‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Showrunners Talk Kirk, Scotty, A “Bigger” Season 2, And Beyond

Following the last episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, the series’ showrunners have been talking about that finale and what’s next for the series in season 2 and beyond, including the possibility of bringing in more legacy characters. We have curated some of the most exciting bits from various interviews and organized them by subject.

Bigger swings for season 2

Speaking to the Hollywood Reporter, co-creator and co-showrunner Akiva Goldsman summed up season two by saying it was going to be “bigger and better.” When asked to follow up on Anson Mount saying the show took “big swings” in season 1, Goldsman said they are swinging bigger in season 2:

I feel the job of this show is to take big swings. And by the way, season one will look like a lot of bunting compared to season two. Star Trek is, in my view, most useful when it is emotionally connecting, which includes joy, wonder and sentiment. I think big swings are how you get there — and by the way, “big swings” just means “not as expected.” A big swing can be small, it can be a small story. So, when we say big swings, I think we mean atypical.

A different Kirk for season 2

One of the big swings the show is taking is by bringing in Paul Wesley to play James T. Kirk. It was first announced that he’d be part of season 2, so his inclusion in the season 1 finale was a surprise. Co-showrunner Henry Alonso Myers told Cinemablend that bringing Kirk into the show in season 1 “was one of our goals” and something he spoke to co-creator Alex Kurtzman about early on. Still, Myers told Variety he wasn’t certain Wesley would end up in the finale, so he wrote “two versions of the script, one with Kirk and one without.”

Myers also made it clear in a number of interviews that season 2 Kirk won’t be the same, telling Cinemablend

The Kirk that we’re going to meet in Season 2 is a totally different person than who we meet in the finale.

Myers got a bit more specific with Inverse, making it clear they are not returning to the alternate future seen in the finale:

[W]e’ll see more [James] Kirk in season 2, but he’s not this 2266 Kirk. We’re not jumping ahead again to 2266 like we have [in the season 1 finale].

And to Variety he said:

The Kirk that we’re going to meet in season 2 is a lieutenant who is on his way to becoming a first officer in the fleet. He is not yet the person we’ve come to know, to the same extent that Uhura and Spock and Chapel are not yet the person that we that we come to know on the original series. There’s still some growth and things that he’s going through that we want to explore.

Paul Wesley as James T. Kirk

More legacy characters… and a crossover?

In addition to Kirk, the showrunners revealed we can expect other familiar faces to show up in season 2, as Myers told Inverse:

[W]e will be meeting some new legacy characters next season.

And in an interview with Cinemablend he explained how this is built into the show:

That’s our brand, right? I think it’s safe to say that yes we will meet other legacy TOS characters on Strange New Worlds at some point in the future.

Alex Kurtzman has previously confirmed there will be some kind of crossover coming in the Star Trek Universe. Goldsman picked up on this, telling Deadline:

I will say only this: We all love the idea of crossovers. So when and if they materialize is still in the air, but we’re looking really hard and we might be able to say yes to that question really soon—at least that’s my hope.

A new engineer… but not Scotty (yet)

Another surprise in the season one finale was the (sort of) introduction of Montgomery “Scotty” Scott as the chief engineer of the USS Enterprise; this was done using only a voice actor. Speaking to Cinemablend Myers explained:

We weren’t quite ready to cast Scotty yet. So, we put that in as an Easter egg for folks.

While that “yet” could be telling, in his interview with Syfy he revealed more about who will be stepping into the shoes of the late Hemmer ( who sacrificed himself in episode 9):

We will meet a new chief engineer—it’s not going to be Scotty. There will be a new character who I’m excited for you to meet, but I’m not going to tell you who it is. It’s going to be a very different person, a completely different type of engineer.

As for the late Hemmer, Myers confirmed previous reports that actor Bruce Horak will be back, telling Screen Rant:

All I will say is that Hemmer may be dead but this is not the last we will see of Bruce on our show. I will say that in the classic Star Trek tradition.

Behind the scenes on the USS Enterprise engineering set

Season 3 and evolving into TOS?

The second season recently wrapped up production, and Myers told Cinemablend they are already thinking about what comes next:

We don’t have a pickup [for season 3]. We are planning for it. The nature of these shows is you just have to plan way, way, way, ahead… In order to get the scripts done and to build our sets and AR assets that live up to achieve here on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, it just requires a lot of lead time. We are in early discussions about it. It’s definitely the next thing in line… these are conversations we’re having.

With the introduction of Kirk, the hint of Scotty, and more legacy characters on the way, the idea that the series will evolve into a recreation of Star Trek: The Original Series came up in a number of interviews. Myers made it clear for the short term, the focus remains on Captain Pike and his adventures (via Variety):

Look, I would love nothing more than to then to go all the way forward to the future, and eventually do that with them. But there’s a lot of stories before that. I’ll tell you what Kirk isn’t: He isn’t the replacement captain. This is the Pike show. This is the Spock show. This is the Number One show. We have a lot of stories yet to tell with them. That said, who knows what the future holds. We would be so lucky to have that Enterprise.

