Strange New Worlds’ Showrunners Talk Fifth Season End, Suggest Continuing With New TOS Show – TrekMovie.com

Last week, Paramount+ renewed Star Trek: Strange New Worlds for a fifth and final season. Now, for the first time, the showrunners are talking in pubic about how they plan to wrap things up. They also suggest what could come next.

A five-year plan

Over the weekend, Strange New Worlds executive producers Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers attended a season 3 premiere event at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York. During the panel discussion, both offered their thoughts last week’s announcement. Myers began by saying they have approached each season as if it could be their last:

Henry Alonso Myers: “One of the things you learn as a TV writer is that all shows end; it’s just a question of when. So you don’t look at it like tomorrow it’s gone… So the whole point is to go out each day trying to do it as well as you can and make it as good as you can. Don’t think about, ‘Oh, maybe I’ll get another season tomorrow.’ Like, really go for it. And we have treated every season like that. It is a blessing to be able to do five seasons. The original show got to do three, and this is more than that, which is amazing.”

He also talked about how the end of the show wasn’t really an end:

Henry Alonso Myers: “So the real thing for us that I think is important is that we get to do the show and the ending. And it’s not really an ending, but the ending to the series as good as possible–as good as we would like it as fans of this genre, as fans of Star Trek. We want to make a show that we would like.”

Akiva Goldsman then weighed in, getting a bit more specific about how they plan to wrap things up:

Akiva Goldsman: “We made a promise to ourselves that we would arc the show into [Star Trek: The Original Series]. And so we sort of thought, ‘Well, five year mission, okay, can we do five years?’ And we are really doing almost five—well four and a little more than half [season 5 is set for six episodes instead of the usual ten]. And we needed to be able to tell that story. Because right now [the characters] are in mid-stage development. How do they become who they are? What happens to some of them? Those are questions that we knew we needed to answer and promised to answer. And so that’s our five-year plan.”

Picking up on what Henry said about how the characters’ stories aren’t ending, Goldsman teased they could end the show only to keep going with something new:

Akiva Goldsman: “And then we run into TOS. [Switching to conspiratorial tone] But they’re not dying. And we have those sets…”

Goldsman is suggesting the story of these characters could continue, which potentially could be a new series set during James T. Kirk’s five-year mission on the Enterprise. Or, he could even be thinking bigger, suggesting a movie (or movies). As of the third season, the cast of Strange New Worlds already includes several TOS characters, including Kirk, Spock, Uhura, Scotty, Chapel, and M’Benga (along with some familiar guests). It wouldn’t be surprising to see Dr. McCoy, Sulu, and Chekov show up before they wrap up the fifth season.

For now, the cast and executive producers are busy in production on the fourth season, which will likely wrap up around the time season 3 debuts on Paramount+, July 17. The fifth season should go into production by the end of the year. As of now, the only other Star Trek show in active production is Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, which has already completed filming season 1 and plans to start on season 2 later this year.

Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers at the Tribeca Film Festival in NYC, June 14 (Photo Marina Kravchuk)

Thanks to Julian Brown from Strange New Pod for assistance with this article.