Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Director Talks Blowing Up the Earth and Human Solutions to Tech Problems

This article contains spoilers for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 4 episode 1

For six decades, Star Trek has featured an array of planets, endless alien species, and countless godlike beings. But the kick-off to the fourth season of Strange New Worlds may have outdone all its predecessors. The season 4 premiere, “Valles Marineris” sends Captain Pike and the USS Enterprise back to prehistoric Earth, where they discover not just a planet ruled by dinosaurs but also a Martian military at war with enemies from another planet in our solar system, a planet heretofore unknown to us. By the end of the episode, Pike makes the hard to decision to not intervene in the Martians’ attack on their enemies, which destroys the planet and sends an asteroid toward Earth, where its collision kills the dinosaurs and jump starts human evolution.

“We certainly left no stone unturned in terms of time travel,” laughs Chris Fisher, executive producer of Strange New Worlds and director of the season 4 premiere. “We had so much fun playing with timey-wimey stuff.” One of the chief creatives of Strange New Worlds, Fisher explains to Den of Geek how Strange New Worlds got to the point where it could destroy a whole planet and bring humanity into existence, a massive feat made harder by the realities of COVID.

Fisher brings to Star Trek two decades of experience as a producing director, starting with the Syfy series Warehouse 13, and including shows such as Person of Interest and The Magicians. On the latter show, Fisher started working with Henry Alonso Myers, who became the showrunner of Strange New Worlds, alongside Akiva Goldsman. From there, Fisher joined Strange New Worlds as a producing director.

“I’m whatever the showrunners want. I’m a Swiss Army Knife,” Fisher says of his role. “My focus is really on production, what’s happening on set. I figure out what the season is going to look like in terms of visual language.

“Strange New Worlds is very unique in that regard. We don’t have a look. We have a unique way of hiring directors because we don’t hire them in blocks of multiple directors to do multiple episodes. We hire 10 Star Trek directors for 10 Star Trek movies, and they’re allowed to create their own visual language. It’s a really director-friendly show, which makes my job, obviously, a lot of fun.”

Despite all the fun, Fisher also acknowledges the show has its challenges. “Every episode takes big swings,” he admits. “Even the season 4 premiere, which is in some ways a fastball down the middle for us because it’s a big action adventure episode, is very complicated.”

The same is true of one of the most famous episodes of Strange New Worlds, season 2’s “Subspace Rhapsody,” aka the musical episode. “That was incredibly challenging because it required prerecording the music and getting the director Dermott Downs and actors involved way earlier than usual, by many months. But Henry and Akiva had a firm grip on the episode, and they knew how they wanted it to come together. We poured a lot of energy into it.”

“Then there was the season 3 bottle episode “Terrarium,” with the Gorn and Ortegas on the planet together. That required a lot of additional builds from our creature designer. They put in an incredible amount of additional work designing a new Gorn that could interact with our actor that way.”

Challenging as these episodes have been, Fisher has a special turn in the form of what he calls virtual production. “A virtual production stage is, in some ways, a traditional stage in that it’s a sound stage where the director, writer, and crew will walk into. But instead of plywood or green screen walls and ceiling, it’s surrounded by LED panels,” explains Fisher. “Essentially, you’re walking into a live, interactive 3D immersive video game. All of the worlds for the episode are built in preproduction instead of post-production and then played back inside of the stage, where you shoot all the scenes.”

“Virtual production has huge benefits because it’s not just a 3D immersive world. You can do all your in-camera effects and animation on it and set the lighting. It’s not just a backdrop.”

Virtual production has been particularly effective for Strange New Worlds, precisely because of the mandate in the show’s title. Pike and the Enterprise crew have to visit various planets, and virtual production allows Fisher and his team to create those worlds.

“When people watch Strange New Worlds, they wonder why the sets look so good. And it’s because we created the worlds,” Fisher explains. “The digital assets are awesome. We spent a lot of time designing and building them, and then the actors get to walk into them, and work while being lit by these worlds. They feel very real.

“Virtual production lets you think creatively. All of our best visual storytellers—our directors, directors of photography, production designers, and art directors. These are roles that are generally left out of the post-production pipeline, because their jobs are usually done by the time the visual effects happen in post. But now, they get to be a part of it.

“There are so many benefits to virtual production and I’m a huge supporter of it, which is why I just wrote a book on it,” laughs Fisher, pointing to his new book The Producer’s Guide to Virtual Production, coming August 12, 2026.

“The real icing on the cake here is that virtual production was an extreme solution to the problem of the pandemic. We would never have done this otherwise,” he points out. “It was an incredible challenge to make Strange New Worlds then. Of course, we owe a lot of gratitude to The Mandalorian, who did it before us in 2019. But the didn’t do it during the pandemic.

“I went with a director of photography and a production designer to Ontario. We had to build a new world every week in a warehouse in Misissuaga, and we didn’t understand anything about anything. We had to work together and collaborate, taking the best of humanity to learn about this new tool,” Fisher recalls. “I’ve had people I’ve worked with on other productions ask if I want to share this technology, but I absolutely do. I want this to proliferate.”

“It’s a great way to keep production local,” he points out, before putting the process in terms that Trekkies can understand. “Virtual production is the antithesis to AI because it’s technology, but it’s completely driven by humans. And on Strange New Worlds, we use virtual production for five seasons without ever using AI.”

Facing a disaster through collaboration? Using technology to enhance humanity instead of replacing it? Discovering new life and new civilizations? Sounds like Fisher is making Strange New Worlds behind the scenes as much as he is making it on the screen.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds streams new episodes every Thursday on Paramount+.