'Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' Season 3 Comic-Con Clip Goes For That Logical Feeling
Come get your Vulcans and efficiency before the series returns in 2025
There’s just one more piece of business left from the San Diego Comic-Con Star Trek Universe panel, and I know you’re going to Pike it. Castmembers Rebecca Romijn, who plays Una Chin-Riley and Ethan Peck, who plays Spock, and executive producers Alex Kurtzman, Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers were on hand for the Strange New Worlds segment, which was the leadoff. Season 3 premieres on Paramount+ in 2025, and while the season wasn’t ready for a trailer like the Section 31 movie also coming next year was, they still came packed with a sneak peek clip to see what’s ahead for the Enterprise crew led by Anson Mount’s Captain Pike.
In said clip, several members of the crew are forced to become the logical and emotion-tempering Vulcans, with Nurse Chapel, played by Jess Bush, M’Benga, played by Babs Olusanmokun, and the half-Vulcan by birth Spock lay witness to the transformation aliens of which Spock is one (well, half of one, as the first look repeatedly and humorously underscores). Carol Kane’s Lanthanite alien character Pelia is also given the same treatment, but it doesn’t transform her, just like LSD didn’t. The newly Vulcanized crew successfully repairs the energy systems in record time but they come back having enjoyed their enhanced abilities, and the Karkovian serum failing to change them back, leaving them in their transformed states indefinitely. Peck would joke that he “did not have to worry about job security until that. I was kind of shocked to see everyone as Vulcans because I know them so intimately, having worked them for several seasons,” as he told Variety at the event. “So to see them in Vulcan makeup was sort of endearing. I had this really bizarre and surprising sense of ‘this is family’ because I’ve been sort of isolated as a Vulcan on the show for the most part.”
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It was also announced that a previously one-off original series character will resurface in a recurring role. It’s Dr. Roger Korby, the antagonistic ex-fiancée of Nurse Chapel. Originally played by Michael Strong, Cillian O’Sullivan will take on the role. When asked what the secret sauce was to the show, Kurtzman said, “The cast is unbelievable. It goes back to the original series…standalone episodes that carry emotional serialization, the switching genres so deftly…It feels like old school Trek told in a brand new way.” He would later tell Variety “We have a bunch of ideas for the kinds of genres Star Trek can accommodate. And we continue to try and stretch those boundaries. We are trying to, dare I say, go where we have not gone before when it comes to genre. Besides the tried and true, which is some sci-fi adventure and certainly our attempt to remember the cadence of at least regularly, there must be a moral to the story. We’re spreading our wings, and we hope you’ll like it.”
Addressing how the season 2 cliffhanger, pertaining to the Enterprise’s failed attempt to rescue a planet of human colonists from the villainous Gorn, might be addressed in the new season Alonso Meyers said they’ve attempted something “classic to Trek”. He elaborated “When you come back for the second part of a two-parter, it always says ‘The Conclusion Of,’ so, come season three, I promise you, you will see ‘The Conclusion Of.'”
Strange New Worlds also stars Christina Chong as La’an Noonien-Singh, Melissa Navia as Lt. Erica Ortegas, Celia Rose Gooding as Nyota Uhura, Paul Wesley as James T. Kirk, and the freshly- introduced Martin Quinn as Montgomery “Scotty” Scott, who debuted in the second season finale “Hegemony”. The franchise YouTube channel has double the views on this sneak peek clip than Paramount+’s does. Watch the clip below.
Sources: The Hollywood Reporter, Variety