Star Trek: Discovery Season 5 will be the final season of Star Trek: Discovery. Jonathan Frakes has revealed that he directed the first part of Star Trek: Discovery's fifth season finale without realizing it would be the first part of the series finale. Frakes has been involved with Star Trek: Discovery since the series brought the Star Trek franchise back to fans in 2017, directing episodes in each season of the Paramount+ streaming series. He returned to direct the penultimate episode of Star Trek: Discovery Season 5. However, it seems that the cast and crew of Star Trek: Discovery Season 5 didn't know it'd be the second-to-last episode of the series until after filming on the season had wrapped. Even the final episode of Star Trek: Discovery Season 5 needed some updates.

"I directed the first half of the finale of Season 5, which turned out to be the real finale," Frakes told Variety in an interview conducted before the actors' striker that looks back on his long history directing Star Trek episodes. "So that was a very emotional end as well. When we did it, we didn't know it was the end. And then [Discovery executive producer and director] Olatunde Osunsanmi had to go back up and do two or three days of new stuff to actually make the finale the finale." It sounds like some extra work was needed to make the Star Trek: Discovery Season 5 finale feel appropriate as a series finale.

Frakes also reflected on his time working on Star Trek: Discovery more generally, starting with the Star Trek: Discovery Season 1 episode "Despite Yourself." He says, "That was my new home, Discovery. And that first episode, getting to know Sonequa -- she's very special, on a lot of levels. She's not only a fantastic actor, but she is a great leader and very spiritual. She was very welcoming. I was very glad to be part of that company in the beginning of the series. To a person, they said, 'So what's this going to be like? What are the conventions like?' They were all being welcomed into the family in a way. Every new show has a different reaction from fans, but we're all a big family. I mean, it sounds a little Pollyanna, but it's really true."

Star Trek: Discovery Season 5 Cast and Synopsis

Paramount+ released a clip from Star Trek: Discovery Season 5 at San Diego Comic-Con during the Star Trek universe panel and a first look trailer before that. According to the official synopsis, "The fifth and final season will find Captain Burnham and the crew of the USS Discovery uncovering a mystery that will send them on an epic adventure across the galaxy to find an ancient power whose very existence has been deliberately hidden for centuries. But there are others on the hunt as well ... dangerous foes who are desperate to claim the prize for themselves and will stop at nothing to get it."

Star Trek: Discovery Season 5 stars Sonequa Martin-Green (Captain Michael Burnham), Doug Jones (Saru), Anthony Rapp (Paul Stamets), Mary Wiseman (Sylvia Tilly), Wilson Cruz (Dr. Hugh Culber), David Ajala (Cleveland "Book" Booker), Blu del Barrio (Adira), and Callum Keith Rennie (Rayner). The season also guest stars Elias Toufexis (L'ak) and Eve Harlow (Moll) in recurring roles. David Cronenberg also returns in Star Trek: Discovery's fifth and final season, as seen in the clip from Comic-Con. Oded Fehr is also expected to return as Fleet Admiral Charles Vance.

CBS Studios produces Star Trek: Discovery in association with Secret Hideout and Roddenberry Entertainment. Alex Kurtzman, Michelle Paradise, Heather Kadin, Aaron Baiers, Olatunde Osunsanmi, Frank Siracusa, John Weber, Rod Roddenberry, and Trevor Roth are executive producers. Alex Kurtzman and Michelle Paradise are the series' co-showrunners.

Star Trek: Discovery's first four seasons are streaming now on Paramount+ in the U.S., the U.K., Switzerland, South Korea, Latin America, Germany, France, Italy, Australia and Austria. Star Trek: Discovery Season 2 and Season 3 are also available on the Pluto TV Star Trek channel in Switzerland, Germany, and Austria. Star Trek: Discovery airs on Bell Media's CTV Sci-Fi Channel in Canada. Fans can look forward to Star Trek: Discovery Season 5's premiere in early 2024.

Jonathan Frakes has been a part of Star Trek's universe for a long time, starting as William T. Riker in Star Trek: The Next Generation and eventually moving behind the camera to direct episodes of The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager, Star Trek: Discovery, Star Trek: Picard, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, and two Star Trek movies. Many things have changed throughout Frakes' 36-year involvement with the Star Trek franchise, and that's no more evident than in the latest of the episodes he directed to release to Star Trek fans, the Strange New Worlds Season 2 crossover episode with Star Trek: Lower Decks, "Those Old Scientists."

Frakes spoke to Variety before the actors' strike and noted that guest stars Jack Quaid and Tawny Newsome were allowed to improvise during filming, a freedom he and his Star Trek: The Next Generation co-stars were never afforded. He told Variety that improvisation "doesn't happen a lot on Star Trek, as you probably have heard. I mean, especially in our fucking show, they were so strict. It was like we were doing Shakespeare or Chekhov."