Myers reiterated to Inverse there is lots to work with in the time before TOS:

We have seven years to play with here. And you know, there’s no reason that every season has to be a year. You could do a season that’s a week. You could do a season that’s six months.

But Goldsman made it clear to THR the idea of eventually running into the TOS time frame was something he could get behind:

Let that be the biggest problem we have, should it go that long, to figure out how that works. But nothing would make me happier than to continue through the TOS timelines and beyond.

Captain Pike in command of the USS Enterprise

New season 2 set

Paramount+ has released a video feature of Production Designer Jonathan Lee and Wil Wheaton touring a new galley set which will be seen in season 2.


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wait so if kirk is a lieutenant then why do the leak photos of him and La’an show him with Captain stripes? is he going to get promoted?

I assume you haven’t watched the Season 1 finale then. We see Kirk in the future (an alternate timeline) when he was captain of the Farragut.

It’s like Muppet Babies!

It’s the Star Trek Kids!

Maybe we will get a 14 year old Pevel Chekov too!

I’m confused. They have 7 years to play with but don’t know if they’re going to be picked up for a 3rd season? That said, I’m really enjoying SNW and hope they continue to keep the quality high

They mean the 7 years in-universe, before Kirk takes over. Although I read it as 7 seasons too, to begin with and I was like “oooh already planning the traditional 7 years huh?”

They also said that one season doesn’t need to be a year in show time.

Which could easily go both ways, as in, a season = three in-show months or a season = multiple in-show years. The latter more likely to come about if they had to wrap things up quicker than originally planned. Which would be less likely to happen these days e.g Enterprise and its finale.

I think long term, I’d rather the show leave a gap between SNW and what would be the start of TOS.

I know that in reality they likely won’t leave any breathing room between the series and will probably do some kind of passing-of-the-torch finale and/or tie-in with The Menagerie.

Hmmm yeah I can see it playing out that way. If they don’t actually remake TOS fully from front to back, then I’d say there is high chance at least The Menagerie will be getting some kind of remake or ‘sidemake’ similar to how they adapted Balance of Terror in the season one finale.

I just hope they do a bit more research into Kirk’s background. They mischaracterized him in season one, both in how Sam described him and in how he portrayed the character. I know fans like to think of Kirk as a chronic rule breaker, but in TOS that wasn’t him at all.

I agree….I feel there is a big push to simply characterize Kirk as Han Solo. Thats not how I seem him.

Perhaps the way Kelvin Kirk was written (at least intially) is playing into the way they’re writing Prime Kirk.

Great point!

It’s funny though as a couple months back the poster you are responding to boldy proclaimed that, canon is meaningless. I guess for character biography consistency in canon, it apparently is not meaningless at all. LOL

Please read the article, it’s very informative. They say quite clearly what I thought was pretty obvious but which apparently many fans are missing:

The version of Kirk we met in the finale is a different Kirk, not the Kirk we know from TOS, not the Kirk we’ll meet in Season 2.

So far this show is brilliant and far better than TOS, and I grew up on that series as a kid, and adore it.

Yea, good point!

While SNW delivered one unqualified smashing winner (ep 6) that was as good as Trek has been thus far this century, and generally delivered well in the back half of the season, I sure can’t see how you can even begin to compare it, let alone compare it favorably, with TOS, in the early going or at any point, actually.

I mean, given, the one obvious comparison point is BoT — and the original has Shatner in low-key control throughout, which is enough by itself to bury SNW’s finale, burdened as it is by This Other Guy.

Just by the sheer volume and variety of early winners on TOS, ranging from THIS SIDE OF PARADISE to CHARLIE X to CITY makes any kind of eval of SNW … well, almost irrelevant, or at best a sidebar. And that’s coming from a fan of nearly 50 years who doesn’t even consider s1 the best of TOS.

That’s how Kurtzman & Bob wrote him in the KU. And now Kurtzman is running Trek. So is anyone surprised KU stuff is permeating this nu-Trek?

Whatever you think of Wesley performance, the characterization of Kirk in the season finale is nothing like the juvenile, Top-Gun-Beyone-the-Stratosphere version we saw in Trek 2009. That’s just absurd.

If the characterization of Kirk as a rule-breaker is a popular misconception of his character (one we can, if true, place much of the blame on Nick Meyer for), then so is the idea that he was always a stack of books with legs, stalwartly following orders. In fact, the character was many different things in various settings, following the requirements of story and Bill Shatner’s whims of the moment. As to Sam Kirk — well, people have all sorts of opinions, and those of siblings are often less objective than most. Even if his opinion is wrong, it’s not an invalid artistic choice for the character to have it.

I wouldn’t necessarily blame Nick Meyer for that, I think it was more so that fans took the “He Cheated”/”I don’t like to lose” conversation and ran with it, which in part helped warp Kirk into some kind of brash, “rulebreaker” on top of all the other flanderization/parodies that shaped everyone’s perception of who Kirk “really” is.

He was an outside-the-box strategist. I think his performance in the episode was about pitch perfect with what I’d expect Kirk to be like, and he did a very “Kirk” thing when he got all the automated ships to be part of the “armada.”

