Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

• Anson Mount as Christopher Pike:
  Captain of the USS Enterprise.[1] To help develop the character beyond his small role in the original series, the writers took Mount's own leadership style as inspiration. Co-showrunner Akiva Goldsman said Mount likes to find consensus with a group, and this led to a table being added to Pike's quarters in the series where he can get the crew together and cook for them.[3]
• Rebecca Romijn as Una Chin-Riley / Number One: First officer of the Enterprise and second-in-command to Pike[1][4]
• Ethan Peck as Spock: Science officer aboard the Enterprise[1]
• Babs Olusanmokun as M'Benga: A doctor aboard the Enterprise[4]
• Christina Chong as La'an Noonien-Singh: A relative of Ricardo Montalbán's Star Trek villain Khan Noonien Singh.[4][5]
• Celia Rose Gooding as Nyota Uhura: A cadet on the Enterprise[4]
• Jess Bush as Christine Chapel: A nurse on the Enterprise[4]
• Melissa Navia as Erica Ortegas: Helmsman of the Enterprise. Her surname is a reference to the original Star Trek pitch which included a navigator named Jose Ortegas.[4][6][7]

• Bruce Horak as Hemmer: An Aenar officer aboard the Enterprise. Aenar are an albino subspecies of Andorians that are generally depicted as blind, and Horak is blind in one eye with limited sight in the other.[4]

Additionally, Paul Wesley has been cast in the role of James T. Kirk for the second season.[8]

The first season finale of the series Star Trek: Discovery set-up the second season by introducing the USS Enterprise, the starship from Star Trek: The Original Series.[18] Then co-showrunner Aaron Harberts wanted to explore Enterprise Captain Christopher Pike, feeling that he had not been seen much in Star Trek previously. Harberts was less interested in exploring another Enterprise crew member, Spock, given his many appearances throughout previous iterations of the franchise,[19] and was reluctant to have an actor other than Leonard Nimoy or Zachary Quinto portray the character.[20] However, Spock was confirmed to be included in the season in April 2018.[21] That month, Anson Mount was cast as Pike,[22] and he revealed in July that Rebecca Romijn would portray original series character Number One.[23] Mount and Romijn both signed one year deals for the series as part of an attempt by the producers to closer align Discovery with the wider Star Trek continuity.[24] In August, Ethan Peck was announced as portraying Spock in the season.[25]

The series stars Anson Mount as Christopher Pike, Rebecca Romijn as Number One, and Ethan Peck as Spock, reprising their roles from Star Trek: Discovery.

In June 2018, after becoming sole showrunner of Star Trek: Discovery, Alex Kurtzman signed a five-year overall deal with CBS Television Studios to expand the Star Trek franchise beyond Discovery to several new series, miniseries, and animated series.[26] After Mount was revealed to be leaving Discovery with the second season finale, fans of that series began calling—including through online petitions—for him to reprise the role of Pike in a spin-off series set on the Enterprise, alongside Romijn as Number One and Peck as Spock. Mount and Peck both responded positively to the idea,[27][28] though Mount said his return would involve "a lot of creative conversations."[29] Kurtzman also expressed interest in the idea, saying, "The fans have been heard. Anything is possible in the world of Trek. I would love to bring back that crew more than anything."[30]

At the 2019 San Diego Comic-Con, Kurtzman announced that the second season of companion series Star Trek: Short Treks would include three shorts starring the Enterprise actors. He said this was a way to bring those characters and actors back after Discovery jumped into the future for its third season, but this would not preclude a spin-off series featuring the Enterprise cast from being made.[31] In January 2020, Kurtzman said active discussions regarding a spin-off series featuring the actors had begun, and he had been "tossing ideas back and forth" with Akiva Goldsman who already served as an executive producer on other Star Trek series. Kurtzman said he would prefer for a potential spin-off starring the Enterprise cast to be an ongoing series rather than a miniseries, and said it could explore the seven years between Discovery's second season and the accident that seriously injures Pike in The Original Series.[32] Kurtzman soon stated that two unannounced Star Trek series were in development for CBS All Access,[33] and the spin-off was reported to be one of them in March.[34][35]

CBS All Access officially ordered Star Trek: Strange New Worlds to series in May 2020, with Mount, Romijn, and Peck confirmed to be reprising their roles.[1] Kurtzman and Goldsman were confirmed to be executive producing alongside their fellow Star Trek producer Jenny Lumet, Henry Alonso Myers, Heather Kadin of Kurtzman's production company Secret Hideout, Frank Siracusa, John Weber, and Rod Roddenberry (the son of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry) and Trevor Roth of Roddenberry Entertainment. Aaron Baiers, Akela Cooper, and Davy Perez were set as co-executive producers.[1][2] Goldsman wrote the script for the series' first episode based on a story he wrote with Kurtzman and Lumet, and was set as showrunner alongside Myers. Goldsman would also remain an executive producer on Star Trek: Picard.[1] Myers joked that "The Cage" (1965), the first pilot episode of The Original Series which stars the same main characters, could be considered the pilot for Strange New Worlds as well, making the series "the longest pilot-to-series pickup in the history of television."[36]

