Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Creator Says Series WIll Be Optimistic and More Episodic

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds will highlight classic tenets of the Star Trek franchise. That's according to co-creator Akiva Goldsman. CBS All Access announced the new series on Friday with a straight to series order. The Star Trek: Discovery spinoff sees the returns of Captain Pike (Anson Mount), Number One (Rebecca Romijn), and Science Officer Spock (Ethan Peck), the USS Enterprise crew from the second season of Star Trek: Discovery. Goldsman, who also wrote the series premiere episode of Strange New Worlds, tells Variety that the Star Trek prequel will focus on certain storytelling signatures from Star Trek: The Original Series.

"We're going to try to harken back to some classical Trek values, to be optimistic, and to be more episodic," Goldsman says. "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. I imagine it to be closer to the original series than even DS9. We can really tell closed-ended stories. We can find ourselves in episodes that are tonally of a piece... It's hard to do a shore-leave episode in the middle of a long, serialized arc."

That isn't to say that the characters won't have emotional journeys throughout the show. "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."

Goldman's comments echo those made by series star Anson Mount in a 2019 interview with ComicBook.com. He expressed what he thought the then-hypothetical Pike spinoff could offer the Star Trek franchise. "My pace in television is usually serialized, rather than episodic or procedural. I don't feel that we had seen enough Trek with longer storylines, with more connective tissue between episodes," he explained. "That said, I think that to do a retro Enterprise show, it almost wants to be episodic, big idea of the week kind of thing. Not that there can't be character development. There was in the original. But yeah, it just feels to me like it would fit well into a more of an episodic structure, like the original and like The Next Generation."

Fans can see the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds crew in action in Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Short Treks. Both series are streaming now on CBS All Access.