Parodies of him that came in later years, such as Jim Carey’s, Phil Hartman’s, or Zapp Brannigan are amusing, but that somehow became the default way people thought of Kirk. I wouldn’t be surprised if people like Shatner embraced it, despite it not being entirely correct, since it would have been a big ego boost.

I remember my stepdad was struck by the ‘i don’t like to lose’ when he saw it, because he thought that while it was neat summation that worked well for the one movie, it lacked what he thought there would be in terms of gravitas for a battle commander, and that it sure didn’t bode well for what would follow. And I remember seeing the trailer for TSFS with Kirk’s ‘I am therefore going anyway’ and realizing he had nailed it, that Kirk was going to be this different thing going forward, and not just due to the character’s age/maturity.

Piling all that on this Kirk is way out of line, and only makes the problem of major miscasting seem even worse. Would greatly have preferred to see this ep minus Kirk’s presence, or perhaps, if absolutely necessary, limited to viewscreen interaction.

I wouldn’t blame Meyer for it. There is the Kirk cliche out there that is not the case and that is the the one they used on the KU. Headed by Kurtzman. If you want to blame someone for helping to cement that stereotype, blame him and his writing partner at the time.

There’s a big difference between how your older brother would describe you and how your friend from the Academy would describe you. Your older brother knows more about your darkest secrets. Kirk’s competitive nature means that he fights in the context of academia in the Academy, but fights dirty when he’s horsing around with his brother. Sam has insight into how Jim will evolve from his stack of book with legs persona into whom he becomes for the movies.

Yes, this. People treat the offhand comments of a fictional brother of a fictional character as an offense to Holy Writ, because they don’t line-up with their perception of who that character is.

I just don’t see Paul Wesley up to playing…..well….any character with gravitas. It’s not just a Jim Kirk problem. Dude just isn’t that skilled of a performer. Night and day different from the rest of the cast they have hired.

I don’t think we have seen enough of him yet to make that judgement. Patrick Stewart came across pretty lame early in S1 of TNG, for example, but we know how that turned out.

Bull shit. Stewart commanded the screen from his first scene on.

Yep. Stewart had a screen presence when he first appeared in Farpoint. The shows were weak but he personally elevated them above that.

I’d say so too. ML31 is right. TNG season 1 was bad due to the writing and the lack of character drama. Both of those were probably due to Gene Roddenberry himself.

But, right from the beginning, Stewart (and Spiner and Burton) had their characters set and Stewart had the right gravitas from the beginning.

It took season 2 for the other characters to fall into place and season 3 for the show’s writing to become great, imo.

I have to agree. At least concerning his portrayal in the finale.

If anything, he felt like he was trying to be Chris Pine as Kirk instead of trying to just be Kirk. And there are moments when he has a face he makes that is very Rod Serling from Twilight Zone and it just doesn’t fit. Definitely didn’t feel Kirk vibes from him.

I’m with others here regarding Paul Wesley. I’ve only seen the first episode of SNW on youtube but I did watch scenes with Wesley from the finale on youtube as well. In an interview Wesley gave he talked about the “sparkle” bravado and charm that Shatner had, how Solo and Kirk were two iconic characters, and really, similar space cowboys. Pine based his Kirk kind of on Harrison Ford, probably Solo, and that’s a good model because Ford’s Solo and Shatner’s Kirk both have that bravado and humor. Pine also liked the way that Shatner “moved” as Kirk and you can see this perfectly at the end of ST 2009 as he comes onto the bridge, survey’s it, and finally sits in the center seat. Anson Mount, I believe pointed this out.

In short, Chris Pine, imo was perfectly cast as Kirk. I’m not sure Paul Wesley has that “sparkle” he talks about. That’s not a slight on him. Like the character of Spock was informed so much by Nimoy, the same goes for Kirk via Shatner. ST 2009 really got lucky with Pine and Quinto, and definitely with Karl Urban’s McCoy who was remarkable. From what I’ve seen of Ethan Peck in season 2 of Discovery and the first episode of SNW, I think they got the right guy to play Spock again. I’m not sure they did with Kirk though. It might be a situation like the Solo film, where a lot of people thought that the actor playing Han just couldn’t fill Harrison Ford’s boots. It’s a hard hard sell, when you have these iconic franchises with characters so beloved and that have been played and are so intrinsically linked to the original actors.

Actually, with regard to Star Wars, I guess they got it right with Ewan McGregor’s casting as Obi Wan Kenobi. He was definitely the most consistent and respectable character of the prequels.

The “beyond” bit of that last quote is interesting. As is the before i.e what we’re getting right now on SNW. It’s just everything that TOS has already covered that doesn’t really interest me as much, as, obviously, there’s a version of it out there right now. Whilst we’re here – I’d love something set post-TUC, pre TNG but through a show other than SNW.

Same here. Seeing Admiral Pike in the ‘monster maroon’ uniform got me excited to see something from that era again. It was the TOS movies that made me a fan of Trek.