Frakes adds that moments of improvisation, such as Newsome's character Beckett Mariner commenting on young Spock's hotness, proved "infectious" on set. He says, "It was just fantasticl" and hopes, "Maybe this will open some eyes." Indeed, that difference may be why a purely comedic episode of Star Trek, like "Those Old Scientists," couldn't have worked until now.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Cast

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds stars Anson Mount as Christopher Pike, Rebecca Romijn as Una Chin-Riley, Ethan Peck as Spock, Jess Bush as Christine Chapel, Christina Chong as La'An Noonien-Singh, Celia Rose Gooding as Nyota Uhura, Melissa Navia as Erica Ortegas and Babs Olusanmokun as Joseph M'Benga. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 also brings back special guest star Paul Wesley as James T. Kirk and adds Carol Kane in the recurring role of Pelia.

CBS Studios, Secret Hideout, and Roddenberry Entertainment produced Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2. Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers are co-showrunners. Alex Kurtzman, Akiva Goldsman, Jenny Lumet, Henry Alonso Myers, Aaron Baiers, Heather Kadin, Frank Siracusa, John Weber, Rod Roddenberry, and Trevor Roth serve as executive producers.

How to watch Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 debuts new episodes on Thursdays on Paramount+ in the United States, the U.K., Australia, Latin America, Brazil, France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. The second season will stream on Paramount+ in South Korea, with a premiere date still to be announced. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds airs on Bell Media's CTV Sci-Fi Channel and streams on Crave in Canada and SkyShowtime in the Nordics, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, and Central and Eastern Europe.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 1 is also streaming on Paramount+. It is also available as home media on Blu-ray, DVD, and 4k UHD.

Paramount+ has revealed the first clip from Star Trek: Strange New World's upcoming musical episode, "Subspace Rhapsody." The crew of the USS Enterprise doesn't break into song yet, but the clip (released on The Ready Room) does set the stage for the musical numbers to come. The clip sees Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding), Spock (Ethan Peck), and Pelia (Carol Kane) working together in engineering on a way to improve Starfleet's subspace communications across the quadrant. Thus far, their tests haven't yielded results. However, Uhura's humming leads Pelia to suggest sending music through the subspace fold as fundamental harmonics may be the answer to their problem.

Spock lets Uhura choose which song to send through the fold. Uhura turns to the Great American Songbook, selecting the 1934 song "Anything Goes," which Cole Porter wrote for the musical of the same name. You can see the clip below.

"Subspace Rhapsody" features music and lyrics by Kay Hanley (Letters to Cleo) and Tom Polce (Letters to Cleo, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend). The episode's soundtrack is already available to pre-save on streaming music services here.

"Subspace Rhapsody" is the penultimate episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2. It is releasing one week earlier than expected due to Paramount+ giving Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2's Star Trek: Lower Decks crossover episode "Those Old Scientists" a surprise release following the Star Trek universe panel at San Diego Comic-Con, where "Subspace Rhapsody" was first revealed to Star Trek fans.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Cast

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds stars Anson Mount as Christopher Pike, Rebecca Romijn as Una Chin-Riley, Ethan Peck as Spock, Jess Bush as Christine Chapel, Christina Chong as La'An Noonien-Singh, Celia Rose Gooding as Nyota Uhura, Melissa Navia as Erica Ortegas and Babs Olusanmokun as Joseph M'Benga. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 also brings back special guest star Paul Wesley as James T. Kirk and adds Carol Kane in the recurring role of Pelia.

CBS Studios, Secret Hideout, and Roddenberry Entertainment produced Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2. Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers are co-showrunners. Alex Kurtzman, Akiva Goldsman, Jenny Lumet, Henry Alonso Myers, Aaron Baiers, Heather Kadin, Frank Siracusa, John Weber, Rod Roddenberry, and Trevor Roth serve as executive producers.

How to watch Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 debuts new episodes on Thursdays on Paramount+ in the United States, the U.K., Australia, Latin America, Brazil, France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. The second season will stream on Paramount+ in South Korea, with a premiere date still to be announced. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds airs on Bell Media's CTV Sci-Fi Channel and streams on Crave in Canada and SkyShowtime in the Nordics, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, and Central and Eastern Europe.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 1 is also streaming on Paramount+. It is also available as home media on Blu-ray, DVD, and 4k UHD.

The ComicBook Nation Crew recaps Marvel's Secret Invasion Finale, reviews Disney's Haunted Mansion movie, Peacock's Twisted Metal TV series, and the epic conclusion to The Witcher Season 3. We also look at Invincible Season 2's Atom Eve Special, preview WWE NXT's Great American Bash, and dive into this week's biggest comics!