In September 2020, ViacomCBS announced that CBS All Access would be expanded and rebranded as Paramount+ in March 2021.[37] A second season of Strange New Worlds was reported to be in development in November 2021,[38] which frequent Star Trek director Jonathan Frakes confirmed a month later.[39] Paramount+ officially announced the second season order in January 2022.[40]

Goldsman had written the first episode by the time of the series' official announcement in May 2020,[1] and said the series would be more optimistic and episodic than Discovery and Picard, a style closer to the original series. He did note that the series would continue to take advantage of serialized storytelling to develop character arcs.[42]

A writers room for the series was underway by July, with stories for 10 episodes already broken by the end of that month.[43] In August, Kurtzman said "we have actually been able to get quite ahead in scripts" for the series due to the COVID-19 pandemic preventing the start of production.[44] He felt what audiences had responded to when watching the characters on Discovery was their "relentless optimism", and said the spin-off would explore how Pike remains an optimistic leader despite learning about his tragic future during the second season of Discovery.[41] Myers elaborated on the series' approach to episodic storytelling, explaining that the writers wanted to "bring a modern character sensibility" to "Star Trek in the way Star Trek stories were always told. It’s a ship and it’s traveling to strange new worlds and we are going to tell big ideas science fiction adventures in an episodic mode. So we have room to meet new aliens, see new ships, visit new cultures."[45]

Anson Mount, Rebecca Romijn, and Ethan Peck reprise their respective roles from Star Trek: Discovery in the spin-off.[34][1] Their characters were first introduced in "The Cage", which starred Jeffrey Hunter as Pike, Leonard Nimoy as Spock, and Majel Barrett as Number One.[22][42] Peck said the characters will evolve in Strange New Worlds from their portrayals in Discovery to be closer to their original incarnations, which he described as a "whole new challenge".[42] Perez described Pike and Number One as the "parental figures" of the Enterprise, particularly to Spock since he is "not the wise, old Spock from The Original Series, [he is] still finding himself".[45] Babs Olusanmokun, Christina Chong, Celia Rose Gooding, Jess Bush, and Melissa Navia were announced as additional series regulars with the start of filming.[2] Their roles were revealed in September 2021, with Bush cast in Barrett's other original series role of Nurse Christine Chapel, Gooding taking over the role of Nyota Uhura from Nichelle Nichols, and Olusanmokun replacing Booker Bradshaw as Dr. M'Benga. Chong and Navia were respectively cast as new characters La'an Noonien-Singh and Erica Ortegas,[4][46] and Bruce Horak was revealed to be cast in the recurring guest role of Hemmer.[47]

In March 2022, Paul Wesley was revealed to have been cast in the role of James T. Kirk for the second season, taking over the role from The Original Series star William Shatner.[8]

Design work for the series had begun by August 2020,[45] with Jonathan Lee serving as production designer.[3] Myers said they looked for ways to keep continuity with past Star Trek series and wanted to "keep some of the amazing design elements from the 60s that were incorporated in [The Original Series while] updating it for a modern audience."[45] Goldsman elaborated that the costumes and sets would keep continuity with Discovery, but would be adjusted slightly for the new show to bring it closer to The Original Series;[48] for instance, the Enterprise bridge set for Strange New Worlds is more compact than the one built for Discovery to bring it closer to the size of the original series' set.[3] Goldsman described this approach as doing one more design iteration on top of what had been done for Discovery.[49] The sets were designed to function like a practical starship, with moving components and pre-programmed monitor graphics that reacted to the actors on set.[3] Legacy Effects provided alien prosthetics for the series, with new alien species introduced in almost every episode.[50]

The series' opening titles begin with a "start-up sequence" of the USS Enterprise with Mount giving the "Space: the final frontier..." monologue that was also used for Star Trek: The Original Series and Star Trek: The Next Generation. This is then followed by visuals of the Enterprise flying through various interstellar locations, similar to the "exploratory-style title sequence" from Star Trek: Voyager.[51]

