Interview: Henry Alonso Myers and Akiva Goldsman Talk ‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds co-showrunners Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers took time away from their travels in space to chat over Zoom about the show. The duo shed light on Captain Batel’s tragic character journey and talked behind the scenes of the holodeck murder mystery episode directed by franchise veteran Jonathan Frakes. Plus, the showrunners touch on the ultimate “near miss” for sci-fi fans, Doctor Who crossover years in the making that almost brought the TARDIS fully into Star Trek canon.

Ayla Ruby: I’m very excited to chat. I love both of your work, so this is excellent. Thank you. Okay, so Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season three, stepping back a little bit. I could be wrong, but there was this real lifetime difference between season two, the end of it production-wise and season three as creative people and from an operational standpoint, can you talk about how you guys navigated that?

Akiva Goldsman: Well-

Ayla Ruby: I’m just jumping right in, guys.

Akiva Goldsman: … as delicately as possible. I mean, what did we have? A strike, a pandemic. What was it this time? So, it was a strike and we got ready, then stopped, then got ready again real fast and it’s okay in hindsight.

Henry Alonso Myers: I mean, yeah, it was kind of like try to just deal with it day to day. It was a lot. It was hard, but not hard just because a lot of things out of our control on the outside coming in.

Ayla Ruby: Okay, that’s fair. So, going a little bit into characters, I want to talk about Batel because I loved her. I love her, I guess. I’d love to know more about her this season because she goes through it, right? Can we talk about her, the beholder, sacrifice what went into that moment and was that always the plan for her when you guys introduced her?

Akiva Goldsman: I mean, it became the plan. It was not the plan when we introduced her in the pilot. I mean, I wrote the pilot before we knew there was a show. So, it was sort of an idea of somebody for a then quite isolated and hermetic Christopher Pike to talk to. And then we just loved her, Melanie. We were just like, “Wow, awesome.” And so, we kept wanting to bring her back and we did in season two. And so, then we built out this arc. And so, from that moment, it was planned. We knew it was a one season arc. We knew where she was going, and we were sort of enamored with the idea of giving Pike a real love interest rather than what is typically more sort of romance of the week or I only left my ship, depending on which show you’re in.

We wanted to experiment with the idea of something more permanent, especially with somebody who knows that permanence is not going to be his long game.

Ayla Ruby: That’s fair and that makes a lot of sense. Okay. So, I have to ask about the Murder Mystery episode, the Holodeck episode, right? This is the meeting of the Holodeck for this part of time. How did that come to be and why the show The Last Frontier? And also, why was La’an the perfect character for this?

Henry Alonso Myers: Wow, these are so many good questions.

Ayla Ruby: I’m sorry. I just have so many of them.

Henry Alonso Myers: Oh no, it’s also just… you’ll have to forgive us because Akiva and I are literally working on season five right now. And so, trying to dig in my mind and being like, “Well, how did we start with it?” Because I feel like we started as one thing and then ultimately, it kind of came down to this, we wanted to do a classic holiday episode, but we knew that because of what time we were in, we couldn’t do it exactly. Meaning, we would not have the same technology that they have the Next Gen. And then this was all the science elements of it. Then another part of it was that La’an had gone through some really intense emotional things in the previous season.

One of the things that we try really hard to do for actors is to just give them a different thing to try. Part of it is what we decide together and in the room and part of it is through discussions with our actors themselves. When we talked to her, she had been really interested in doing dance, clearly was very interested in some kind of a romance. And we were looking for surprise and we were looking to try to play something with her because she’s always been such a … In the previous seasons, she’s been a very dark character. She’s been a character who’s struggling with the Gorn, her history with the Gorn.

Why don’t you just flip the switch with her and try something completely different, totally different performance, totally different character requirements? And she is essentially like the character almost is like a cop on the ship. So, part of us were looking for ways to play that out in an amusing way that was different for her, that allowed different things. And then on the B side, we really wanted to tell a story about … I mean, we had been struggling for a long time to try to tell a story about something about the Original Series, but we couldn’t do the Original Series.

So, we were like, “All right, well, what if we can do something a murder mystery that clearly can’t be taking place in the Original Series, but on the ideas behind that?” You know what I mean? That building the original series, there were so many historical ideas that they were approaching. And so, we were like, “Let’s tell a light and fun episode that surprisingly tells you something deeper about how the show is made.” That’s what we came to.

Ayla Ruby: I love it.

Ayla Ruby: So, Jonathan Frakes directed that episode, right? And he’s only done one other Strange New Worlds episode. I mean, obviously he’s got a very long history with Star Trek, but why him for this episode?

