Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 Finale Spoilers Demythified By Its Writer and Showrunner!
Executive Producer and episode writer Henry Alonso Myers and series Showrunner Akiva Goldsman talked with Variety about the Star Trek: SNW Season 2 finale “Hegemony”.
…The Gorn are a powerful threat on this show, but they’ve never been much of a factor in any iterations of “Trek” that come later in the timeline. Some of that, of course, is because as they were conceived on “TOS,” the Gorn were a little silly looking — it was just a man in a rubber suit.
[Henry Alonso] Myers: It was hard to do it well. It was hard to do respectfully.
Do you intend to resolve that tension in “Strange New Worlds,” to explain why as the timeline evolves, the Gorn as a threat seem to have diminished?
…Akiva Goldsman: The Gorn, for me, were not intentionally comedic — they were just executed about as well as they could be executed at that point in the run of the show at that time. Like, it was just a bad suit — and let’s not even talk about the Metrons. But I looked at the intention, which is: scary, scary, scary, Other, Other, Other. One thing that we always do in “Star Trek” is we empathize — that’s in large part the purpose of our show. We’re kind of an empathy generator. It’s a carnival mirror on modern society.
But in our desire to express compassion first, which I think is the right desire, sometimes we forget that real monsters exist. I thought it was important for there to be real monsters in our galaxy. That doesn’t mean that 10 years, two seasons from now, we won’t be having a nice chat with the Gorn. But right now in Seasons 1 and 2 and 3, they’re the monsters. By the way, many of the other “Star Trek” antagonists began as alien, as Other — forgive the use of “alien” — but we learned to connect with them. Not so the Gorn. The Gorn are not understandable to us in this way, not relatable to us in this way. Part of our galaxy is be good, be kind, be empathetic, and also understand that evil exists, because seeing with compassion does mean you should be blind to horror. The Gorn are monsters…
…By introducing Scotty [played by Scottish actor Martin Quinn in the finale], you’re inevitably raising the possibility that the show will also be introducing other characters from the “TOS” era, like Bones or Sulu. Should fans expect that to happen as the show progresses?
Goldsman: The longer we stay on the air — do we still say that? — the longer we stream, the longer we do whatever it is we do to let people watch us, the more likely it becomes. Given our druthers — because Henry and I are both greedy and gluttons for punishment — we’d go right into the TOS era and see what happens. So, if we’re around long enough, sure…
…This season took some major risks. What other boundaries are you considering pushing for Season 3?
Goldsman: We’re going to keep going. We genre hop. So where we haven’t been, we will try to go. Henry’s watchwords for Season 2 were, “Let’s do Season 1, just bigger and better.” That’s become the truth of Season 3. We’re always doing the thing that we do best, which is secretly just a lot of relationship stories in space. We’ll keep unfolding those hopefully in ways that are different, in the same way that the tones of our episodes will be different. But yeah, ambition will taper off only when we can’t figure out a thing to do we haven’t done before.
Myers: The joy of doing the show — Akiva and I spent a lot of time on this — is trying to come up with something really great and cool and different for our actors. The more challenging stuff you bring them, the harder they will work. We want to bring them great material so that they will continue to do incredible things.
Season 3 for “Strange New Worlds” was announced in March, well after production on Season 2 had ended. How confident were you that you’re going to be able to resolve this cliffhanger?
Myers: The best way to approach this is with a deep sense of confidence. We were very upfront with all of our folks internally about what we were doing. They were very supportive of it. We wanted it to be a surprise. I remember how the [“Star Trek: The Next Generation” cliffhanger episode] “The Best of Both Worlds, Part 1″ made me feel. That was what we wanted to revisit for the audience, to really surprise them… The opportunity when you have a show like this is to make it as interesting and surprising as you possibly can. Sometimes that just means taking risks. This was a big season of risks. So by the finale, we had done so many risks, it was kind of like, “Yeah, sure!”
The full interview is here.