With the series' announcement in May 2020, Goldsman said he was unsure when production would begin due to the COVID-19 pandemic,[42] but Kurtzman stated on August 12 that filming would take place in 2021.[44] Pre-production began on August 24,[52][53] with Kurtzman saying in October that filming would be a "systematised, militarised operation" due to the pandemic. The crew experienced this approach to filming first working on Discovery. He elaborated that filming would function in "pods" to minimize the potential spread of the virus, and added that, due to the pandemic delays, the series would begin filming with more completed scripts than is usual for Star Trek.[54]

Filming began on February 18, 2021,[55][56] at CBS Stages Canada in Mississauga, Ontario, under the working title Lily and Isaac.[55] Despite feeling that he was not a "visual director", Goldsman wanted to establish the tone of the series by directing the first episode because he had been thinking about it since he started working on Discovery. Goldsman worked with cinematographer Glen Keenan,[49] who was the lead director of photography for the series after serving the same role on the second and third seasons of Discovery.[57] Magdalena Górka also served as a cinematographer for the first season.[58] Keenan brought back Cooke Optics' Anamorphic/i Special Flare lenses from Discovery, and also used the Anamorphic/i Full Frame Plus SF lenses. Coincidentally, cinematographer Philip Lanyon chose to use the full frame format lenses as well on the fourth season of Discovery around the same time that Keenan selected them for this series.[57]

Due to pandemic restrictions, scenes on the bridge were the only time that the whole main cast could film together. Mount played music on set those days to help them bond.[3] Paramount+ constructed a video wall to allow for virtual production on the series as well as the fourth season of Discovery, based on the StageCraft technology that was developed for the Disney+ series The Mandalorian.[59][60] The new virtual set was built in Toronto by visual effects company Pixomondo, and features a 270-degree, 70 feet (21 m) by 30 feet (9.1 m) horseshoe-shaped LED volume with additional LED panels in the ceiling to aid with lighting. The technology uses the game engine software Unreal Engine to display computer-generated backgrounds on the LED screens in real-time during filming, which visual effects supervisor Jason Zimmerman noted was especially useful for creating the planets that are visited in the series;[60] additional filming for the series to support these visual effects took place in New Mexico.[61] Zimmerman oversaw the installation and use of the volume remotely from Los Angeles.[60] It took at least four months to create each background that is displayed on the video wall, including the Enterprise's engineering set which Myers said was unlike any engineering set created for Star Trek thanks to the new technology.[50]

Goldsman finished filming the pilot episode by early April 2021, except for scenes requiring large groups of extras that could not be filmed due to limits on the number of people allowed on set during the pandemic. He hoped to finish those scenes soon after.[48] The showrunners encouraged the other directors to bring a unique look and tone to highlight the series' episodic approach, with Meyers saying "sometimes it's funny, sometimes it's horrific, sometimes it's dramatic, and sometimes it's sad".[50] Later in April, a guest actor for the series flew from Vancouver to Toronto before testing positive for COVID-19. They had been in contact with a few crewmembers during a costume fitting before the positive test was returned, and those people were quarantined per the studio's protocols. Filming for the series was not impacted by the incident,[62] with frequent Star Trek director Maja Vrvilo beginning production on the second episode by April 26.[13] Filming for the seventh episode took place in the week of May 31 with Sydney Freeland directing, followed by Amanda Row directing the eighth episode in the week of May 7.[14] Filming for the season finale began on July 7,[63] with Chris Fisher directing.[15] Principal production concluded on July 24,[64] with additional photography for the season taking place later and wrapping on October 11.[65]

Filming for the second season began on February 1, 2022,[66][67] again under the working title Lily and Isaac.[68] By March 14, Row had begun directing the third episode of the season.[16] Jonathan Frakes travelled to Toronto during the week of April 4 to direct an episode for the season, after he was prevented from working on the first season by changes to his directing schedule on Picard caused by the pandemic.[17] Filming for the sixth episode had begun by the week of April 11.[50] Production for the second season is expected to last until June 29.[67]

By December 2020, Discovery and Picard composer Jeff Russo had discussed Strange New Worlds with Kurtzman, including how it "should be treated musically", but whether Russo would be involved in the spin-off's score had yet to be determined at that point.[69] In February 2022, Russo was revealed to have written the main titles music for the series, with Nami Melumad composing the rest of the score. By the time of the announcement, Melumad—who previously composed the music for Star Trek: Prodigy and an episode of Short Treks—had been recording her music for several months at the Eastwood Scoring Stage at Warner Bros. Studios in California.[70][71] A smaller orchestra was used for the first season than Russo used for Discovery and Picard. The orchestra was recorded together while still accommodating COVID-19 safety protocols. Melumad approached each episode of the series as if it was a feature film, was able to develop some recurring motifs, and included some references to past Star Trek music.[71] Russo's main theme is a modern adaptation of Alexander Courage's original Star Trek theme.[51]