Haunted Mansion Review

In his review of Disney Haunted Mansion (2023), ComicBook.com critic Charlie Ridgley says:

Disney's new take on Haunted Mansion was always going to have its work cut out for it, thanks to the ill will earned from the 2003 film. Some wondered if the attraction was somehow unadaptable without Guillermo del Toro (who was once attached to helm the project). Enter the team of director Justin Simien and screenwriter Kate Dippold, who have made questions about Haunted Mansion's adaptability feel rather silly. Their Haunted Mansion movie is a breath of fresh air for everyone who has grown tired of Disney's lifeless live-action output of late, as well as die-hard Haunted Mansion ride fans who have been begging to see a film actually give the attraction the love it deserves.

Rating: 4 out of 5

Twisted Metal Review

In his review of Peacock's Twisted Metal TV series, gamer/critic Cade Onder said the following:

Twisted Metal is a very charming show that manages to accomplish a lot in its ten 30-minute episodes. There are tons of well-earned laughs, a diverse cast of eccentric characters with fleshed out and unique backstories, and a surprising amount of world-building. It's almost shocking that the show isn't longer, given everything it does and how well it pulls it all off. While there are some areas that suffer, such as the vehicular action scenes, everything else comes together in such a satisfying way that it makes Twisted Metal another very successful gaming adaptation.

Rating: 4 out of 5

BONUS ROUND: What's Going On With The MCU???

After the disappointments of the Secret Invasion Finale, the ComicBook Nation crew discusses what The Marvel Cinematic Universe needs to do in order to get back on track:

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Gia Sandhu plays a Star Trek character that is simultaneously well-known and, until now, practically undefined in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. That character is T'Pring, Spock's dejected fiance introduced in the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Amok Time." That episode provided little insight into T'Pring's personality or life beyond that she was over her engagement to Spock and ready to commit to Stonn. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds adds depth to T'Pring, revealing her work as a treatment specialist for the Vulcan rehabilitation colony Ankeshtan K'til and that she really did love Spock before something drove them apart from each other.

That something may have occurred in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2, Episode 5, "Charades." Spock had been made human and instead of telling T'Pring chose to keep it a secret and muddle his way through an important Vulcan ritual related to their engagement. Upon finding out, T'Pring was none too happy at being kept in the dark and decided that she and Spock needed some time apart, perhaps setting the stage for "Amok Time."

ComicBook.com had the opportunity to speak to Sandhu about bringing Vulcan romance to the Star Trek universe and adding layers to a memorable Star Trek character. Here's what she told us:

Jamie Lovett, ComicBook.com: When you signed up for Star Trek, did you expect to be involved in so many goofy, romantic comedy plots, as opposed to the kind of thing the franchise is more commonly associated with -- alien encounters, phasers, science problems, etc.?

Gia Sandhu: Well, specifically with T'Pring after watching "Amok Time," I did not think that this was going to be a comedically charged character, but obviously, I'm so happy that it has gone in the direction that it's gone in. I think the levity is so important when telling the story of what's happened during Spock and T'Pring's journey in advance of "Amok Time."

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has done such an interesting job of fleshing out to T'Pring's character, getting into her work, and going far beyond "Amok Time," which shows her as somewhat one-note in how she's a person stuck in an arranged marriage and not happy about it. Based on "Amok Time," how strong were your preconceptions going into the role? How much did they change as you worked on the character? How much does it resemble who you thought this character would be?

That's a good question. I think what I drew primarily from "Amok Time" was the more superficial layers of the character, because we don't really get to go behind the scenes of what's happening for T'Pring, and she's only seen very briefly. So I think what I got was a lot about just what her presence feels like, the way that she stands, the way that she speaks and there's a lot of sternness and she doesn't really give anything away, and I don't think that that's just because she's Vulcan. I think that there's a lot more to that. So it was more of that I took from the original.

And then every time the scripts come in, I kind of just go with the flow of what the script is telling me because they really are taking massive liberties with how they tell this story. I mean, the world is their oyster. The story can be whatever they want it to be, to lead into what happens in "Amok Time" and I really enjoyed what they're doing. I love that we're seeing a kindness to her and a softness to her and a vulnerability to her, and we see her as this Vulcan who's just so loyal to her love for Spock, so having all of those colors is really nice in advance of what we know happens.

I spoke to Bernadette Croft, the show's costume designer, and she mentioned that one of her favorite things to work on are the Vulcan costumes. Since you mentioned those mannerisms, and the kind of stoicism that comes with T'Pring, partly because she's Vulcan and partly because she's who she is, how much does that costume work factor into your performance for you? Do you feel that Vulcan-ness come on as you put on those pieces?

Oh, absolutely. In the first season, the waistline was really tight on those costumes. I was very corset-like. So then during the second season, I asked them to open it up a little bit because at that point I understood what the feeling was and I thought I should just be able to breathe a little bit in Season 2. And so yeah, it is very informative, not only in the feeling on the body when the costume is on, but also when I look at myself reflected in the mirror, my posture kind of changes, my shoulders go back a little bit and my neck becomes a bit more aligned with my spine and that all feels very natural to what the shape of that costume is.