Likewise [on both seeing Admiral Pike and the TOS movies]. I think through both the Kelvin movies and now SNW, the primary colour uniform era has been pretty well represented on screen in modern times, leaving the ‘monster maroon’ era even more left out. If the Kelvin universe wants to jump ahead to their version of that time period, that would be pretty cool too.

Whilst we’re here – I’d love something set post-TUC, pre TNG 

I also would love them to cover that period!!!

Agree a TOS reboot doesn’t interest me in the slightest. This show is different because we never had the adventures of Pike until now. And I want them to keep doing something new. Not just rehash 50 year old TV shows to keep reliving nostalgia for fanboys. That’s how the JJ verse was born in the first place.

TNG is my favorite Trek show by far but I hope they never reboot that show either. Come up with new ideas and not something for just old fans.

Me personally I would not mind if TNG got a full on reboot. To me the weakest part of that show were the boring characters. The show was best when it dealt with general sci-fi & Trek-like situations.

I agree, and hope that they eventually get to redoing TNG for the 21st century after the redo TOS.

This prompts me to say again.. I really want to see a show set post TUC. That is an untouched era that to me is rife with possibilities.

That said, I absolutely do NOT want Secret Hideout to make it. I know they will only screw it up.

Yeah. A post-TUC show could work really well if it’s done right. But I don’t trust any current Trek writers to do it. It would be weird mess and they’d feel the need to tie it into all the other shows instead of just telling the story of a ship that isn’t the Enterprise with a crew of original characters that does stuff that doesn’t affect any of the characters we know. Is that really so hard?

It’s either way hard for Secret Hideout or they have orders to tie in all sorts of previous Trek stuff in everything they do… Even if it makes zero sense to do so.

Let that be the biggest problem we have, should it go that long, to figure out how that works. But nothing would make me happier than to continue through the TOS timelines and beyond.

As I’ve been predicting and outlining for months! Cha-Ching! AWESOME!!!

The only think that can stop this now would be unexpectedly poor financial performance of P+ in the next few years. Otherwise, I feel the momentum towards this is nearly unstoppable.

But it doesn’t have to be a remake or retread of TOS. I don’t think they’d do that. We only saw the last three years of Kirk’s five year mission (or was it the first three? or was it in the middle? I was never clear on that.). Also, there were other ships and other things going on during the Kirk Enterprise years that could be covered. (Where was Una? Or La’an? etc…)

Really hope not either. JJ verse is already a retread of TOS, do we need more of it?

Make something new in that period like an Una show. Why rehash a 50 year old show whose story has already been told?

And the guy they got as Kirk is awful. A show starring him? Ugh 🙄

I actually like the new Kirk. I don’t think the brash 60s Kirk or the smart ass Chris Pine Kirk really works these days.

The performance I saw this dude give was sort of something between Picard and TOS Kirk and actually reminded me of Sisko.

Random thoughts/reactions:

Star Trek is, in my view, most useful when it is emotionally connecting, which includes joy, wonder and sentiment.

Really? Then please, Akiva Goldsman, explain how you ever allowed that abomination of an episode, “All Those Who Wander,” a horribly obvious, poorly executed “ode” to Aliens ever happen?

Could they have found a less charismatic and more timid actor to play James T. Kirk? I don’t think so.

Let’s just create sets for rooms and spaces that were never seen, used or mentioned in TOS. Like a Ready Room off the bridge or a fancy new bar which is the center all social activity. Apparently Kirk’s style was to ignore the connivence of this ready room and make people schlep on down to a briefing room. And were our three heroes just too good to hang out in that fancy bar so they hung out in the ship’s mess hall or rec room instead?

Conversely, in the episode, “The Serene Squall,” why didn’t anyone try to regain control of the ship fro Auxiliary Control?

I loved that episode, am taking a wait and see approach on Paul Wesley, and and fine with Kirk’s ready room as a minor update to the E. And while I agree with your comment on Auxiliary Control, I can point out multiple times on TOS where they could have used Auxiliary Control to get out of a jam, but it wasn’t even brought up by the characters…it’s basically a plot device that can be used when needed.

Next?

This is a minor quibble. Suffice it to say that Kirk didn’t like the concept of a ready room.

John McCain was famous for arranging his senate office in a unique way. Most senators have a big private office, but McCain reportedly put his work area in the middle of his staff’s. (Never saw it personally, alas.) Kirk appears to have copied the McCain model.

Nice but I don’t think a “ready room” existed on the TOS Enterprise. If it did, it would have been used. The concept was not created until TNG. Is it a minor quibble? Perhaps. Should they have added a “ready room” for this series? No. Should they have added a five star restaurant & bar for this series? Of course not. These are small things that serve as garnish to the bigger things. And if those were the biggest offenses the show had I would feel better about it.

Yep. Conferences are held in the BRIEFING room, because there IS no ready room.

I’m willing to forgive the showrunners for making the ship a bit snazzier, though, since I think they’ve otherwise done a wonderful job with SNW. To me, it has the true Trek feel.

