'Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' showrunners explain Season 3's intense cosmic horror finale (exclusive)

Warning: Spoilers for "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" Ahead!

Even though we're all well aware that "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" will return for a fourth and fifth season before signing off forever, it was still a slightly somber affair when the Season 3 finale episode, "New Life and New Civilizations," aired on Sept. 11, 2025. For a deeper examination of the episode check out our breakdown.

After a few themed genre episodes, we were gifted a follow-up to the fifth chapter of the current season, "Through the Lens of Time," which dealt with an eldritch species known as the Vezda and its discovery by Dr. Roger Korby and Nurse Chapel. It was total old-school "Trek," stripped of musical dance numbers or dress-up affairs and instead presented an endcap injected with H. P. Lovecraft's cosmic horror and provocative themes of fate and destiny.

"Certainly there is this Lovecraftian idea in the finale of what's outside of our space and our time, and a little bit of the Old Ones in Lovecraft, the race that predates us," Goldsman tells Space.com on the high concept storyline.

For Pike and Batel's seasonal arc, it was a touching, bittersweet story of sacrifice that ended with her leaving her romantic partner to take her place as the sentinel protecting the universe from the insensate evil of the Vezda.

"I'm very compelled by, and I'm sure to everyone's annoyance, the idea of the kind of horror that can exist in space," he adds. "And I think there was some of that in 'The Original Series.' But it really starts in the '70s, and by the time we get to 'Alien' the two genres marry in a way that folks hadn't quite done before. Then Carpenter is doing the remake of 'The Thing' and we're seeing 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers' again and you're really seeing sci-fi horror as its own object. I think that is a great color for us, one that was just touched on in the Robert Bloch episode ['What Are Little Girls Made Of?'] of 'TOS,' but it's not really in the firmament of it as much as it could be.

"So that was in the background, the idea of old, unspoken, unnamed things that were in conflict with each other and probably shouldn't be allowed back in."

Myers freely admits that he and Goldsman sometimes draw from different creative wellsprings.

"Episode 5 of Season 3 was a deep passion that came from Akiva because it has stories about mystery and darkness and it's as close to time travel as we deal with that season. In a weird way I think the finale is like part two. We set up a monster that's interesting and illustrated in a way we haven't seen before. And you can't just let them go! You need to follow through and show what's going to happen because of this monster. It's a crossover between that and the conclusion of the season's emotional story for Pike."

That melancholy reveal of Pike and Batel's domestic bliss as we skipped through the decades watching them have a family and grow old in Montana had viewers reaching for tissues to dab some well-earned tears.

"That's the outcome of that section, because fundamentally we didn’t have the opportunity, as we know Pike's timeline, to give him the love of his life," Goldsman notes. "We used, as Henry calls it, the 'Inner Light' mechanism, which is this 'The Next Generation' episode where it's the first time Picard really has a life outside the normal timeline. And it's long and he gets old, so we took that because all 'Star Trek' is all 'Star Trek' and we believe we can just crimp from ourselves.

"We wanted to give him true love and in order to do that we broke an objective timeline and then we snatched it away from him. It's a detour that took place in a heartbeat."

As Myers explains it, they're not altering the path that Pike is on, they're altering viewers' understanding of what happens inside of him. What we see in that sorrowful sequence perhaps has more depth and breadth than we may have considered having seen it before.

On the topic of Batel's connection to the Vezda and her ultimate role as a warden of these nefarious multidimensional creatures, Goldsman ties it back to sci-fi master Larry Niven.

"She's even referred to as a protector and that's a bit of an allusion to Larry Niven," he explains. "He wrote a bunch of great science fiction books, one of which is called 'Protector.' Niven is the only person whose universes intersected with the 'Star Trek' universe because of a 'TAS' episode where they collide. I think it's called 'The Slaver Weapon.' There's an idea here that she's having an epigenetic response to the ancient evil due to her blended genetics. These races at some point in their history all faced some ancient evil and they were imprinted with an ability to respond to it. The part that's less straightforward is the nullification of cause and effect. There's this weird 'I've been there, I've always been there, I'm going there' thing.

"It's a reach towards quantum entanglement but we sort of combine it with the idea of destiny, so it can jump out of physics into a leap of faith. Your job was to be made into this thing now, so that you could have been there then. I don't know the math for that, but it's a fun thing to say that resonates."

Warping into Season 4, "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds'" creators can see the series conclusion just over the stellar horizon, but there's still plenty of time for more bold exploration of the final frontier.

"More than anything we were trying to set up the traditional understanding of 'Star Trek,'" Myers shares. "We're not saying this is a plot we're going to deal with or a plot we're going to track. It's going to be surprising and different every week. This is a show about going to strange new worlds and exploring a new thing each week. There's ten completely different movies that we go on next season and it's some of our best work."

All seasons of "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" stream now on Paramount+.