Warning: Spoilers for "Strange New Worlds" season 4 finale ahead!
Time travel has been a key topic to explore in "Star Trek" since its 1966 inception, so on the occasion of the sci-fi franchise's 60th anniversary it was appropriate for the season finale, "Tomorrow's Enterprise," to revolve around a temporal rift between two sides of a black hole providing a showcase for Celia Rose Gooding's Lt. Nyota Uhura. This year is also the 40th anniversary of "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home" and the 30th anniversary of "Star Trek: First Contact," both of which contain time travel plotlines.
To dip into the DNA of this resonant finale where Uhura becomes entangled with her future self to save Scotty's life, we connected with "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds"' showrunners Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers to break it all down.
"It was almost the episode to end the show with," Goldsman told Space. "We didn't know whether we were going to have a season 5. So we built a thing that was going to serve as a potential season finale. Fortunately, as we were still breaking it, we ended up with our season 5. So we then reengineered a bunch of things to not end the show. But it was originally designed in case it was our last season."
Myers recognizes "Strange New Worlds"' attraction to skipping across time’s continuum at least once per season, but adding a second one for this fourth outing.
"Every time we hit it we try to approach time travel completely differently," he notes. "This is that rare season where we've got two and they could not be more different in the time travel genre. I think we were really inspired by "Frequency" when we were talking about it initially. We had the idea that it would be great if we had the communications officer have a discussion over time to herself.
"There was an emotional core idea there, which is that there's always something for you to learn from who you're going to become, and there's always something for you to learn from the person who you used to be.
"We felt, in some ways, that summarized 'Star Trek.' Because everyone knows what they're going to become, and for us we've got this weird reversal. We get to tell a show about who we used to be, and for that, everything's a surprise for them. People going through this journey have no idea what they're going to become."
Gooding delivers a fascinating two-pronged performance in "Tomorrow's Enterprise" that required a challenging mindset for both the actress and the series' writers.
"We discussed it with her early," Myers recalls. "One of the biggest tricks was just determining the two different looks so you could see them and feel the difference. Part of the journey here on the show has been, if you speak to your actors early and encourage them to bring their own strengths into it, you tend to get some amazing stuff back. We came in and said, 'Here’s what we're thinking. Tell us how you'd like to explore this.' She’s a really talented actress."
Looking back on the season 4 finale that first aired with Paramount+ on Sept. 24, Goldsman and Myers mention favorite moments that captured its heart and soul.
"My two favorite scenes are Pike and Uhura, and La'an and Uhura," Goldsman shares. "We have a line in there that 'Time travel is heartbreaking.' And you only get to do that because you've had so much wind at your back with stories you've told. Nobody thinks about it, but then if you stop for a second you’re like, 'F***, it really is.' What's nice about this story is that the episode gets to look over its shoulder, which we don't get to do a lot. Those scenes are our version of that, which I think are lovely to watch."
Myers takes us back to his youth for one of his most memorable aspects of the finale.
"I'm a sucker for black holes/white holes. So the stuff where she's actually drifting through space into the black hole is the kind of stuff I dreamed about when I was a little kid.'
As the episode concludes, audiences were no doubt wondering if the show would actually unveil the "space baby" or keep it concealed as a shining cosmic enigma.
"You do see a version of it," adds Myers. "But like most things with creatures that live across temporal schisms, I’d like to imagine they live in a universe where their perception and ours are totally different. It was about how do two creatures who could never even speak a language that the other could understand, how could we cross them over just enough to be perceptive to each other? You see light. You see movement. We spent a lot of time in VFX working on that."
"Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" is currently streaming all 10 episodes of season 4 exclusively on Paramount+ along with all previous three seasons.
