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Are We Excited for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds?
Let’s see if the Star Trek fandom can give the Star Wars fandom a run for the money when it comes to toxicity! I’m kidding. That’s impossible.
CBS announced that it had given a series order to Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, a new show that will take place on the starship Enterprise in the years prior to James T. Kirk coming aboard as captain. The spinoff will be available to stream on CBS All Access and will, according to co-creator and executive producer Akiva Goldsman, will follow more closely to the original Star Trek in structure and tone than other spinoffs.
“We’re going to try to harken back to some classical Trek values, to be optimistic, and to be more episodic,” Goldsman told Variety. “Obviously, we will take advantage of the serialized nature of character and story building. But I think our plots will be more closed-ended than you’ve seen in either Discovery or Picard”
The Star Trek canon includes the Original Series, an animated series, six spin-off television series, the film franchise, and further adaptations in several media. As of July 2016, the franchise had generated $10 billion in revenue, making it one of the highest-grossing media franchises of all time.
“I imagine it to be closer to the original series than even DS9,” Goldsman says of Strange New Worlds.” “We can really tell closed-ended stories. We can find ourselves in episodes that are tonally of a piece.” Of the type of episode that Strange New Worlds might attempt that Discovery or Picard might not, Goldsman says, “It’s hard to do a shore-leave episode in the middle of a long, serialized arc.”
“I think one thing that we always struggled with [as fans] was that Kirk is heartbroken at the loss of Edith Keeler in The City on the Edge of Forever and has to be just fine the next week,” Goldsman says. “I think what we would want to do is keep the characters having moved through and recognizing the experiences they’ve had in previous episodes, but to be able to tell contained, episodic stories.”
Strange New Worlds will spin off from Season 2 of Discovery and the new series will include Anson Mount, Rebecca Romijn and Ethan Peck reprising their roles as Capt. Pike, Number One and Mister Spock, respectively.
Peck believes that the Spock of Strange New Worlds will have matured since his Discovery days. “It’ll be a whole new challenge for me as an actor portraying Spock because you’ve had this transformation,” Peck shared with Variety. “I can’t wait to see what we explore.”
“Last year, I basically told myself I was gonna do as many conventions as possible to connect to the fan base and campaign for a spinoff show for Anson and Rebecca and I,” Peck went on to say. “We all got along so well, and we all loved the content so much and the message of Star Trek.”
No word on story details or production timeline but the excitement is apparent from those involved. The real question is how the fans will respond. What is your anticipation level? Thoughts on Discovery and Picard?