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Star Trek: SNW EP Akiva Goldsman Discusses S01 Finale, Previews S02

Published Tue, 12 Jul 2022 08:37:18 -0500

by Tom Chang

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With Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season one in the books, there's a ton to unpack entering season two. Some of the major developments include how Captain Christopher Pike (Anson Mount) might be resigned to his fate given the events of "A Quality of Mercy" and where that will take him and the crew going forward. The closing shot also sees his first officer Una-Chin Riley (Rebecca Romijn) arrested by Starfleet authorities upon the discovery of her genetically-enhanced nature as an Illyrian. Executive producer and co-creator Akiva Goldsman opened up about breaking down the season one finale and its future entering season two.

How Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Ventures Closer to The Original Series

As SNW takes place 10 years before The Original Series, there's still a lot of ground to break. "Well, we have always been rubbing up against TOS, obviously, not just when it comes to chronological continuity," Goldsman said. "We've done a lot to identify ourselves with TOS, and that's the episodic nature of the storytelling and the genre-jumping that we do. So it felt like an intersection was owed, at least to ourselves. Very early on we thought, 'Well, how are we going to do that? Are we going to do that?' And you know, the 'Balance of Terror' episode is this classic moment, in a Trek-esque lens on society. So who's the other? What's the other look like? Is the other us? How do we not, dare I say, alienate those who are different? How do we alienate those who are different, you know? All the stuff that Roddenberry was talking about, which is really tragically equally, at least equally relevant today. So, there you have 'Balance of Terror' sort of sitting there as its own object. It's like an inflection point for our stuff too, and so we thought, 'Well, this is sort of fitting and kind of a delightful possibility,' and so off we went."

As far as Pike and his future, "I have said this before, but we wanted to convert it from curse to choice, right?," Goldsman said. "He's going to pick his future again, and so I guess that look at the end of the finale is, I'm now facing the audience and facing the coming season, parentheses and question mark, hopefully. There's a lot of what to do now that I know when my life is essentially over." When it comes to Christina Chong's La'an taking a leave of absence, "[Laughs] But, I will say this about Christina's character: Something that I was interested in seeing, in a Star Trek context, was trauma. So for La'an, having been raised under tremendous duress, who would she be and how she would be in Starfleet?" Goldsman said. "It was more about what kind of person that created, and it was less about Khan. You know, the Khan thing for me was a little bit more the question of, what is the legacy of the history of Star Trek, right?"

The EP broke down more about how Khan factored into Star Trek lore. "Also, there's this dark moment in the history of Star Trek that leads to the creation of the Federation," Goldsman said. "So what are the echoes of the darkness or at least of the, again, the fear or the trauma or the loss or the recovery or the resurrection that have also inhabited the lives of those who were born generations after? And so that's where the Khan thing came in. Then slowly but surely, you know, we started to create how people reacted to La'an, and that's a little more what's been leading us down some potential pursuit of her history, but not in the way you think." Goldsman teased what's to come with Romijn's character's future. "With Una's reveal that she is an Illyrian earlier in the season, and genetically modified, we want to touch on it in a real way next season. To actually bring to the foreground at least in a way that's fulsome, some exploration of marginalization. So this was our opportunity to begin that."

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