[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 3 finale “New Life and New Civilizations.”]
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds explains what exactly has been going on with Batel (Melanie Scrofano) ever since she was turned into a hybrid to combat the Gorn infection, showed the life she and Pike (Anson Mount), who has his own future still to come, could have had, had Spock (Ethan Peck) and Kirk (Paul Wesley) do a mind meld, and set the Enterprise crew on their next mission in the Season 3 finale.
The Vezda, the evil, resurfaces in “New Life and New Civilizations,” in Gamble’s (Chris Myers) body, and it turns out that Batel is the warden, the sentry of the prison in which it had been kept. She returns to just that, meaning she and Pike have a heartbreaking goodbye — with a glimpse at what their life together could have been (à la “The Inner Light”).
Below, executive producers Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers break down the Season 3 finale and tease the rest of the show’s future.
When did you know this would be the culmination of Batel’s arc?
Akiva Goldsman: We knew it from the beginning. We built this as a one-season arc where in our endless desire to put poor Chris Pike through anything and everything, we gave him a whole life to then take away from him.
Marni Grossman / Paramount+
Speaking of, talk about showing that life they could have had, if not for both of their futures because it’s so heartbreaking, but it also felt really necessary.
Henry Alonso Myers: I mean, we have been looking for a way to do some version of “The Inner Light,” and you can’t kind of shape the whole season based on the thing you want to do. You sort of have to follow what is the natural emotional drive of the show, and we just kind of kept working on until it made us cry. That was really it.
What had you wanted to do with their relationship leading up to that this season?
Goldsman: Well, from the pilot, we really dug Mel. There was something kind of special about her as an actor and then the two of them. So that was recurring for us in our imaginations. And then Pike is challenging because we know that life as we know it ends for him pretty quickly, certainly his life as it has been. So how do you give him experiences that were deep and lasting, like a lifelong marriage, knowing that he doesn’t have a long life, at least in terms of, again, as we sort of think of him in Starfleet. So that was using, as Henry said, “The Inner Light” trick. We wanted to give him true love.
How are we going to see this affecting Pike going forward?
Myers: 100%. I mean, every season shapes our characters and you don’t want to lose that. You want to build on it, and that was our intent.
Can you tease at all what we’ll see from him? How different he’ll be? Will he be different as a captain?
Goldsman: [Shakes head.]
Myers: I would say he is not going to be endlessly sad. Part of what we try to do on the show very much is look at the brave brightness of the future. He’s a person who knows what he thinks will be the end of his life, and yet he faces it and lives and lives in the moment and tries to enjoy the things that are in front of him. And we continue to do that.
I loved Spock and Kirk’s mind meld and the “call me Jim.” Why have that now, and why did you want to showcase the building of that trust, given we know what that relationship becomes and you’re doing the origins of it.
Goldsman: Henry says this all the time, they don’t know who they’re going to be. They only know who they are today. And so there’s a distance between who they are today and who we meet in The Original Series. So that is one of our jobs. One of our jobs is they don’t know who they’re going to be, but we do. So how do we start to march inevitably towards that in a way that is authentic for the characters and delightful for the audience?
Marni Grossman / Paramount+
Spock and La’an (Christina Chong) did start out casual, but it does seem to be developing into something more. We also see what the two characters mean to each other, and that can also complicate things. What can you say about their relationship at this point?
Myers: It’s continuing. We continue with their relationship into the next season. It’s a very different kind of relationship than what he had with Chapel. I would say it’s probably more mature but also casual. This is not the same as Pike and Batel. These are two adults who are making the world more enjoyable for themselves. And how do they live with that?
What can you say about how they feel about each other at this point, at the end of the finale? With what you’re talking about, leaning on each other, dance…
Goldsman: I think they care very deeply about each other.
Myers: Everything you saw in the dance will continue. That is expressing a bunch of different things about themselves that we’ll continue to explore throughout the next season.
Chapel (Jess Bush) and Korby (Cillian O’Sullivan) are clearly on different paths. Where are they in terms of having a sense of what the future holds for them as a couple and as individuals at the end of the finale?
Myers: Well, they haven’t seen TOS and they haven’t experienced those things. I mean, a lot of what we wanted to do with them was, he has introduced in The Original Series in a kind of, I don’t want to say a throwaway way, but —
Goldsman: A less-than-ideal light.
