Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Director Valerie Weiss Explains Why the Illyrians are the Heroes of Season 2’s Legal Drama (Exclusive)

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 went to court in its second episode, “Ad Astra per Asperum.” The episode resolved the cliffhanger from Star Trek: Strange New Worlds‘ first season finale, in which Starfleet arrested Commander Una Chin-Reilly (Rebecca Romjin) upon discovering she’s a genetically-modified Illyrian. Such modifications are illegal in the United Federation of Planets, and Una hiding her nature from Starfleet for years lands her in front of a court martial tribunal. Captain Pike (Anson Mount) seeks out an old friend of Una’s, the Illyrian civil rights lawyer Neera (Yetide Bakari) to come to Una’s defense. Though tensions are high, Neera wins the case by portraying Una as a refugee who sought sanctuary in the Federation.

It’s a powerful episode with timely themes and the latest in a line of courtroom dramas set in the Star Trek Universe. Valerie Weiss directed the episode and ComicBook.com had the opportunity to talk to her about how that legal drama lineage influenced the episode, as well as how her background as a scientist helped form the narrative’s point of view. Here’s what she had to say:

Jamie Lovett, ComicBook.com: “Ad Astra per Aspera” is a courtroom drama set in the usual Star Trek sci-fi. The courtroom drama is a very popular television genre on its own, but Star Trek has a history with it. When I spoke to Yetide Bakari, the actress who plays Neera, she brought up the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Measure of a Man” as an example. Did you look back on those Star Trek legal drama episodes when you were preparing to film this episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds? Did you avoid them to make sure this episode felt appropriately modern?

Valerie Weiss: No, definitely didn’t avoid it. You have to understand where you’re coming from. Especially if you do want to put your stamp on it, you need to know what the foundations are. Luckily these foundations are brilliant, that’s why they’ve stood the test of time. I watched “The Menagerie,” and “Court “Martial,” and “The Measure of a Man,” and they were just fabulous. They were so great. I was like, “I have to stop watching… I could watch everything, but now, I need to get to work. There’s a lot of work to do here.”

It was just important to watch and get them in my bones and understand the ethos and also get great ideas like having the lie detector instrument that they all put their hands on and the floppy disc that goes into the computer when they read the transcripts. And it was really fun. I was looking for elements we could add that make it timeless but also, like you said, it’s a fresh, modern story, and unfortunately, one that we have to keep revisiting because humans don’t really learn from history. But there are a lot of modern aspects to this like genetic modification. It was exciting to get to put my stamp on something so timeless in this franchise.

Did it take a certain finesse or a nuance to deal with the real-world resonance of this story? I talked about this with Yetide Bakari as well. In “The Measure of a Man,” there are things that reflect our reality, but it being about an android makes it feel more sci-fi, more hypothetical. Here, Una is depicted as an immigrant, or refugee, which is a very real thing we’re dealing with. What’s it take to capture that in a way that is exciting and compelling to the audience without making it feel like you’re sensationalizing something without giving it the respect it deserves?

I think it’s this tethering that has to happen between the past and the present and the future. The injustice that’s happened — I guess it’s still happening in the current day of the episode — but really, they’re revisiting a past trauma that happened to the relationship when the Federation came in and separated Illyrians and non-Illyrians. You have to not let the current characters of Una and Neera be plagued or limited by that, yet show the strength of who they are today.

I think that’s why it feels so watchable. They’re not hemmed in or made lesser in terms of what they want out of life because of a society that tried to tell them they were lesser. And so it’s a story with heroes that we want to watch who feel fully actualized, who are fighting for something, despite the fact that society told them that they shouldn’t or that they don’t deserve what they have. I think that’s the engine and energy that propels this episode as you watch it. I think that’s the key to visiting these issues that are very modern and things that we’re dealing with today, but not from a sad perspective, but a powerful perspective of, “let’s change it.” No one’s going to tell us who we are. No one’s going to stop us and we’re going to fight and we’re going to do it together as a team.

Given everything you just said, when read this script and got a sense of the weight of it, was there any part of you that wished for one of the lighter episodes of the show, or were you immediately excited by that challenge? 

100%, I loved it. I mean, I used to be a scientist, so for me, thinking about big concepts and ideas about the world we live in. there’s so much repair to do. If we’re not making the world a better place, we’re just taking up space on an Earth that already is very crowded. And so for me to get to do something that really can change minds and hearts through this incredible writing, and the script by Dana Horgan was just a gift, and then to get to do it through beautiful characterizations is exactly what I love to do as a filmmaker. But then having moments of lightness with Spock and Pasalk, that’s great because you need that contrast. If you’re going to have something serious and emotional, it’s that much more poignant if you let the audience have a release and a contrast to that. And so I think those moments were so well distributed throughout the episode that it really drove home the emotional impact and the philosophical and political impact even more.

Speaking of Pasalk, played by Graeme Somerville, I think a lot of viewers may be wondering, what is his deal? He looms over the episode even though he says nothing until near the end. How did he figure into the calculations of this episode for you?

He has such a strong presence. The casting really provided a lot, and then I really wanted moments where he was just so intimidating to Batel, like when she goes to stand up and he just takes two fingers and stops her from standing. It’s infuriating, and it’s scary, quite frankly, to have that person who you can’t appeal to on an emotional level, it’s purely logic, but honestly, he’s doing what he’s supposed to do. That’s his job.