Can you tell me a little bit about what you considered while you were trying to work on those scenes with Spock? Because we don't see a lot of Vulcan romance in Star Trek, and I imagine there's a challenge to making it feel genuinely romantic but still recognizably Vulcan.

I think we get to see two very different types of romantic relationships between Vulcans in this episode. I mean, the mom and dad don't feel very romantic at all; feels like a couple that's been together for a very long time and have just learned to make it work. And then of course you have T'Pring and you have Spock who are still very early on in their love story and she's obviously very much in love with Spock and of course, Spock is confused about how he feels and he spends this episode kind of, I guess, delving into himself and understanding himself better. But as far as understanding that romance, I think that it's so universal, that relationship that they have. One party is fully in, fully ready to commit and the other party's got some cold feet and some hesitations. I mean, who doesn't know what that's like?

It's interesting because you almost see T'Pring as an antagonist in "Amok Time," because she's the one forcing Spock into the challenge, but all the work that you guys are doing specifically, it makes it so much more tragic because now you see how they really were in love at some point.

And I think T'Pring is finally a bit of a sympathetic character now. You can really understand where she's coming from and the hurt that she feels and the betrayal that she feels.

I'll end this by asking, is this the moment that they split up and don't see each other again until "Amok Time"? Are they on a break? Is there a lot more up-and-down to this story of Spock and T'Pring to come?

I genuinely don't know and I am also looking forward to finding out.

How to watch Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 debuts new episodes on Thursdays on Paramount+ in the United States, the U.K., Australia, Latin America, Brazil, France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. The second season will stream on Paramount+ in South Korea, with a premiere date still to be announced. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds airs on Bell Media's CTV Sci-Fi Channel and streams on Crave in Canada and SkyShowtime in the Nordics, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, and Central and Eastern Europe.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 1 is also streaming on Paramount+. It is also available as home media on Blu-ray, DVD, and 4k UHD.

Editor's note: This interview was conducted prior to the SAG actors' strike.

In Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2, Episode 5, "Charades," Ethan Peck got to show Star Trek fans a new side of Spock, the fully human side. The episode sees Spock and Nurse Chapel (Jess Bush) crashing into a stable space-time vortex. Spock's body is damaged and the alien beings living within the anomaly attempt to repair him. However, with only Chapel as a point of reference, they restore Spock as a human with no trace of his Vulcan heritage. With T'Pring (Gia Sandhu) and her family making their way to the Enterprise to perform a Vulcan ritual for the betrothed, things quickly get awkward.

ComicBook.com has the opportunity to chat with Peck about the episode and what it was like playing a human Spock and the character's romance with Nurse Chapel. Here's what he had to say:

Jamie Lovett, ComicBook.com: I have to wonder when you signed up to play this famously stoic, unemotional, logically-minded character of Spock, did you ever imagine the amount of romance that this role would end up involving as we got into Star Trek: Strange New Worlds?

Ethan Peck: Super surprised. Season 1, Episode 1 kicks off with some very romantic moments between Spock and T'Pring that I was totally floored by. I just had no idea it would kick off like that. I love where Akiva Goldsman, one of our writers and showrunners, took it. Obviously, Henry Alonso Myers, too, but Akiva directed that episode in particular.

It's so funny because Spock is famously sort of isolated and alone, and in this series, he's the one that has all these romantic relationships. It's crazy.

You've been working hard, getting these Vulcan mannerisms down. Then you get this script that's like, "Hey, you're a human in this one." What was your initial gut-check reaction to that? Was it like, "Oh, cool, I get to unclench in this one," or was it a little bit, "Come on, guys. I've been working so hard at this Vulcan thing"?

No, definitely the former. My reaction was, "Holy moly, this is going to be really challenging." Because, yeah, you're absolutely right, I've got to throw out everything I know about Spock, almost everything. The big challenge there is how far can we take this version of him without being totally untethered to the spirit of Spock. And where I landed, at least, is in these amazing qualities of Spock that I think are so essential to who he is, which are the curiosity -- he's filled with wonder, he's adventurous, he's brave -- and he's got so much depth. He gets to explore those qualities, just in a very different way this time, and that was really, really fun and liberating.

Was there a specific moment that posed a particular challenge when it came to letting go of a particular mannerism without totally dropping the character?

All the time. Every moment was like that. The first few days we were filming the episode -- and shout out to Jordan Canning, our amazing director for that episode, she was such an incredible partner in this for me, really made me feel safe and comfortable, and is such a smart and creative collaborative -- in those first couple of days, we were kind of figuring out, "Who is this guy? How loud is this guy? How big is he in his emotions and his emoting?" And the first couple of days were so discombobulating because this character is so different from the Spock that we know in so many ways, and it was really hard to let go of because I'm still dressed the same, and all of these things reinforce who he is normally. And so to be in these same environments, in the same costume, but be a totally different person was really difficult and exciting.

I know the scene was shot using the magic of television, but I have to wonder how much bacon were you actually forced to consume for that one scene.