Myers: Yes. And so a lot of us we wanted to talk about is Chapel is a smart, interesting individual. I believe she made smart choices. I don’t think she just dated a really terrible guy. I think she thought that guy is interesting and expressive of the world in a way that you were like, “Oh, I get why she likes him. I get why she would go down that path. I get how this illustrates something about her.”
Goldsman: Yeah, I mean, we made a real choice about — we thought about it because Chapel, you can tell, carries a dating history that is complicated. And so we could go one of two ways, right? Korby could have just been the one who from the beginning, the audience and all her friends would be like, “Oh, don’t do that.” Right? Because Chapel is fully capable of those choices clearly. But we did think it was more interesting to sort of create this other version because it helped elevate Chapel as a character.
How’s M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun) doing after his encounter with the Vezda-as-Gamble? Because he dealt with quite a bit this season.
Myers: I think it’s been hard for him. He is someone who, like an onion, he has many, many, many layers. Part of what we have tried to do with him is express and figure out something new and surprising and different with him for every season. A lot of it’s just stuff we’ve set up and a lot of it’s stuff that we wanted to — sometimes when you set something up, you don’t know where it’s going to go, and that’s usually the best. Akiva will come in, and we’ll be like, “Hey, what if we do this to him?” And we’re like, “Oh, I feel terrible when I hear that. Oh, we should do that. We should absolutely do that.”
What can you tease about Season 4? Are we going to meet any other characters that we know from TOS?
Goldsman: Season 4, I think, I mean, I should be so careful saying this, but I think it’s our finest season so far. I just think we struggled a lot on Season 3. We had lots of real issues around the strike and stopping and starting, and therefore, we lost people. And so it was a lot of good, valiant, hard work on everybody’s part, and we didn’t have the breadth that we liked to take between in a way that sort of let us really go into it the way we have in Season 4. So I think that Season 4 is everybody firing on all cylinders. I think it’s the show’s most confident season, and I would be loathed to say anything more specific.
Myers: I would just say we had an incredible amount of fun. Every episode was fun and surprising for us in that’s all we can — that’s not a promise, that’s just a description of what it was like to make it. So usually I feel like that’s usually a good thing.
I mean, you have the puppet episode coming. Why is Season 4 the right time to do that?
Myers: It’s a lot of work. [Laughs.] It’s a great deal of work. I mean, the big thing that I would just say this as a broad reminder is even when we try to do a big swing, we very much are still trying to do it as Star Trek. This is Star Trek. This is not us being like, what if we turn Star Trek into something else? This is us saying we have to do a Star Trek episode. We have to do this as what we would as Star Trek fans like.
Goldsman: It’s sort of like the documentary where, in the background of it, there’s an actual Star Trek episode.
Are there any other big swing episodes like that? Even if you can’t say what they are, are you going to have multiple ones like that in Season 4?
Myers: Yes.
Obviously, you’re building more and more towards the Enterprise we know of TOS with things we saw in 306 and 308, especially with Kirk and certain characters. How are you going about balancing that with maintaining the focus on the Strange New Worlds‘ characters, especially those we know won’t be around in the future?
Goldsman: Very carefully.
Are Paul and Carol Kane going to continue to be special guest stars in Season 4? Same status?
Goldsman: Yep.
There’s been talk about this possible Year One series. I know it’s just a rumor right now. How likely do you think that is that it could happen?
Goldsman: Honestly, I think we have no idea, in fairness. I mean, I think that clearly we would be thrilled to do it, and ultimately, we are renting, we don’t own. And so it’s the people who own the building, which is now, it’s different landlords, so we’ll see what they think, and if so, great, but we’re building out our show to end to really, we’re completing our five-year mission after Season 5. And then if there’s more to do, serendipity, but if not, we’re going to make sure that we did it as well as we knew how and closed it out as elegantly and correctly as we believe we can.
What about Spock’s brother, Sybok?
Myers: We don’t want to promise everything, but it’s absolutely something we’ve been discussing internally for quite some time. All I can say is —
Goldsman: We haven’t heard the last of him. How’s that?
Myers: That’s a good one. Yes. I’ll stick with that. I think, as always, Akiva’s phrased it perfectly, so I’m not going to say anything else.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Season 4, TBA, Paramount+
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