“Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” Season 3 is off to a strong start after its two-episode debut last week with “Hegemony, Part 2” and “Wedding Bell Blues.” As chapters progress we’re going to be seeing many more romantic entanglements between Starfleet crew members in slim-fitting uniforms.
Award-winning creators, executive producers, and showrunners Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers are not shy about providing their cast’s characters with more “amour” this season. We connected with the creative duo to learn about love in space and hear how much fun it is to sling Cupid’s arrows around the USS Enterprise to see what hot hook-ups arise.
“I think it is a lot of fun and I think that because of the stronger genre walls that existed in the ’60s, the show was sexy for its time, but it didn’t really entertain romance beyond the sort of Kirk date of the week,” Goldsman tells Space.com. “And I use ‘date’ kindly. We believe that if you put a lot of people close together in a spaceship and hurl them across the galaxy, things will happen, and it’s a delight. We’re secretly ‘Love Stories in Space.’ I think that people understand character as revealed during romance. It’s a great way in and our actors are good at it.”
Myers is also quite enthusiastic regarding the intimate relationships popping up in the series, and it’s something he and Goldsman shared a strong affection for in terms of its dramatic effect.
“When Akiva and I first met to talk about the show we were surprised that it was something we both really loved, and that we were looking for lots of ways to bring it out in the show,” Myers notes. “It’s great for the actors and as viewers understanding the romance makes you think of the characters differently and deeply in a way you may not have thought of them before.
“Things that we’ve gotten to do with Spock are a little more relatable to today’s audience in a cool way. There’s not an actor on our show who doesn’t have an interesting approach to this. Pike has had a great deep love story that we’ve followed through the seasons. In the pilot, Akiva had cast an actress [Melanie Scrofano] as Betel and they were really in synch and they worked well together.”
The evolving cast chemistry on display is palpable once again in Season 3 and maintaining that connected tone often takes a hands-off approach.
“Having worked on ‘Fringe,’ and I will include ‘Fringe’ in this, I have never been part of a cast that is, to the man, woman and child as extraordinary as this cast,” Goldsman adds. “Typically there’s a weak link somewhere and you write away from that person. It’s just not the case. This cast is so extraordinary and versatile and brave and they’re constantly showing each other what they can do, showing us what they can do, challenging us to write to see whether they can do it, and always living up to the occasion. I think that’s just a function of good luck and good casting.”
In the season opener, we return to those aggressive reptilian creatures known as the Gorn when Pike and Co. come to the rescue of his imprisoned crew and Parnassus Beta colonists. These aliens have been fan favorites for the last two seasons but now they’re being laid to rest at last.
“Well, the Gorn were my idea and boy are they a pain in the ass,” jokes Goldsman. “You’ll notice the further into the show you’ve gotten, the more CG they’ve become. That’s not an accident. That being said, in Melissa’s [Ortega] episode this season, which is one of our very best, they’re the puppet that is the Gorn as well as the CG Gorn and they’re synthesized to create a character. There I think we hit the pinnacle of our ability to present the Gorn and we’re very proud of it.
“In part it is also the work the Gorn is doing with a human actor. We’ve had a lot of Gorn. Here today, Gorn tomorrow. I think it’s now time for other scary things to take their place.”
“Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” Season 3 is now streaming exclusively on Paramount+ with new episodes each Thursday.
