it’s really important.

So our Scotty is younger. He’s not yet the person who will come to be. We had the joy of finding an actual Scotsman to play him, Martin Quinn, which if I’m not mistaken is actually a first for this series. Which I say out of love — I love all the other Scottys out there.

But do you think about how to balance making the series reliant on characters from previous iterations versus letting it stand on its own? 
To me, the most important thing about this show is that it works for everyone. If you’re familiar with the old show, you’ll recognize things. It will be special for you, but it won’t be crucial for how to watch it. If you’ve never seen Trek before, you can follow this and enjoy it.

One of the things we borrow from Next Generation and some of the other series around that time is we really think about trying to give everyone their own character story, at least for some part of the season. Even if it’s just one scene. We want to make sure they have a chance to be a person, and yes, they’ll feel a little different from a past version of that character on another series, but they can eventually become that. They’re just not there yet. It makes the show more genuine, and it makes it more fun to play. I think if you spend all your time trying to make a reference to something that hasn’t happened yet, that’s just not how people live their lives.

The related question is how much you worry about canon. Do you feel like you have freedom to ignore it sometimes? 
We’re not trying to discredit or get rid of canon, and we’re not trying to undo it, but we are trying to deepen it. It’s like what I said before, the question is how Gene Roddenberry would’ve made the show if he were making it now, and that means our approach to female characters is very different than it was in the ’60s. We want these to be real roles, and we want everyone to get a chance to play great things. It just wasn’t an issue they were looking at in the ’60s.

What other elements of the show do you feel have shifted because of that way of thinking? 
One of the big ones is Spock as a person. He represented a very different thing at the time he was created; he was the Other in a lot of the old show. But he’s come to be someone you connect with emotionally, someone you feel emotions for. It’s not that Vulcans don’t have feelings, it’s that they express them and feel them very differently. So we get to go into his head, and we can write stories with more humor to them, which are episodes I really loved writing. But it is different from the original. We just try to make the show feel contemporary, but also respectful.

It’s certainly more of an ensemble approach. 
That is also part of making it contemporary — we get to explore the emotional lives of lots of characters who have come from different places. It doesn’t take other people out of the show, but it means everyone gets a chance for a real story.

In that vein, I know Anson Mount, who plays Captain Pike, was out on paternity leave for some of the production of season two. I was curious how much that changed his role in this season. 
We just tried to make his schedule a little lighter at the very beginning. We want him to be a big part of the show, obviously, he’s a crucial and important element. And I can’t say enough good about working with him. It’s been nice on the writer’s side to really push to try some crazy ideas, and the actors have all really jumped up and been excited to do it.

That sounds like you’re talking about this season’s musical episode?
Sure, although there are challenging things we try with every episode. But yes, the musical episode required a lot of work from everyone.

Obviously, we learned a lot from Buffy as we were thinking about that episode. I woke up in the middle of the night thinking, Well, everybody’s going to think this is silly, so we have to make this surprisingly emotional. That’s the crucial thing. We have to do songs that actually reveal things and make you want to cry. That’s definitely something we took from Buffy. And we also are telling a very clear story that made this episode a useful way to express those emotions.

At what point did the idea of a musical episode even come up? 
Well, Akiva Goldsman had this discussion about a musical episode with the folks on Picard, going all the way back, but they weren’t able to pull it together. So when we started season one, he said, “How about a musical episode?� And I said, “Not yet.� I have done musicals on The Magicians. We would do one every year. I’d also worked on the show Ugly Betty, and produced a musical episode that we did with Wicked for that. So I’d learned a lot of practical elements that are required in putting it together, and I knew how long it would take. And then one of our writers, Bill Wolkoff, came in with this crazy pitch for it at the beginning of this season, and all of us thought, That’s crazy, but we sort of like it? But we knew it would take a long time to prep for, which is why it would fall late in the season.

I love that this season has a musical episode, and I love that it comes in the middle of this huge tonal swing from animated crossover episode, to war-PTSD episode, to musical episode, to a very tense cliffhanger finale. But it also makes me think about what it would be like if this show had an old-school 22-episode model, and I’m wistful about it!
I would be excited to do more episodes. It would be great! Yes, even just ten is a lot of work, but for my first ten years, I was working on 22 episodes a season. It’s hard, but we’d produce them differently. But could we do more? Sure. It would be a lot of money and a lot of time, and it would be a lot more work in a good way for some of the writers. And in a terrifying way for some of the writers — it cuts into your life. I have worked very hard to make sure that all the writers get to be producers for the show. They get to go work with their actors, with their directors. They work in post. It’s a classic writer’s format, and it’s how I came up. It’s how I’ve tried really hard to make sure the people on our show come up. They’ve been able to bring all kinds of excellence to the show because of that. It’s a money thing. It’s complicated. But the team and I would love to do more episodes.

There are so few new episodic shows on streaming platforms. Lots and lots of older episodic shows seem to do very well on streaming, and yet so few streaming originals follow that model. What have conversations about this show been like with Paramount?
This is a weird one, because they’ve been surprisingly supportive. I have a really surprisingly good relationship with those folks. I know we’re in a very weird time, but it’s been weirdly positive. It’s also been a really nice reminder. It’s been one of the bigger hits, and people are like, Oh, right, maybe we should do it this way?

I think it does depend on the company. Paramount has been more open to it than I think Apple or others, but I haven’t worked for them, so I can’t really speak to that. What I can say is that there are a lot of us who are professionals and who’ve been working in television for a long time, and we still know how to do it. It turns out when we do it the way we know how to, it seems to work out much better. And — we do it on a budget.

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