A lot. I ate a lot of it.

Are you ever going to look at it the same way?

I'll tell you what, I didn't eat anything else that day, and I didn't want to eat bacon for a while.

Tell me a little bit about working with Jess Bush to establish that nervous energy that seems to radiate between Spock and Chapel leading up to the end of this episode. What were some of the things you talked about as far as what that chemistry should be like, and also what feedback you got from the director in that regard?

Oh, great question. I love working with Jess so much. She's so incredible in that role, and just an incredible person, as well, and we get along so well off-camera. We actually don't really speak too much about process or how things are going to be. I know how she works, she knows how I work, and we show up and see what happens, to be honest with you. We did discuss a little bit the technicalities of the kiss and what that would be like, but we really kind of hide our process from each other and then experience them in the moment together on camera. That's how I remember it.

Those sorts of moments of intimacy are really challenging because on paper it seems really intimate, but practically, it's so mechanical and needs to be done a certain way, and it's got to be discussed and choreographed, and it's just kind of silly and awkward, which really did a lot for me as Spock because I think he's silly and awkward in a lot of those sorts of situations, so, it was perfect.

In your mind, how do you define whatever this thing happening between Chapel and Spock is? I know we've got some episodes left to go, but at this point, what would you say to fans wondering about that?

Oh, that's a good question. I would say that there's some part of him that really hopes for it, that, really, he wants to fit in and he wants to belong. I think ultimately what we discover about him is that he doesn't. He doesn't belong on Earth, necessarily. He doesn't belong on Vulcan, necessarily. He's really perfectly suited to being in Starfleet and being on the Enterprise with all of these weirdos, these beautiful and intelligent weirdos.

And so I think there's a part of him that yearns so badly to have this human relationship with Chapel, but knows that that's not quite right because the same applies to T'Pring that he, I think, aches to be Vulcan and to belong with her and to belong on Vulcan. But there's some part of him that understands that that's not to be, and that's what all of these events are leading him to, that realization that neither of these are really for him. I don't think he knows that yet, but I think maybe the answers are in him, but he's just working to reveal them at this point. But I think he wants to be with her.

The show is a prequel to Star Trek: The Original Series. A lot of people who are watching will know where they end up. Do you think there's a particular trick, be it in the performance, the writing, the directing, to make it feel just as raw and real and exciting as a traditional, "Will they, won't they," even though people may have already seen the ending?

Oh, well, I never think about where it's going. I think about the moment that we have, day to day. So, I really do my best to stay in those moments and not think too much about the bigger picture. In that moment, I think Spock looks to be with Chapel but just isn't really clear on what that means yet. I know that he has yearning and pining for her and to be with her.

There's some great stuff with Amanda Grayson in this episode. One of the scenes really reminded me of a scene from the first J.J. Abrams Star Trek movie where Spock kind of tells off the council when they start looking down on his mother. I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about filming that scene. Did that scene from that movie pop into your mind or get mentioned at all, or were you purposely trying to avoid it?

No, it didn't pop into my mind, actually. When I was preparing for the role, my focus was really on Nimoy's version of the character because Zachary Quinto, I loved those movies, and I mean, I so admire him and love his performance in those movies, but he's in the Kelvin Timeline, and so if I ever have a reference come up in my mind, it's usually to Nimoy. But that's a really interesting connection, and I think goes to show you that they're both great, well-written Spocks. But again, I really try to view every moment and interpret it on my own and for what I see it to be as best I can at this point in time, knowing Spock as I do now.

How to watch Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 debuts new episodes on Thursdays on Paramount+ in the United States, the U.K., Australia, Latin America, Brazil, France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. The second season will stream on Paramount+ in South Korea, with a premiere date still to be announced. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds airs on Bell Media's CTV Sci-Fi Channel and streams on Crave in Canada and SkyShowtime in the Nordics, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, and Central and Eastern Europe.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 1 is also streaming on Paramount+. It is also available as home media on Blu-ray, DVD, and 4k UHD.

Editor's note: This interview was conducted prior to the SAG actors' strike.

The ComicBook Nation Crew Goes DEEP on "Barbieheimer" weekend, with reviews of both Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer and Greta Gerwig's Barbie movie! PLUS, we recap what's going down at Comic-Con 2023, breakdown The Marvels Trailer and Secret Invasion Episode 5, and discuss this week's comics!