Henry Alonso Myers: Well, I mean, we can speak to many reasons, but one of the great ones is that he is just terrific with actors and performance. Knows how to work with them. He really gets them to try different things. I don’t know, it’s a fun episode for him because all of the actors are coming in to do something different. And so, he makes the set a fun place to be. And I feel like the more you do that, the more that actually comes out through the show. You know what I mean?

Ayla Ruby: Yeah, I love it. And in thinking about the prior Strange New Worlds episode, that comes out too in that episode, so obviously.

Henry Alonso Myers: The delight working on that one. Yeah.

Ayla Ruby: Okay. I’m just going to keep asking my questions because I have so many of them. So, the stuntwork this season, there’s a lot of really cool stuff. It feels so much more elevated this season, if that makes sense. And it works with the story and I love when action works with the story. Can you guys talk about how does that work for you from beginning to end practicality, writing to throwing your actors up on Marionette Wires? What does that look like?

Akiva Goldsman: Well, we are very aware that there are things that the parameters of how we produce the show make easy or easier and things that are more challenging. And things with giant scope and scale, weirdly, spaceship battles are probably easier in some ways for us. We’re certainly much more used to them than stunt work, elaborate fights. Our sets, we didn’t build sets to do John Wick and you can’t keep fixing it over and over again the way you do with a space battle because you’ll break your actor or your stunt people. So, we try, and I think this is true of the visual effects as well, but very much in a way that’s very economical and conservative, we try to be as extraordinarily expressive as possible, but also as specific as possible.

So, we wanted to really serve a rule of thumb with stunt sequences, which is more a guideline, but I think is typically true is that if your stunt sequence is serving your character arc, it’s more effective than if somebody’s just kicking somebody’s ass. And so, we try very hard to do that and the stunt team tries very hard to do that. And in that sense, once it’s written, they do some work. They come back to us with kind of video previs in the same way that the visual effects team will interpret the page and the actor interprets the page, the stunt team interprets the page and then they come back to us and then they show it to us, then they work with the actors.

So, it iterates in order to be effective and different actors have more or less, although our crew is so game and so athletic, but typically we sort of try to drive it towards what the story needs and what the actor is capable of.

Ayla Ruby: Okay. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And again, it was lovely this season with the stunts. Okay. So, we kind of touched on it a little bit in… I think we did in La’an everything she’s going through. Can you talk about this budding romance between her and Spock? How did that come about? What-

Akiva Goldsman: Oh my God, it’s budding. I remember when it was budding. Henry, remember when romances were-

Ayla Ruby: I mean, it happened. I guess it’s not the character and all that stuff. We’re fully-

Akiva Goldsman: We’re so many seasons past budding.

Ayla Ruby: I can’t ask about that!

Akiva Goldsman: No. Look, I think that part of what we are delighted by in having gotten to do Strange New Worlds is taking characters that we know, but seeing them in ways that we don’t know. And so, there’s this stereotypical notion of, oh, Spock is so logical, but the truth is if you look at Spock’s life across all the shows and all the movies, he’s a waveform. He’s wrestling with different sides of himself. His human side, his Vulcan side. And so, where better to express that than in relationship where we are tested and where we are most rewarded

Ayla Ruby: That makes him so much more interesting too when you think about just the character overall like that.

Henry Alonso Myers: See him before he becomes the person you expect. And so, there’s a lot of stuff he hasn’t figured out yet. And so, anything we get to play with or that Ethan gets to play with is a fun exploration.

Ayla Ruby: Well, and we see that too with all the other characters, right? We see them before they were the Original Series, we see these guys, these people and just how the backstory to them and it’s fantastic.

Akiva Goldsman: I mean, it’s a fun game we have because there are those where we’re working on the precursor to the character that you’ve seen, right? How do you do Kirk or Spock in a way that is surprising? And then there’s the fill in the lines version of characters who were barely sketched and are still iconic in our hearts. So, who was Chapel before she was shot through Vaseline pining for Spock? And really what did Uhura go through getting to the ship? And so, those characters are a little bit more tabula rasa for us and so there’s a little bit more. And then there’s someone like La’an who’s just out of whole cloth, right?

But honestly, the directives creatively that we give ourselves and our cohort are a little different depending on what the parameters of the characters are and how much is known about them in canon.

Ayla Ruby: So, you have these characters. Is there anything for them in this season… I know you’ve talked about [in other interviews] overall maybe things that you wish you could have had that didn’t in all the Strange New Worlds. For this season, was there anything that didn’t quite make the edit floor that you would’ve wanted to included?

Henry Alonso Myers: Oh my God, there’s a thousand things.

Ayla Ruby: I know.

Henry Alonso Myers:

I mean, well, I won’t speak for Akiva, but I know there’s a certain type of story that we have tried to do every season that we definitely did try to do season three and weren’t able to pull it off with William Shatner.