The ship interiors aren’t actually half bad, even if it bears little resemblance to the TOS ship (which is fine, I get it).

However, I wish things were a tad less bright and that most surfaces had a more matte finish.

Modern audiences have different life experiences and different expectations, so they’re giving us a different ship. I’m mostly okay with that, though the TOS ship will always reign supreme in my heart.

I love Captain Pike, and I hope it will be a very long time before he hands the Enterprise over to Kirk. I mean, I love Kirk, too, but we’ve already seen a lot of him. I’m happy for this to be Pike’s moment in the sun.

I don’t think they really need any more legacy characters, but since they’ve said there will be a new one, I hope it’s Sulu. He never got the development in TOS that he should have, and since Asians are a third of Earth’s population, there really should be a lot more of them in Star Trek.

If Takei is available, have a young Sulu/old Sulu ep where he makes an appearance as they introduce the young version. That would be really cool!

That WOULD be really cool! Or Takei could be Sulu’s grandfather or something, a mentor who encouraged him to go into Starfleet and is proud to see him assigned to the Enterprise.

Sure!

I made this comment in another thread only a day or two ago, but here goes again: I’m sick and tired of legacy actors showing up to play ancestors or descendants of their original characters. Seriously, is everyone a carbon copy of their ancestor?

That’s not to say it never works (cf. “Carbon Creek”), but it’s becoming quite trite.

Don’t be too surprised bro when the actress who plays La’An Noonien Singh will be playing her great grand daughter in the Picard spin off show in 5 years… looking for vengeance of course!

I think a lot depends on how people feel about the legacy actor. I like George Takei, and it would warm my heart to see him again for five minutes. I realize this doesn’t work for everyone, but IDIC, you know? :-)

Agreed!

There was a deleted scene from Voyage Home involving a small Japanese boy that turns out to be Sulu’s ancestor. Maybe that backstory could be brought back.

Yes, that would be cool!

It’s a pity they couldn’t film that scene because the little boy who was supposed to be Sulu’s ancestor wouldn’t do it; it would have fit in perfectly with the rest of that movie.

Maybe but from a logical standpoint Scotty was the one who made the most sense to be there from the beginning. It fits that he would have been on the engineering staff of whoever the Chief Engineer was under Pike. It would explain his attachment to the ship, too.

Yes, he’s far older than Sulu, so it would make sense that he’d been there ten years in the past. I’m just sad we never got much Sulu, and the showrunners have already told us that the new legacy character won’t be Scotty.

They said Scotty won’t be the new Chief Engineer. They never said Scotty won’t show up.

All I know is if they change TOS, I’m done.

Stick a fork in you then, because like it or not, it will be tweaked. :-)

They tweaked it a ton already in JJ verse and we see how much fans loved that. 😁🙄

The regular young Kirk will be different from Kirk from the Kelvin Universe. I wonder if Kirk will be a tactical officer like his father.

At this point, Kirk and Spock are quite best friends as he has Gary Mitchell. I wonder if they’re going to bring in Mitchell.

I strongly disliked Gary Mitchell, so I hope either they don’t bring him in, or they give him a personality transplant, like the one Chapel got. :-)

He was a bit of a jerk, but I think that was part of the point of the character. He’s the wingman who was always in Kirk’s shadow, and he knows it, and it bothers him because he wants to be the Alpha.

And freaking Gary Lockwood (2001) played him — what’s not to like about that!

Mitchell in WNMHGB was always a bit of a jerk. We saw that in his early interactions with Dehner and his confession about how he manipulated Kirk’s emotions with the lab assistant (who I always thought was Carol Marcus in my head canon). The accident in the galactic barrier just amplified those qualities even more and made him more of what he already was.

I really hope they don’t do a TOS remake but if they do they could definitely play on that aspect of Mitchell’s character; have it sort of simmering in the background before finally exploding once he is transformed.

I don’t think adding a jerk character to SNW would improve the show. Some people enjoy having jerk characters to hate, but I don’t. :-)

Maybe we’re all having a different discussion here. I agree with you that I don’t want to see an every week Gary Mitchell. But as a character we see now and then with the right actor – I would like to see that.

I also like to see an episode that includes the original captain decker facing off against doomsday machine.

I thought “The Doomsday Machine” was already great, exactly as it was. I don’t see the need to re-make it, when the one we have is perfect as is.

Yeah, I had a brain-fart and forgot that Decker’s ship was destroyed off-screen right before that TOS ep began…for some reason I was thinking that was years before (and thus could have been tied into SNW), but that is wrong, obviously.

Er, actually Decker’s ship is destroyed at the end of the episode, as Kirk drives it into the machine. It’s Decker’s CREW that was destroyed off-screen before the episode began.

It’s my favorite episode of the series. And I don’t think it should be touched.

That said, watch one show up on SNW next season…

Me neither actually. Hopefully it would be done more tactfully and subtly, if modern writers are capable of such a thing.

Oh yippee…..more legacy characters….jeez are they going to bring back the janitor in the transporter room from TOS, that would be awesome….or are we going to meet Khan but the crew doesn’t know it’s Khan, but Pike defeats him and puts him back to sleep, but the audience knows…….