Legally and logically, they did break the law. Until Neera comes up with that great closing argument, it is a losing case because they’re wrong. They’re maybe not politically or ethically wrong, but by the letter of the law, they do lose. And that’s why Neera’s line, [“A law does not make something just’], I think that’s why it’s going viral because that’s true. It’s up to us citizens to fight and have a really important debate in our judicial system to make the laws reflect the society we want to live in. And hopefully, this episode goes far to inspire people to do that. And so he is a great foil and counterpart in this argument. If you didn’t have a strong antagonist, then you wouldn’t have a strong episode. So I think he’s great.

What was it like introducing and guiding Neera through the episode? Because she comes off strong in the opening of the case with her questioning of April, and I feel like without the right direction, she could have come off as a villain, but she doesn’t. How did you approach her depiction in the episode? 

I think there were two tracks that we needed to be tracking with Neera. There’s the personal journey that she’s on as well as her professional journey and while she’s there, they’re intrinsically linked. We talked a lot about her personal journey. She’s got real hurt. It’s so hard to confront a friend or a sibling about an old trauma, an old rift to your relationship. It’s harder for her to do that than it is to go win this case, quite frankly, and it’s just as important, so we talked a lot about what that vulnerability looked like and when it would surface and how Rebecca and Una would respond to that.

So there was that, and then there was also, okay, let’s make sure your arc from the beginning to the end really is variable because we don’t want to see the very strong Neera from the beginning and just keep hitting that same note the whole time, and so really there was a reluctance to even go at first, or at least that’s what she put out there with Pike, and then a bit of an insecurity about being in the Federation. So really just modulating the vulnerability versus the strength, but also pulling on the personal insecurity that she may have felt about their relationship and bringing that into it when it needed to be, I think is what made it such an interesting performance.

You mentioned that you have a science background you mentioned. While the Illyrian’s genetic enhancements are mostly used as a metaphor here, genetic modification is something that’s beginning to become more of a reality for us, and the pace of technology these days is incredible. How much did your knowledge of science and the scientific community influence how you portrayed the situation in this episode? Because it seems to me there’s a lot of nuanced given to the situation with the Illyrians. 

To be honest, we should look at everything all the time with nuance. There are two sides to every story and unfortunately, so often just a blanket law or rule or statement is put in play because people don’t take the time to understand it and evaluate it and make a specific choice about a specific situation. That’s something really unfortunate about the world we live in. Because of the fact that I really understood what genetic modification means and what adaptation means historically throughout humanity and evolution, I think I never felt intimidated by the subject matter. In fact, rather than these terms feeling scary or instantly things that we should prohibit, I took a more balanced view and I actually thought it was so cool that this whole Illyrian culture has the ability to adapt by genetic modification.

I mean, we’re destroying our earth right now. I do tons of fundraising for the World Wildlife Fund, and I’m on the Sustainable Future Committee for the DGA. It’s so important to me. Soon we’re going to have an Earth that’s not as habitable as it is now, and so you have a race of humans that can actually adapt and live in places where others can’t? That’s a positive thing. And here we are denigrating them and punishing them. So I instantly went to that place in my mind of celebrating the Illyrians as heroes, not just saying, “Oh, no, they’re equal to all of us. We should respect that.” It was like, “No, we need them. They’re awesome. And you were treating them like that.”

And so I feel that way about anybody who has a different point of view that balances the world we live in, and I think I saw that, felt that, and celebrated that in my own storytelling, and I think it comes through in the costumes. That’s why I wanted Bernadette to have all the extras in the Illyrian scene in bright colors. They’re celebrating their achievements and how awesome they are. That perspective, I think I was able to bring into it because science doesn’t intimidate me and it doesn’t make me make quick assumptions that just because it’s potentially artificial or not natural that it’s bad.

How to watch Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds stars Anson Mount as Christopher Pike, Rebecca Romijn as Una Chin-Riley, Ethan Peck as Spock, Jess Bush as Christine Chapel, Christina Chong as La’An Noonien-Singh, Celia Rose Gooding as Nyota Uhura, Melissa Navia as Erica Ortegas and Babs Olusanmokun as Joseph M’Benga. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 also brings back special guest star Paul Wesley as James T. Kirk and adds Carol Kane in the recurring role of Pelia.

CBS Studios, Secret Hideout, and Roddenberry Entertainment produced Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2. Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers are co-showrunners. Alex Kurtzman, Akiva Goldsman, Jenny Lumet, Henry Alonso Myers, Aaron Baiers, Heather Kadin, Frank Siracusa, John Weber, Rod Roddenberry, and Trevor Roth serve as executive producers.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 debuts new episodes on Thursdays on Paramount+ in the United States, the U.K., Australia, Latin America, Brazil, France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. The second season will stream on Paramount+ in South Korea, with a premiere date still to be announced. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds airs on Bell Media’s CTV Sci-Fi Channel and streams on Crave in Canada and SkyShowtime in the Nordics, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, and Central and Eastern Europe.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 1 is also streaming on Paramount+. It is also available as home media on Blu-ray, DVD, and 4k UHD.