Barbie Review

In her official review of Barbie, ComicBook.com's Nicole Drum had the following to say:

Even for these tiny things, Barbie is quite possibly Gerwig's best film to date. It is insightful, hilarious, and packed with thoughtful commentary as well as an incredible amount of Easter eggs and one-liners that will reward audiences of every age and opinion on Barbie, not just on the first watch, but on multiple rewatches. Barbie pulls off the near-impossible task of taking what could have been merely a capitalist IP-driven cash grab and turned it into a celebration of and commentary on culture that gives the audience permission and encouragement to challenge not only everything they think Barbie represents but what the world asks of us mere humans as well so that we never go back into the box again.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Oppenheimer Review

Critic Patrick Cavanaugh had this to say in his official Oppenheimer review:

After a long string of crowd-pleasers that also manage to inject ambitious philosophical and existential components, Oppenheimer is Christopher Nolan's most intellectual and internal experience in years. It showcases the universality of humanistic struggles without hingeing upon them entirely, while also subtly yet exponentially layering in explicit critiques of global war machines. Despite chronicling events that unfolded 70 years ago, exploring an arms race or being given conflicting information by government authorities and being expected to honor ever-changing ideologies feels immensely contemporary. With Oppenheimer, Nolan orchestrates a talented symphony of performers at the top of their game to explore an overlooked corner of history, treating it with nuance and respect while lesser hands would lean into melodrama. The movie is a tribute not only to the true-life figures who pushed the limits of science forward, but also to those who suffered the consequences of those forward-thinkers' quest for fire.

Rating: 4 out of 5

BONUS ROUND: Be Sure to Listen to our FULL SPOILERS DISCUSSION of OPPENHEIMER!

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Paul Wesley debuted as a Captain James T. Kirk in the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 1 finale, and played another Captain James T. Kirk in the tragic time travel romance that was "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow." He finally gets to play the James T. Kirk, though not yet a captain, in the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds episode "Lost in Translation," where he meets and teams up with Nyota Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding) for the first time years before he becomes her commanding officer on the Enterprise's bridge. And that's only the first of a handful of historic Star Trek meetings in the episode.

"Lost in Translation" also let Star Trek fans see Jim Kirk interacting with his brother, Sam Kirk (Dan Jeannotte), for the first time, and ended with the very first meeting of Kirk and Spock. ComicBook.com had the chance to speak to Welsey about playing multiple Kirks, that understated historic meeting, and the potential for 25th-century Kirk adventures.

Jamie Lovett, ComicBook.com: When you signed up to play Captain Kirk, were you aware that you'd actually be playing three different versions of Captain Kirk? Does it feel like you've done three times the prep? Or, do you like they've been, more or less, the same character?

Paul Wesley: No. Look, the first appearance I did was based on "Balance of Terror," which I watched a few times, and I remember, when I watched it, I thought, "Okay. Kirk doesn't smile very much. He's very serious. A lot of people have died. This is a very serious mission." There's very little Kirk-isms in there. There's little charm. He's a man on a mission. And he's taking everything very, very seriously." And I thought, "Okay, for this episode, I'm going to make a concerted effort to make it a little more of the serious Kirk, because this is an alternate timeline and I have that flexibility to do that." And so, I made a very conscious effort to hold back on some of that charm and, for lack of a better word, the Kirk-isms that we all know, knowing that there would be future episodes in Season 2 where I would be able to explore those facets.

So then, in Season 2, Episode 3, when I read that script, I thought, "Oh my gosh, thank God," because it is the exact opposite of the Season 1 finale, and I get to have so much fun. So then, I decided, "Okay, I'm going to make him a bit of a goofball." Because in many ways, Kirk was a goofball in TOS. Every episode is different. There are episodes where Kirk is incredibly lighthearted. There are episodes where he's actually taking himself very seriously. And so, there are so many facets of Kirk that we can explore. And I thought, "Let me do that for this one." And so, it's not that I changed, radically shifted the character. It's just more that I chose to bring out different personality traits in different episodes.

When was the first time that you fully felt like you were Captain Kirk? I know for some of the people I've talked to, it was when they put on the uniform. For some other people, it was when they sat in the chair, or wherever their station was, that it hit them they were in Star Trek. When did that moment come to you? Or was it more gradual?

I think, more gradual. And also, I don't feel like Captain Kirk yet, because he is not Captain Kirk. He's Lieutenant Kirk. And I think, for me, I don't really want him to feel like Captain Kirk yet. I want him to feel like Captain Kirk eventually. In terms of his unwavering ability to lead a ship. I think he's still growing into that. But, I do feel like James T. Kirk. I feel like, in many ways, with the interactions that I've had with, be it, Uhora, or La'an, or Ethan Peck, they've been limited now, but nonetheless, as I interact with these characters, and I form these relationships, and these character dynamics, I begin to feel more and more like James T. Kirk. Because really, James Kirk, in my opinion, he's all about the relationships that he has with people, and that's what makes him who he is. So, I think, I'm beginning to feel more Kirk as the episodes progress and as the relationship dynamics grow, if that makes sense.

I want to ask about Spock because we get what is the first meeting between Kirk and Spock and it is so understated. We get this whole episode with Kirk and Uhura, and then a brief shot of Spock sitting down with Kirk afterward. Can you talk about what filming that scene was like? I spoke to Akiva Goldsman beforehand, and he made the point that "Kirk and Spock don't know that this is the first meeting of Kirk and Spock." Did you have this discussion on set?