Enough of the legacy mining and get back to original stories please….

No more prequels! Leave it as a Pike show then wrap the TOS era up.

Would a post TUC set show be considered a prequel?

And I have no problem with prequels. IF they are done right. So far Secret Hideout hasn’t shown they are up for the challenge.

So why hasn’t anyone asked them about Rebecca’s absence from major parts of the episodes?

Second thought: I’m kinda hoping they’re not pushing Kirk on us in season two. I mean, I was in awe of season 1. All episodes (except for 1) were strong 8s and 9s, but I wasn’t too thrilled about the casting of Kirk tbh.

Hearing Jonathan Lee tell Wil Wheaton that security will be searching his bag for the Saurian brandy bottle was hilarious 😆🤣😃!! The galley looks so beautiful! I loved hearing Mr. Lee say that he put a rail in because Henry Meyers is a big Love Boat fan and that’s funny because I just started watching the Love Boat for the first time and I’m falling in love with it myself. And I loved that thing that was hanging above the bar.

Mr.Lee called it a “Cloud”. To me, it looks like a chandelier. But, no matter what it’s called, it’s absolutely gorgeous and illuminates the bar magnificently. I am a little bit disappointed though to hear that Scotty’s not coming in the next season of SNW.

But I guess there’s other legacy characters they want to do first before him so I understand. I can’t wait to see what type of engineer we’re getting next season. Henry Meyers said that “we’re getting a different type of engineer”, I wonder what he means by that? Whatever it is, I know it’ll be interesting.

This is the only Star Trek show where every single episode was a home run. They hit for 10 and they scored for 10. That’s very rare with any show, not just Star Trek. I’m very impressed with this whole team, not just the actors but also everyone behind the scenes too.

They worked just as hard to make this show truly shine and stand out on its own and they did a great job on the Enterprise as well but she looks beautiful irregardless 🙂😊💖.

Live long and prosper, Trekmovie 🖖

By “different Kirk” I was hoping different actor. This guy does not have one tenth the charisma of Shatner, and looks small and tiny next to Pike, who is more like Kirk than this guy. Others have remarked on this online. Shatner is sometimes mocked for being over the top, especially later in his career, but he is also criminally underrated. Capt. Kirk has to be the guy who dominates the room. This actor does not and I believe Can not.

Facts.

My husband and I re-watched “Balance of Terror” just last night, and Shatner gave an excellent performance in that episode. I turned to my husband and said, “People love to rag on Shatner, but this is what he’s REALLY like as Kirk — fabulous!”

In his reviews of TOS, JP Halt notes that Shatner only chewed the scenery as Kirk when the scripts were bad, and when the scripts were bad, Shatner’s over-the-top performance actually made the episode more entertaining than it would otherwise have been, showing that Shatner had excellent instincts as a performer. I agree with him. When the scripts are good, Shatner gives a controlled and totally believable performance.

There are times when it seems as if Shatner decides that the moment needs an infusion of charisma, and he just gathers up a bucket of charisma and throws it at the screen. :-) I have no idea how he even DOES that, but he makes it look effortless. I’m just amazed at what he did as Kirk.

All the other captains had Shatner’s performance to draw upon if they wished, but Shatner CREATED the Starfleet captain from nothing. If he has a big ego, well, maybe it’s deserved. :-)

Bullseye! When he is in a winner like CHARLIE X or BoT, he can be the cool commander, a professional soldier/warrior performance that is thoughtful yet credible. And I think a lot of what you accurately describe as Shatner chewing away when he was riding a bad script comes out of his desperation on a play in the early 60s, which debuted badly. People walked out in mid-show, so anytime he heard rustling in the audience, he would open up his performance and direct it thataway, essentially daring them not to bail. And eventually the show got legs, critics re-reviewed it and it ran for a long while.

I honestly think that if THE ANDERSONVILLE TRIAL with Shat had been done live, he’d’ve done better work than he did, because he wouldn’t have felt a need to go broad — because I’m sure the audience would have been riveted throughout and he’d’ve felt more secure. He is very good in parts of ANDERSONVILLE, but there are other parts he kind of Kirk’s his way through, to the project’s detriment, especially compared to Jack Cassidy, who is mesmerizing as his opponent. I’ve always seen a certain similarity in acting style with Shatner and George C. Scott, who originated the ANDERSONVILLE role and then directed the Shatner version, but they differ hugely in how accepting I am of them when they go broad. With Scott, it always feel organic, not applied. I know that even major Shat detractors like Harlan Ellison adore him in ANDERSONVILLE, but even though I’ve watched it at least 25 times, I’ve always wished somebody else — ideally, Scott — had been in his role.

Nobody can touch what Shat did in THE INTRUDER — it was like that was written for the full range of his abilities, so no matter where he went with the character, his choices were appropriate and engaging.

I’ve often made the claim that Shatner is a better actor than many give him credit for.

Very, very true!

