Season one of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds ended on a high note. Fans loved the inclusion of the Time Stone and that stellar call-out to the original series’ great episode, “Balance of Terror,” where things play out in eerily familiar form. We found future Captain Pike (Anson Mount) eventually telling Present Captain Pike that his tragic fate is inevitable, and that in every timeline outcome, except when Kirk is at the helm of the U.S.S. Enterprise during the incident in question, Spock (Ethan Peck) dies.
There’s more, but the big twist comes at the end of the final episode when Lieutenant Commander/Number One Una Chin-Riley (Rebecca Romijn) is arrested for concealing from Starfleet that she is an Illyrian. More on that in a moment…
Ahead of the second season premiere of Strange New Worlds on June 15, Anson Mount and Rebecca Romijn spoke with a panel of journalists about the series. Check out the exclusive MovieWeb video clips here and the interview below.
Rebecca Romijn on Number One’s Big Shift
No doubt, Trekkies were left hanging about the fate of Number One at the end of the first season of Strange New Worlds. Would Una Chin-Riley really get kicked out of Starfleet? Showrunners Henry Alonso Myers and Akiva Goldsman tackle that dilemma right off the bat, beginning in the premiere episode and even more deeply in episode two in the season ahead.
Rebecca Romijn shared that episode two is truly Una-focused. “Having worked on episode two and seeing how Una is going to finally free herself of having lived inauthentically for so many years, that will allow her to move forward and let her crew and her everyone know who she really is. It feels like a great metamorphosis for the character. It’s going to be fun moving on from that,” added Romijn. “Una will no longer be living in shame with this shameful secret she’s been hiding all these years. So, moving forward, that’s going to be very different for her.”
As for all the pressures that come entering a sophomore season, Romijn noted that she and the cast have seen shows where the second season doesn’t compare to the first:
We really wanted to make season two bigger and better than season one. And we took some real chances and big swings, genre wise, and tried a lot of things. And a few episodes coming after episode six are really out there. We’re very proud of them.
“Sometimes when you get to episode nine, which is almost at the end of the season, everyone’s kind of tired and ready to go home. They [the writers] brought us this episode that was so out there, and it required us to work on weekends,”continued Romijn. “And we were all so excited about it. It was the extra wind behind our sails we needed at that point in the season. So, we’re really excited to share all these different genres this season.”
Anson Mount Talks Season Two’s Strengths
Audiences are bound to appreciate Captain Pike’s journey in season two, and Anson Mount is ready for audiences to see what lies ahead for Pike and the USS Enterprise crew. He quickly credits the freedom Paramount+ has given the showrunners and writers. “We had a couple of episodes in the first season that they weren’t too sure about, and both of those episodes are ones that popped for us,” said Mount. He continued:
“They gave our showrunners a lot more freedom to play with ‘genre.’ Star Trek can be a lot of things. We’re not just playing with a message, but within the episodic structure, we can play with how we get there. As far as genre… it’s been a fun way of us talking with the writers about what we haven’t done that we would like to do. That makes everybody excited to be there, which I think is often an undervalued currency in filmmaking — the excitement level, especially in television.”
The ripple effects show up on screen. Season one of Strange New Worlds was downright enjoyable if not refreshingly surprising. Season two is even better, with memorable story arcs involving the primary cast, including Ethan Peck (Spock), Celia Rose Gooding (Uhura), Melissa Navia (Erica Ortegas), Jess Bush (Nurse Chapel) Babs Olusanmokun (Dr. M’benga), Paul Wesley (Kirk), Christina Chong (La’an Noonien-Singh), and newcomer Carol Kane (Pelia), who comes on as Chief Engineer after the tragic death of Hemmer (Bruce Horak) in the first season.
The Future of Captain Pike
“There is this really great thing that happens around season two of a TV show when you’re working with smart writers like we are,” Mount shared. “And it’s that you’ll find them starting to come to you a bit. Because there is a sense of the character you have from the inside, that they’re trying to get to from the outside. And conversations about arcs can often lead to really fruitful ideas. And they [the writers] have been very proactive about doing that with us.”
Meanwhile, burning questions linger. Star Trek canon foretells a grim fate for Captain Pike; that he will suffer a horrific injury by delta radiation during a heroic mission saving Starfleet cadets. This is set to take place roughly seven years after the first season of Strange New Worlds. How does Pike handle all that in season two?
“It about getting Pike back on mission,” said Mount of the season ahead. “He’s been through the existential crisis for the most part, and you don’t want to entirely forget it, because then you’re leaving behind a very important aspect of the character, which I think makes him brave in a different way than we’ve seen every other captain. But we wanted to get kind of the navel-gazing out of the way, and we did that.
“Then it’s always been an aspect of the character that his challenge continues to be reminding himself that the journey is the destination. Right?” added Moiunt. “And not the other way around. I think that the introduction of the relationship with Captain Batel (Melanie Scrofano) [in season two] has been a very important part of that.”
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds premieres June 15 on Paramount+. New installments of the 10-episode season drop weekly on Thursdays.
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