Actually, yeah. It's funny, and Ethan will say -- we had discussed this moment, because I remember we were on set, and Dan, the director was like, "Okay, great. Let's shoot this." And I remember we shot the first take, and I was like, "Okay, wait." And I was like, "Okay, can we just pause forT a moment here?" And I was like, "Dan, this is a really big deal. It's the first time Kirk and Spock meet. And, we're creating canon here. And, we want to really emphasize this moment. And maybe we should do this. Maybe we should..."

And he's like, "Dude, no. It's the exact opposite. They're just two dudes that are meeting. And, there's a curiosity, and there's something that draws them to one another, and there's the beginning of that friendship, but they don't know that yet. And so, let's just not try to milk this for something that it's not yet. Let's let it grow." And I thought it was a smart, understated choice because just think about how forced it could have been. Sometimes, the imagination is more powerful than anything else. And so, let's imagine what this relationship will be, as opposed to handing it on a platter to the audience.

It felt like the opposite of what the first JJ Abrams movies did where it kind of insists that Spock and Kirk have to be friends, otherwise the galaxy is doomed. This is more like, "Eh, it happens."

And it wasn't there in the beginning. I don't remember now, but initially, Spock didn't like Kirk in the JJ Abrams movies, right?

Right, because he cheated on the Kobayashi Maru test, which Spock created.

Right, right, which was interesting because, there was an animosity that then grew into a trust and a friendship, which I thought was also a pretty wise choice.

Another interesting moment in the episode is getting to see Kirk with his brother because that's not really a thing that we get to see elsewhere as Sam dies immediately in Star Trek: The Original Series. Can you talk about what discussions went into how Kirk behaves as a sibling, and what that family dynamic is like?

I think, honestly, a lot of it was on the page. It became very, very clear from day one, the minute I read their first interaction, that they had an obvious sibling rivalry. But, I made a very concerted effort, and frankly, the writing was so good that I didn't need to work that hard, to make sure that it was lighthearted and that there was still a sibling love. I think, honestly, it's meant to be funny. Sam is silly, but he's silly because he should be the better brother in many ways. He should be ahead, and dad's favorite, and perhaps even higher rank, and he should be the adventurer, but he's not. He's the scientist. He's the logic-oriented one. He chooses the safe route,, and, I think, in spite of himself, it drives him crazy, which I think is part of the humor. And Kirk is just someone who's naturally, I don't know, ahead of everyone else, and, he doesn't even quite know why. It's just being himself, and it drives Sam crazy. It's funny.

Kirk has been played by two different actors before you. Here we're seeing him in a prequel. Obviously, you might look to those other performances for inspiration, but where do you see space to add something original, to explore a side of Kirk that hasn't at all been seen in those performances?

I'm very much doing that. Look, I made a very conscious decision to do something a little different. I think some people love it, some people don't, and that's okay with me. What I really wanted was to make sure that I played a guy who was still growing into the Kirk that is very much part of pop culture history.

I didn't want the personality traits that he's known for to be fully formed yet. I wanted those to be blossoming like a flower in many ways. I wanted to explore the brainier side of Kirk. I hate to use the word nerd, but in some ways, he's a cool nerd. I drew from certain resources that allowed me to delve into that aspect. I didn't want him to be this jock guy. I wanted him to be this charming, intellectual goofball in many ways. Not to say, that he can't have acts of courageousness and pure heroism. I wanted that to still exist. But, I just wanted to layer it a little bit.

Last question I'll ask you, I don't know if you're aware of this, but Star Trek: Picard included this Easter egg where Kirk's body is in stasis at Starfleet, as a nod to a series of books where Kirk gets revived and goes, and has adventures in the future. Does the idea of playing a revitalized Kirk in the 25th century on whole new adventures appeal to you as a possibility? Hypothetically, of course?

Hypothetically, of course. Yeah, absolutely. I love this character. I honestly have been having the best time, and that's obviously a testament to the cast that I'm working with and the writers. I love it. It's fantastic. I love how much room there is to grow, and I love all the different facets of his personality. So playing Kirk in the future, I would approach that in a completely different way, and it's such a gift for an actor to be able to do that.

How to watch Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 debuts new episodes on Thursdays on Paramount+ in the United States, the U.K., Australia, Latin America, Brazil, France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. The second season will stream on Paramount+ in South Korea, with a premiere date still to be announced. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds airs on Bell Media's CTV Sci-Fi Channel and streams on Crave in Canada and SkyShowtime in the Nordics, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, and Central and Eastern Europe.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 1 is also streaming on Paramount+. It is also available as home media on Blu-ray, DVD, and 4k UHD.

Editor's note: This interview was conducted prior to the SAG actors' strike.