Ayla Ruby: That’s what I was referring to. I read, I think, a recent interview where you guys mentioned that.

Akiva Goldsman: Yeah. In what has been, for me, personally, just an extraordinarily gratifying experience, that’s my one regret is that we never found our way to a Shatner episode.

Henry Alonso Myers: Well, we’ll give Akiva a lot of credit on this though because it is not for lack of trying. We have reason to try to figure out a way to make it happen and things that are out of our control have stepped in each time, but it’s not for our lack of interest in this.

Ayla Ruby: I can understand that. Okay. Going back again a little bit to, I think, Four and a Half Vulcans, because I feel like I have to ask about that. So, Patton Oswalt is back, but he’s not a cat because he was a cat, right?

Akiva Goldsman: Nice. Good.

Ayla Ruby: I forget what-

Akiva Goldsman: In Picard. Yeah, that’s a good deep cut. I respect it.

Ayla Ruby: Can you talk about how that came about that episode, him being Doug, just anything?

Henry Alonso Myers: I mean, part of it was about trying to take an episode and flip the script on it, meaning that we came up with a concept that was sort of a sequel to a previous episode in the episode where Spock became human. What if Spock isn’t human but everyone around him becomes Vulcan? And we had this notion of giving our actors a chance to do a thing that they don’t usually get to do, which is to try to be Vulcan. And then the hardest thing, which I actually think is a real interesting idea is that Spock as a character is someone who is half human, half Vulcan, and it’s something that he has dealt with all his life. He’s caught between two different societies, two different cultures.

And when he’s surrounded by people who are humans who are working with him, they’re thinking of him as a Vulcan. And when he’s surrounded by Vulcans, he gets a concept of what it’s like for him to be with Vulcans. So, part of it was to start it as funny and then kind of build into the serious more center of it. And also the other thing was like, how do we make everyone a Vulcan, but completely different, completely different from different character have their own specific Vulcan story that we wanted to tell so that we weren’t just telling the same Vulcan story with each of them? That was the idea with that.

Akiva Goldsman: And we loved the Romulan of it all. We just delighted in that possibility.

Ayla Ruby: That’s wonderful. I know we’re getting pretty close on time, but so I have one probably Easter egg question and then I’m going to throw the floor to you guys, I guess. So, I have to ask about Dr. Who and Pelia and I don’t know if you can answer it, but-

Akiva Goldsman: We have no idea what might you be referring to.

Ayla Ruby: So, there’s a TARDIS in the Farragut episode and then she drops this line that she knew a time traveling doctor. Can you tell me anything about that?

Henry Alonso Myers: Long history. She’s done many things. She’s had many adventures. Carol has had many adventures and has a long history, and so I think it probably speaks to that as well.

Akiva Goldsman: We were trying with Russell to do a crossover. We were for years. Again, these are the near misses, but we got not unclose and we had some really cool conversations about it. And so, certainly in our view, I mean, Pelia traveled in the TARDIS. Why not?

Ayla Ruby: I love it.

Akiva Goldsman: I think Russell would probably say the same.

Ayla Ruby: Well, Ruby Sunday, right? She…Starfleet is canon there.

Akiva Goldsman: That’s right.

Ayla Ruby: Perfect. Okay. So, is there anything we haven’t talked about that you guys want to share about season three? Anything that you want people to know about just that iteration of Strange New Worlds or anything else with Strange New Worlds or anything else in general?

Akiva Goldsman: No. I mean, the only thing I would say about Strange New Worlds, which I think is really worth remembering is that it’s a level of craftsmanship and dedication that is self-selecting because it is created by people for whom almost to a person dreamt of being part of Star Trek when they dreamt because of Star Trek. And so, I do think this season, like all seasons, is a culmination of so many extraordinary humans getting to play at the thing that they wanted to since they were small. And I think there’s a kind of joy that comes from that, which I know I am grateful to have been a part of.

Henry Alonso Myers: So, it is a real gift to … I remember as a five-year-old watching Star Trek on Channel 11, which came out of New York and we used to get up in Central New York. We would get all of the New York channels. And when I was a kid, I loved space shows. I loved space and at five years old to see that and then to get a chance to actually play with it in a real way that people see, that’s a life gift. And to do this for five seasons, I mean you don’t get to do that very often. So, part of it is just to be grateful for getting to use it, for getting to do it, for getting to have the fun while making it. And it’s also been a joy.

Ayla Ruby: Well, it really comes through and it’s a beautiful sentiment. So, thank you both for chatting. This has been wonderful.

Akiva Goldsman: Thank you.

Ayla Ruby: I can’t wait to watch the next season.

Henry Alonso Myers: Well, we can’t wait for you to know.

Ayla Ruby: Bye. Thank you.