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At its core, Star Trek is the story of humanity embracing an optimistic future, overcoming their petty differences to learn how to go boldly into unexplored parts of the universe. The original show has gone on to launch numerous spinoff series and movies with various crews and missions, opening space for lots of adventures and philosophical discussions. But for many, the appeal of Star Trek comes down a friendship, more specifically the friendship between James T. Kirk and his first officer, Mr. Spock, originally portrayed by William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy.
Kirk and Spock haven’t quite hit that point on the prequel series Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. But for Ethan Peck, who plays Spock, and his co-star as Kirk, Paul Wesley, the show is already laying the groundwork for a legendary friendship. “We get to bring a lot of our off screen chemistry to screen,” Peck says during the cast and crew’s visit to Den of Geek studio at San Diego Comic-Con. “I enjoy the job of scrutinizing Kirk and his brash decision-making and impulsive behavior.”
“I feel like you enjoy doing that to Paul,” interrupts co-star Christina Chong, who plays La’An Noonien-Singh, to which Peck agrees. “Yes, and I get to bring that from off-screen and onto the screen,” he asserts.
Set on the USS Enterprise in the years leading up to Kirk’s command, Strange New Worlds stars Anson Mount as Captain Christopher Pike, who leads a team of explorers that includes first officer Una Chin-Riley (Rebecca Romijn) and helmsman Erica Ortegas (Melissa Navia). Although he still serves on the USS Farragut during the period covered by Strange New Worlds, Kirk finds himself visiting the Enterprise a few times every season, giving him a chance to get to know the most human soul he’ll encounter on his travels. And already, they see the personality traits that will bring the two together.
“Kirk has this trust in Spock right away. And he’s kind of amused in Spock’s very skeptical and uncertain of way of being,” explains Peck.
“Kirk is drawn to Spock and he’s not sure why,” adds Wesley. “It’s interesting,” he says with skepticism as he turns toward Peck. “Like our friendship.”
For Wesley, Kirk’s relationship to Spock is just one of the ways the show explores the man who will become one of the greatest heroes in sci-fi history. “For my character, the whole point of this prequel is to dig into the vulnerabilities of Kirk and understand why he is the way he is on The Original Series. There, he’s a much more poised, decisive man who seems infallible, in a way. We wanted to show the vulnerabilities that led him to embrace the sort of shell that he creates later.
“The second episode, ‘The Griffin Incident,’ is a perfect example of some of the trauma he experiences,” Wesley points out, referring to a story that sees Kirk wrestling with his relationship with his infant son, David.
Kirk and Spock may be the primary draw for causal viewers of Strange New Worlds, but they’re hardly the only characters who have grown over the show’s four seasons. In season 4, Ortegas gets pushed out of her comfort zone for a whacky adventure with another classic character, engineer Montgomery Scott, played now by Scottish actor Martin Quinn.
“We’re going to see more of a beef between engineering and the pilot,” teases Navia. “I look forward to fans seeing Erica play alongside Scotty more, because I love getting Erica off the bridge as much as I love being on the bridge with her.”
That love means also letting fans see the more difficult side of her character, especially as she works through the emotional fallout of the season 3 standout episode “Terrarium,” in which Ortegas survived only by bonding with a Gorn. “The PTSD and grief Ortegas experienced in season 3 is always underneath the things she does, just like everything she does. All those feelings are still there, and you’re going to see tension as she tries to figure out if it’s coming form a place of hurt, a place of anger, or places of things we haven’t seen yet,” Navia observes. “But that’s Star Trek, right? Finding yourself amid the chaos.”
Like Ortegas, La’an has been going through chaos for the past few seasons, dealing with her legacy as a relative of Khan Noonien Singh, recently becoming a Romulan, and navigating her relationships with Kirk and Spock. Difficult as it has been for her character, Chong has one word to describe the experience.
“Fun! It’s fun because I get to express myself more,” says Chong. “In season 1 especially, La’an was emotionally repressed. But season 2 opened her up a little bit, and then she had a romance with Spock in season three. And as I grow as an actor, I’m able to have more fun playing her.
“We’ll see where that ends up later this season,” Chong teases. “You’ll see where she stands in episode nine.”
Even beyond the promise of more development for La’an, Chong’s hint excites viewers because every episode of Strange New Worlds has been so different. But for showrunners Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers, that’s all part of the franchise, whether they’re making an episode about a courtroom hearing, a battle with aliens, or a musical.
Myers explains, “We start with Star Trek and we end with Star Trek. We look back at TOS and then The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine. All along the way, we make notes of the many times they tried and succeeded at doing different types of stories. I think the critical thing is, A) Make it Star Trek, and B) Make sure there is a genuine human story to perform.
“No matter how terrifying, scary, or funny the episodes are, we try to emphasize the heart of the people going through it. That’s the real trick, making sure that by the time the episode ends, the viewer feels like they’ve been on a human journey that they can understand on some level. They can understand why the characters do the things they do.”
Myers can talk about the process of making Strange New Worlds with such confidence because this five season journey is done, at least for the people making it. The fifth and final season, which won’t air until next year, is already “done and finished,” says Goldsman. “We were very fortunate, because a weird evolution of circumstance made it seem like season 4 would be our last. So we did everything that we really wanted to do in season 4. And then when we weren’t canceled, when we negotiated a reprieve to say goodbye.
“So the last season, abridged as it is, is meditation—a Strange New Worlds meditation, so it’s not very meditative—on how we say farewell. We have given it a lot of feeling, and a tremendous amount of heart, so we can say goodbye in the best possible way.”
Thoughtful as Goldsman’s observation is, Myers brings it back to the point, joking, “In fairness, we did the last season to keep Ethan and Paul from having to separate because they got too teary.” So while the full depth of Kirk and Spock’s friendship may be ahead of them, behind the scenes, they’re already more than shipmates.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds streams new episodes every Thursday on Paramount+.
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