Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Bosses Looked to The Next Generation When Crafting That Cliffhanger

[Warning: The following contains spoilers for Season 2, Episode 10 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, "Hegemony." Read at your own risk!]

After the second season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds delighted fans with an abundance of playful comedic touches and romances both torrid and tortured, the action-packed finale episode, "Hegemony," took a turn for the intense with the return of the rampaging, reptilian Gorn — first introduced in "Arena," the classic episode of Star Trek: The Original Series, and given an even more formidable makeover in Strange New Worlds' debut season — putting the crew of the Enterprise on the brink of a potentially catastrophic intergalactic incident.

At the same time, the episode also put the budding relationships of both Captain Pike (Anson Mount) and Captain Batel (Melanie Scrofano) and Spock (Ethan Peck) and Nurse Chapel (Jess Bush) in crisis, and brought the surprise introduction of the beloved original series stalwart Montgomery Scott (Martin Quinn), unseasoned and not yet in full miracle-worker mode. All the ingredients culminated in a jaw-dropping, didn't-see-that-coming cliffhanger reminiscent of Star Trek: The Next Generation's stealthily deployed "The Best of Both Worlds" two-parter.

Before you put yourself in a stasis field for safekeeping until the third season opener comes around next year, TV Guide beamed in Strange New Worlds showrunners Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers to reveal how they crafted one of the all-time Trekkiest seasons of a Star Trek series yet while still pushing into frontiers the franchise has yet to explore and making things feel brand new again. 

I imagine it wasn't easy, given how warmly received the first season was, to walk into Season 2 saying, "OK, we set our own bar pretty high." Tell me about how you saw this season playing out from the beginning, and the fun surprises and discoveries that you had along the way in these 10 episodes.
Henry Alonso Myers: No one had even seen Season 1 when we started working on Season 2. Season 1 didn't even come out until we were partway through the Season 2 shoot. So we were just trying to make something that would make us happy, and the real big goal that we came into [it with] was we really liked the show that we did. 

We wanted to do it again, but now that we have had one season's worth of experience to know how to produce this, we're going to try the harder stuff that we were a little too challenged by to work in Season 1. So we wanted to do the same thing, only bigger. That was really the goal.

The blend of the episodic nature echoing the original two series and the ongoing character development really, once again, worked extremely well this season. Had you arced the season all out from the beginning, or did you make new decisions and pivots as you went?
Akiva Goldsman: We try to build the character stories at the front. We try to – we're not that good. But we're not just riffing. It evolves. Certainly, the story teaches you how to tell the story, but we know where we hope we're going to get to with each character in each relationship, and we set those goals at the beginning. 

It's a large cast and we want to serve those characters and those actors and the audience and canon and stories, so that requires a lot of forethought. So we certainly break the season, at least its serialized components in a weird way almost alongside breaking genre, and then we see how they marry. But the character arcs are always the most important thing and everything falls in line based on that.

I mean this entirely as a compliment: I feel as if each episode has, baked in its DNA, a subgenre that exists within Star Trek. You guys know Star Trek so well that you know how to look at a type of episode and then put your Strange New Worlds spin on that springboard. Is that part of the philosophy of the show?
Myers: One hundred percent. We're always very aware of exactly the types of episodes that we have seen on other shows that have worked and how we are going to try to approach it and either make it deeper or make it different, or in the case of the musical, the rare one where we were trying to pull off a thing that hadn't really been done, at least not in this style, on the show.

With the season finale in particular, "Hegemony," every bit of it felt like it had some ingredient or another of truly classic Star Trek, made into a new soufflé. Tell me a little bit about what you were thinking specifically for that episode going in. What was the concept up front — and then tell me about ending on a cliffhanger, which is, again, in fine Star Trek tradition.
Myers: We had a lot left over with the Gorn, and doing the Gorn well we knew would take a long time; it takes a long time to design the characters and do all of the visual effects work. And one of the reasons it comes later in the season is because it just took that time to build. We've had two seasons worth of work, essentially, to get to this episode, and then the classic turn where we reveal that this is one part of a two-parter is a deep Star Trek moment.

It's one of my favorite moments. "The Best of Both Worlds" was the one that kept coming into my head because, boy, I don't know a single person who doesn't remember that moment when Riker says, "Fire!" at the very end of the season, and you're like, "Oh my God — I don't know how this is going to end!" We really wanted to have that same "holy crap" feeling, like, "What's going to happen?" To have that for the audience. And the great news was that the Gorn was going to be so much work that it was worth it to do at least two episodes of it.

One of the things that I really appreciated was after this string of lightness and comedic touch that you integrated into so many of the episodes in both seasons, especially after such a buoyant experience with the musical, this one gets real serious, real quick — and stays that way. Tell me about the tone and the stakes and what you wanted to say with this finale for the season after having so much fun.
Myers: Well, the weird thing for me is the things I love… I love writing scenes where people make people cry. I love scenes that make people laugh. I love scenes where you blow stuff up and do big battle sequences. And so those are three things that don't always click together. The greatest thing about this show that my partner designed in the pilot is that it can be all of those things. So as a writer, I will say that that's what this season is about — you really get a chance to try all that stuff.

