Strange New Worlds Producers Promise More Traditional Star Trek Next Season

Sometimes, it’s possible to be too bold and to go too far into where no man has gone before. That’s the lesson that the producers of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds learned during the show’s third season, which managed to squander the good will built up over seasons 1 and 2. But it’s a lesson learned, say showrunners Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers.

Speaking with ScreenRant after New York Comic Con, Goldman and Myers promised to right the ship in season 4, the last full season before the series ends with a truncated fifth season. “We’re trending now, and beginning with season 4 and through season 5, to a much more singular sci-fi, action-adventure, emotional storytelling,” Goldman said. “The outliers are getting less and less, as we kind of focus on saying goodbye to each other and the fans.”

The words “outliers” and “less” are doing a lot of the heavy lifting in that sentence. Although Strange New Worlds began as a prequel series spinning out of Star Trek: Discovery and following the adventures of the USS Enterprise before Kirk took command, it soon devoted episodes to whacky hijinks about Spock’s love life and experiments such as the musical “Subspace Rhapsody.” Season 3 may have taken it too far, but these episodes have always been part of SNW‘s DNA.

Thus, the showrunners probably aren’t planning to turn the series into a pure adventure and exploration series, a point underscored by Myers.

“The thing I will say about season 4 is, it’s in line with what we have done with the previous seasons,” he explained; “in the sense that we look at this like, this could be our last season. So we treat it that way. What’s something that we want to try to do, that we have never done before? What is something we want to try to do a version of, that [other Star Trek series] have done before, but never in this way? So that’s what we do in season 4”

We already know that season 4 will include an episode in which the Enterprise crew turn into puppets, something that not even Q dared to try. However, we also know that Strange New Worlds understands that it’s a prequel series with a clear termination point. It’s not just that, at some point, Pike will be badly burned and will lose his ability to speak. It’s also that, eventually, Spock will stop exploring his dating options, Scotty will start adding hours to his turnaround times, and M’Benga will be superceded by McCoy.

In other words, Strange New Worlds understands that playtime will be over soon and the voyages of the USS Enterprise will return to the format we’ve long known and loved. Hopefully, that doesn’t mean the end of every form of boldly going… just that the going won’t involve quite so much attention to Spock’s love life.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 4 will stream on Paramount+ in 2026.