Although NuKirk SUCKS I thought SNW was terrific. A few bad episodes and some canon issues but overall a great show and the best show for me since Voyager. And I never been a big TOS fan. In fact I prefer this show to TOS now.

And it’s ten times better than the awful Discovery and Picard. Not even close.

This Enterprise looks like the ultimate Cruise ship. I mentioned this in other places but I swear that new bar for season 2 looks similar to a bar on a Carnival Cruise line I went on a few years ago. 😆

I like it a lot though. Very swanky looking like most of the ship. But wasn’t the original Enterprise supposed to feel more like a battlecruiser and less like a Royal Caribbean cruise liner? Still beats it looking like an Apple store though.

Yeah, the captain’s quarters in TOS could barely fit three people in them. There was no kitchen and certainly not room to have a large group over for dinner. Pike’s quarters are like 20 times the size of Kirk’s. :-)

I think you’re lowballing it; Pike’s ‘quarters’ might be 40 times the size of Kirk’s. I mean, it’s almost like a hangar deck in there, it must be deeper than TOS engineering deck. I really think his cookouts should have been set elsewhere, that way you could have intimate capt’s quarters scenes in an intimate-sized setting, instead of a room where directors feel compelled to show off the struts in the overhead architecture (which is WAY WAY too tall, like everything else in the KurzVerse.)

I’ve enjoyed this show so far, but I’ve got major problems with it and it feels to me as if the majority of them come directly from Akiva Goldsman, who is a talentless writer Hollywood ought to have curbed decades ago.

I agree with you that Goldsman is talentless, but don’t you know that in Hollywood you fail upwards? Especially if you’re friends with other talentless writers in high places like Kurtzman and Abrams.

Ain’t it the truth? This dude should have been toast after “Lost in Space” and “Batman and Robin.”

Goldsman and John Logan both somehow have Oscars, but I find them nearly valueless as creative forces nonetheless. Logan managed to do more damage to Bond than just about any single creative in that series’ history (even Christopher Wood) and that doesn’t even take into account NEMESIS, or BATS, or the cutnpaste of history that is his RKO 281 script. As much as I blame Kurtzman for the mess that is most things Trek these days, Goldsman’s ‘work’ on the dsc s2 finale (which ended my viewership of that series) was so stunningly bad that anytime I see his name on a show now, I have to hope somebody else did a final pass to take the curse off his touch.

As for Goldsman, he was instrumental in ruining the movie adaptation of “The Dark Tower,” which is my favorite series of books. I just don’t have any use for the guy at all. I’m a little amazed that SNW has been as good as it has been given his heavy involvement; I was prepared for the worst, and that has blessedly not come to pass. It’s despite him, though, not because of him.

As for Bond… In retrospect, I think Daniel Craig may have done more harm even than Logan. I despised his last two films, so much so that it’s kind of sapped my enthusiasm for Bond down to nothing. I think it’ll rebuild itself eventually, but boy is it slow in happening.

I didn’t want to disrupt things here too much by getting started in on Craig again, but his casting and all of his films, except for a few minutes of QUANTUM, have been unmitigated disasters IMO. It’s not popular to say so, but I find SKYFALL and CASINO to be among the worst films of the series, mainly because they are so wrongheaded in their approach to the material and the character of Bond, either as representative of the book Bond or the film Bond. CASINO’s Bond might have worked with Henry Cavil, since Bond comes off like a young brat who doesn’t know better, but you’re still stuck with a movie that seems driven by how you get your leads off dead people’s cellphones, when professionals would be keeping the secret data in their heads (something only Bond does in this universe.) Except for the Shanghai skyscraper visuals in SKYFALL, I can’t stand a single minute of the whole movie (and even the skyscraper stuff is ruined by using music in the one scene where they should have relied just on sound effects, since you’ve got the sound of the glass being cut and the wind against Bond’s footsteps.) Craig’s ‘creative’ contributions outside of acting have been grotesque (and I admit he was a good character actor pre-Bond, despite his utter unsuitability for the role owing to looks alone), but I still think that the b-t-s folks enabling said behavior are more to blame, as in YOU, BABS!

I’m totally a Connery/Dalton guy, somebody who thinks Brosnan might have had a good chance if he’d been allowed to take the character darker (see THE TAILOR OF PANAMA for just how good he could be as a bastard of a spy), and my running joke for decades has been that Roger Moore was Bond’s gay uncle, so saying Craig did more damage than Moore sounds like it is saying quite a lot, but man, did he ever misunderstand that character! And even when they had the potential for a great moment, they blew it (look at NTTD’s ending, where they could have had Bond guiding the missiles in by heat signature and/or voice, simply by picking up and lighting a cigarette while saying ‘Bond, James Bond’)

Add to that the fact these filmmakers don’t seem to understand how a Bond action sequence is built, or how much music contributes to said effect. All you have to do is look at SPECTRE’s big explosion to see how you can squander a huge and potentially marvelous practical effect (world’s biggest explosion) by simply recording it instead of building up to it. It’d be like throwing the Death Star explosion over a random TIE fighter from earlier in the film.

