Trekkies everywhere rejoice! Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, a Star Trek: Discovery spin-off series, is coming to your TV screens this Spring. The new adventures of the USS Enterprise are actually a little old — well, old as in set before James T. Kirk set off on his famous five-year mission and beginning with Captain Christopher Pike in the captain’s chair.
While Pike appeared in the original series’ 1965 pilot, “The Cage,” his comeback in Star Trek: Discovery‘s second season which garnered great fan interest earned him his own spin-off, with other veterans from the pilot Number One and Spock.
Here’s everything we know so far about the upcoming series set to premiere on Paramount+ in May.
‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Release Date
The new series is officially set to release May 5, 2022 on Paramount Plus after Star Trek: Discovery season 4 and Star Trek: Picard season 2 have finished. The first season of the series is set to run for 10 episodes and will presumably run every Thursday.
As far as the build up to the release date, an exciting new poster was released to get fans hyped — and to remember to pencil in that premiere date, of course. “We wanted [the poster] to reflect that the [concept] of the final frontier is at just the beginning,” executive producer Alex Kurtzman told the show’s TCA panel (via Syfy). “We think it brings the sense of nostalgia hope, optimism, exploration and sense of adventure.”
The build up goes far beyond the poster and various video clips, as the series was first announced back in May 2020, following the five-year overall deal Kurtzman signed with CBS to expand the Star Trek franchise beyond Discovery into various shows, miniseries, and animated series. The show was pushed back due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, but its production still trekked on. In Sept. 2020, Viacom CBS then announced that CBS All Access would be be expanded and rebranded as Paramount+ for the series to premiere and, already, a second season of Strange New Worlds was confirmed to be in development by director Jonathan Frakes in Nov. 2021.
Cast & Crew
Incoming transmission from Captain Pike himself Anson Mount ✨ #StarTrek #StrangeNewWorlds pic.twitter.com/7MzivTtKCH
— Star Trek (@StarTrek) October 11, 2021
Since the series was confirmed back in 2020, we’ve known about three main actors returning to reprise their roles. Anson Mount is back as Captain Christopher Pike while Ethan Peck is returning as the pointy-eared Spock and Rebecca Romijn continues as the first officer/helmsperson Number One. As seen in the above tweet from production, Anson appeared in a brief video after filming wrapped in Fall 2021 to get fans excited for the forthcoming season and thank them for their “continued support.”
Rounding out the cast is Jess Bush as Nurse Christine Chapel, Christina Chong as La’an Noonien-Singh, Celia Rose Gooding as Cadet Nyota Uhura, Melissa Navia as Lt Erica Ortegas, Babs Olusanmokun as Dr M’Benga and Bruce Horak as Hemmer.
“We wanted our show to be more or less a throwback in every way we could,” Anson told TrekMovie in Sept. 2021. “And that started with making room for the big idea of the week, which meant more of an episodic structure. And so every episode is a distinct story. It’s not that the characters don’t grow or change–that definitely happens. But the star of the show is the ship and the big idea of the week. I like to think of it as a two-hander that way.
What is ‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ About?
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds follows Captain Christopher Pike and the crew of the USS Enterpriseas they explore, well, strange new worlds throughout the galaxy. The series, which brings back Pike, Spock, and Number One, is set before Star Trek: The Original Series. Producer Henry Alonso Meyers joked that “The Cage” (1965), aka the first pilot episode of The Original Series which stars the same main characters, could be considered to be the pilot for Strange New Worlds, making the series “the longest pilot-to-series pickup in the history of television.”
“We’re going to try to harken back to some classical Trek values, to be optimistic, and to be more episodic,” executive producer Akiva Goldsman (and director of the Strange New Worlds pilot episode) told Variety in May 2020. “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.”
Alonso Meyers also talked about the series to be “Star Trek in the classic mode,” in the way the “stories were always told” like before. “It’s a ship and it’s traveling to strange new worlds and we are going to tell big ideas science fiction adventures in an episodic mode. So we have room to meet new aliens, see new ships, visit new cultures.”
Writer Aleka Cooper also told The Hollywood Reporter in April 2021, “If you think back to the original [Star Trek] series, it was 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,” he explained. “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. Picard is deeply serialized but Strange New Worlds is very much adventure-of-the-week, but with serialized character arcs.”