Star Trek: Strange New Worlds just teased its fourth season in one of the most unexpected, imaginative ways possible. During Star Trek‘s universe Hall H presentation at San Diego Comic Con, Paramount+ not only confirmed that Season 4 of Strange New Worlds has finished shooting, but also reiterated that the series has been renewed for a fifth and final season. And as part of the next run of episodes – which are expected to drop in 2026 – Star Trek is going to a strange new world even the boldest sci-fi show of all time has never visited.
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Paramount revealed at Comic-Con that a puppet-themed episode will be released as part of Strange New Worlds Season 4, and revealed a preview of Captain Pike (Anson Mount) as a puppet thanks to the talented folks at Jim Henson’s Creature Shop. In the preview, puppet Pike searches for the rest of his crew and concludes they left him on the U.S.S. Enterprise for the new season.
On the stage at Hall H, producer Akiva Goldsman set up the episode: “There might have been an unexpected and terrible transporter accident. Which might have had some unexpected felt-like effects.” And we should have known it was coming. Back in 2024, Goldsman dropped a major hint to Variety, when asked if there was any genre Strange New Worlds couldn’t cope with: “As long as we’re in storytelling that is cogent and sure-handed, I’m not sure there is. Could it do Muppets? Sure. Could it do black and white, silent, slapstick? Maybe!”
This is obviously not the first time the Star Trek series has played with different genres and formats on the show. In Season 2, Strange New Worlds did a musical episode titled “Subspace Rhapsody“, in which the crew enters a mysterious “subspace fold” that in turn causes the crew to sing about their feelings as if they were Broadway stars. Tom Polce and Kay Hanley of the alternative rock band Letter to Cleo penned the original music for the episode, and though it was certainly an unconventional Star Trek story, “Subspace Rhapsody” was generally positively received.
While an entirely puppet-themed episode of Strange New Worlds is a similar gamble, like with “Subspace Rhapsody”, the series’s executive producers and showrunners Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers have enlisted the best in the business to pull it off. In addition to the iconic Jim Henson’s Creature Shop transforming the U.S.S. Enterprise crew into puppets, the episode will be helmed by director Jordan Canning, who’s directed several episodes of AppleTV+’s Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock series.
Star Trek Surprised Hall H Attendees with Advanced Screening
While we’ll have to wait until next season for Strange New Worlds’s all-puppet episode, Star Trek surprised its Hall H audience with a surprise advanced screening of this season’s latest episode “A Space Adventure Hour”, several days ahead of its streaming debut on July 31. Though it doesn’t goes as far to bring in musical numbers or puppets, “A Space Adventure Hour” also plays with genre. The episode, which was directed by Jonathan Frakes, is a murder mystery. Its official description is as follows “When La’An (Christina Chong) tests a prototype holodeck with a fictional case only she can solve, the consequences of failure get greater and greater, with the Enterprise hanging in the balance.”
Though the rest of us will have to wait until Thursday to watch “A Space Adventure Hour”, Paramount+ did reveal that they’re making the episode completely free to stream across the internet. From Thursday, July 31 through Wednesday, August 6th, “A Space Adventure Hour” will be free to watch Pluto TV, Paramount+ channels on Amazon, Apple and Roku, the Free Content Hub on Paramount+, and the Paramount+ YouTube channel.
Season 3 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds premiered on July 17th, and is currently streaming on Paramount+ with new episodes dropping weekly on Thursdays until its finale on September 11th.
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