Is it a coincidence that this finale, like last season's, introduces a legacy character — Scotty, this time around — in a very fun way?
Goldsman: Coincidence is a strong word. We understand that we are driving inexorably towards the actual Original Series era, and so we want to be thoughtful about where our characters — those that we know, some of whom we haven't met, obviously — would be at these moments before they have become the folks we know from the original series. So we like that. We try to use it sparingly, but we do. 

We are aware of the larger galaxy, dare I say, of characters that are out there and we think about them and wonder where they are and what they're doing. And if there's a right moment to imagine one into the show, we do.

Tell me about finding your Scotty in Martin Quinn.
Myers: We knew that we had a great opportunity here to find a Scottish actor to play this. Lots of people have played Scotty over the years. He is Scottish, and so we wanted to find someone who had that, but also, the unusual thing, especially for this show, is we are not trying to make the actors do the thing that they do later. We're trying to make them not know who they will be, to give them an actual journey that a human being can recognize where they have moments of frailty. They have moments of fear. They have moments of they don't know who they'll be. They don't have a sense that they're going to succeed. 

So part of the joy of that was finding someone who could hit all the notes that we knew would eventually be Scotty, but not there now and not yet be that person. So a lot of that is funny, because we were essentially trying to [get to] the three moments I was talking about earlier: You want to find someone who can deliver a scene that can make you cry; you want to find someone who can deliver a scene that can make you laugh; and you want to find someone who can do action. In a way, that is as much Scotty as anybody.

I hope you're feeling gratified about the huge investment the fans have put into the different romances that the show has, and two of them in particular — Pike and Batel, and Spock and Chapel — come to a head in the finale, and then there's been the lingering La'an and Kirk romance that people have really gotten into. Tell me about having an even stronger romantic element of Star Trek than perhaps previous incarnations have had, and what it's meant to see the fans really embrace it.
Goldsman: Well, I think it's actually just a byproduct. Obviously, both Henry and I are interested in human relationships. Having said that, I think it's the byproduct of modern storytelling Star Trek just hadn't quite necessarily caught up with yet, which is trap a bunch of people on a ship in space. They're going to start smooching, and that's fun and interesting, and part of the things that we talk about and relate to in entertainment and story is that it's a significant part of the human experience. 

Attraction, love, heartbreak, how we combine, how we recombine, how we survive in close quarters while all these things go on — that's untapped story potential, which is just great news for us because it turns out that audiences today are more interested in actually understanding how people feel about each other and maybe less so, or not necessarily, about who Kirk is kissing this week. And so it's our version of that. Again, it's just taking a modern lens and an element of classic Trek and seeing it through this lens, and it just creates more nuance and more opportunity.

Have you seen the actors' performances inspire, amongst your writers' room, going further with those plotlines? Because you've definitely landed on some great chemistry combinations between your romantic leads.
Goldsman: We are always aware of how the actors are, what they're bringing to it, and we're always trying to write to it in every possible way, in that way. We're very open with them about asking them things. We say, "What were the special skills at the bottom of your resume?" Anything that they know they can do that we don't know, we want to know and we try to incorporate it. And that also goes for kinds of character performances that they may have done in Season 1 — that we can give them the opportunity to do something else in Season 2, and so on.

Have you guys written the opener for Season 3 — at least in your head, if not on your laptops?
Goldsman: There is an opener for Season 3.

Anything you want to tease? Don't tell us exactly what happens! I know you creators love to reveal everything ahead of time. [Laughs.]
Goldsman: Not me!

Myers: I will just stress that this show, this season that you're getting to enjoy now, was done a year ago and there was a lot of time to spend thinking about where the future would be. So that's all I'll say.

As we get deeper and deeper into the weeds of you guys fleshing out these characters while also keeping an eye on the canon and continuity that we know lies ahead, what is your overall philosophy of where you can bend and where you might even decide to break what's been set down?
Goldsman: It's entirely improvisational, and what I mean by that is we try to adhere to canon whenever possible besides very, very, very, very intentionally sliding the timeline of the Eugenics Wars and World War III. But we try to hold fast and we won't let it get in the way of really great storytelling.

Myers: The only thing that I will say we try to do is we believe that this is not a show being made in the '60s. This is a show being made now. People have an expectation for men and women that is very different, and we really try to make [the show address] "What would Trek be like today if it was made for today's audience?"

That's really what we're trying to bring in. We want to make sure that all the characters are deep in that sense, and that's really the only change that we offer is that we're making it for modern audiences, and we want it to feel like it's been made contemporary.

Have you looked way, way ahead in the future — and hopefully there are many seasons left to come — and do you know in your heads how the transition from the Pike Enterprise to the Kirk Enterprise plays out? Do you have an endgame in mind?
Goldsman: God, no!

Myers: I don't know if I've even pitched this to Akiva: I do have an endgame that I've thought of, but we haven't discussed it yet, so can't even say that it's going to happen, but it's a good one. I'll tell you that.

Seasons 1 and 2 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds are now streaming on Paramount+.