So much for not getting into the Craig thing this week …

I loved his first three, but disliked his last two so intensely that it has soured me on even those films. Rebooting the series looks increasingly like a major mistake to me.

Hopefully when they make their next move, it will wash some of the taste of the recent ones out of my mouth.

I honestly don’t think Goldsman is the problem. I think it’s a mixed bag of problems. And the biggest problem is Alex Kurtzman’s failure to hire the right people. He has good ideas but has failed in his execution of them.

There might be some truth in that. I’m not it extends to the animated shows, though; those are excellent.

i was relieved but am still nervous about them bringing too many TOS legacy characters into SNW….for me #1, spock, doctor m’benga, chapel and pike are enough….uhura was just ok, i liked her more than i thought i would but i’m glad she was only there for one season. i hope La’an returns next season. kirk 3.0 was good in moments, maybe it was the direction he was given but when he was in the captain chair i got in living color / jim carey vibes (in his posture)…but then the stuff 1 on 1 with pike was great.

regardless i’m excited for season 2…..the season 1 finale felt like something straight outta the 90s trek era and it made me really happy.

You do know Uhura will be back next season, right? La’an will be back too!

But I agree, the finale felt exactly like any of the 90’s Star Trek shows. SNW in general really fits into TNG, DS9 and VOY and more than TOS at times since it does a like of A and B plots. Also the characters are more like an ensemble where every week it will focus on a different one. I originally thought it would go the TOS direction and it would just be mostly Pike, Spock and Una getting most of the spotlight and everyone else just fills up whatever time they have in an episode. Happy that wasn’t the case although for a first officer Una is getting a lot less screen time.

I hope Number One will be back.

I don’t think Chapel should have been there at all. I liked the idea of M’Benga but we all see a demotion coming in his future. So I have mixed feelings on that one. Uhura was the one TOS character who I felt worked the best. I was very surprised at that. However given the T’Pring stuff she really shouldn’t have been there. So the only reasonable options there were to not use Uhura (not one I endorse because I think she worked well), not use T’Pring at all or if they must then T’Pring should have no interaction with anyone on board. Her only interaction should be with Spock away from everyone else.

As far La’an, I found her a pretty worthless character. Her only schtick is her bloodline. Which they used only to fill a few minutes of screen time. Rendering that aspect worthless. Which is fine because that aspect is a terrible idea to begin with. And I originally found #1 interesting but when they decided to make her Ilyrian she suddenly became less interesting. There was no reason she couldn’t be human and be what she was. Again, the show seems plagued with poor creative choices but this show has the added bonus of taking really huge legacy canon and tossing it out the window because they were just too lazy to go find an existing Trek alien that would actually work and/or too creatively bankrupt to come up with a new one.

The only thing surprising here was the idea that Kirk showing up in the season finale was surprising. I have to say this is mainly disappointing news. I’m a huge TOS guy and would love to see those characters. I liked seeing them again in the KU. But this is a Pike show. I really don’t want to see them on this Pike centered show. I want to see them do their own thing with perhaps one TOS or future reference a season tops.

As usual with Secret Hideout they took a decent idea and screwed it up.

What „big swings”? They re-heated a few concepts that worked well in TOS, got rid of the deeper meanings, and made them into some fun, yet empty episodes. And that’s not really a criticism. It’s an entertaining show for the most part. But it’s incredibly safe and formulaic.

And Season 2 doesn’t need to go “bigger” or bring in more “legacy” characters. If anything it needs to scale back a little and get rid of the legacy. They have their cast of characters. And with only ten episodes you can barely give anyone time to shine. Why not focus on them instead?

I was personally hoping that we’d only see Kirk show up in a series 5 finale, when he takes over for Pike and inherits Chapel, Uhura, and Spock. I can deal with this, but I wish Paul Wesley portrayed him better.

Is it too late to recast Kirk? That actor looks more like Jim Carrey than Jim Kirk, and what’s with his nose? A plastic surgery mishap? At least Chris Pine was fairly Kirk-like and had some Shatner swagger. The Farragut is also supposed to be a Constitution class cruiser.

https://youtu.be/WugEKDZF5I4

They already finished shooting s2 with this guy, so unless they pull a Ridley Scott and matte somebody else over him like Sir R did with Christopher Plummer over Kevin Spacey, we’re stuck with The New Guy.

with how this show is being received, a “pickup” is just a formality.

The company doing the Enterprise graphics needs to be fired and replaced. Worst graphics ever. You can barely make out the ship.

Can say the same for all of the current live-action ship VFX. PICARD was mildly better than DSC, but we’re still talking about everything being blue and murky out there instead of stark and crisp, and the detail is lacking massively, in its place an artless yet painterly sense of fakeness.

If #SNW is still Pike’s show, Pike’s story, why is 90% of this article on S2 about Kirk? IMHO, Kirk is such an iconic character, a lightning rod to many people he will take the focus off of Pike……for that reason, I do NOT want him too much in S2. Keep the FOCUS on #TeamPike & his current crew. Sprinkle Kirk in 2-3 times in the season & no more. #TeamPikeRules