Paramount+ brought some surprising Star Trek: Strange New Worlds news to the Star Trek Universe panel in Hall H at San Diego Comic-Con. Paramount+ announced that Star Trek: Strange New Worlds will have the Star Trek franchise's first-ever musical episode. A trailer for the musical episode, which is titled "Subspace Rhapsody," also debuted during the presentation. You can watch it below. It features the "Subspace Rhapsody" version of the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' main title theme. The Star Trek: Strange New Worlds musical episode features music and lyrics by Kay Hanley (Letters to Cleo) and Tom Polce (Letters to Cleo, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend), and the episode's soundtrack is already available to pre-save on streaming music services here. "Subspace Rhapsody" is the ninth and penultimate episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' second season and will debut on Paramount+ on Thursday, August 3rd.

Paramount also announced that following the advance screening of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2, Episode 7, "Those Old Scientists" during the Hall H panel, the highly anticipated crossover between Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and Star Trek: Lower Decks will be made available to stream early on Paramount+. The episode will debut today at 7 p.m. ET/4 p.m. PT on Paramount+ in the U.S. and all Paramount+ international markets exclusively on the service. The updated Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 release schedule is as follows:

• Saturday, July 22 - Episode 207, "Those Old Scientists"
• Thursday, July 27 - Episode 208, "Under the Cloak of War"
• Thursday, August 3 - Episode 209, "Subspace Rhapsody"
• Thursday, August 10 - Episode 210 (Season Finale), "Hegemony"

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Cast

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds stars Anson Mount as Christopher Pike, Rebecca Romijn as Una Chin-Riley, Ethan Peck as Spock, Jess Bush as Christine Chapel, Christina Chong as La'An Noonien-Singh, Celia Rose Gooding as Nyota Uhura, Melissa Navia as Erica Ortegas and Babs Olusanmokun as Joseph M'Benga. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 also brings back special guest star Paul Wesley as James T. Kirk and adds Carol Kane in the recurring role of Pelia.

CBS Studios, Secret Hideout, and Roddenberry Entertainment produced Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2. Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers are co-showrunners. Alex Kurtzman, Akiva Goldsman, Jenny Lumet, Henry Alonso Myers, Aaron Baiers, Heather Kadin, Frank Siracusa, John Weber, Rod Roddenberry, and Trevor Roth serve as executive producers.

How to watch Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 debuts new episodes on Thursdays on Paramount+ in the United States, the U.K., Australia, Latin America, Brazil, France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. The second season will stream on Paramount+ in South Korea, with a premiere date still to be announced. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds airs on Bell Media's CTV Sci-Fi Channel and streams on Crave in Canada and SkyShowtime in the Nordics, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, and Central and Eastern Europe.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 1 is also streaming on Paramount+. It is also available as home media on Blu-ray, DVD, and 4k UHD.

Paramount+ is having a massive Star Trek day today at San Diego Comic-Con, and they're giving us a bunch of new looks at all of their upcoming projects. We've already gotten the first clip from the final season of Star Trek: Discovery, and now they're giving us a new look at another series. Star Trek: Lower Decks is getting ready to release a brand new season, and during their panel at San Diego Comic-Con, we got to see a brand new trailer for their upcoming fourth season. In the trailer, we get to see what the Star Trek: Lower Decks crew has been up to since we last saw them.

You can check out the Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 4 trailer below!

What is Star Trek: Lower Decks about?

Paramount+ describes the animated series as follows, "Star Trek: Lower Decks is an animated comedy series that follows the support crew on one of Starfleet's least important ships, the U.S.S. Cerritos, in 2380."

Star Trek: Lower Decks' cast features the "lower decks" crew of the U.S.S. Cerritos: Ensign Beckett Mariner, voiced by Tawny Newsome; Ensign Brad Boimler, voiced by Jack Quaid; Ensign Tendi, voiced by No?l Wells; and Ensign Rutherford, voiced by Eugene Cordero. Star Trek: Lower Decks also features the U.S.S. Cerritos' Bridge crew: Captain Carol Freeman, voiced by Dawnn Lewis; Commander Jack Ransom, voiced by Jerry O'Connell; and Doctor T'Ana, voiced by Gillian Vigman.

CBS' Eye Animation Productions, Secret Hideout, and Roddenberry Entertainment produce Star Trek: Lower Decks. Secret Hideout's Alex Kurtzman, Roddenberry Entertainment's Rod Roddenberry and Trevor Roth, Katie Krentz (219 Productions), and Heather Kadin are executive producers alongside creator and showrunner Mike McMahan. Aaron Baiers (Secret Hideout) also serves as an executive producer. Titmouse (Big Mouth) is Star Trek: Lower Decks' animation studio for the series.

Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 3 is now available on Blu-ray and DVD. Season 4 is expected to premiere on Paramount+ this summer. Paramount+ has even renewed Star Trek: Lower Decks for an upcoming fifth season.

What do you think about the trailer for Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 4? Are you excited to see the series when it arrives later this summer? Let us know your thoughts either in the comments section or by hitting our writer @NateBrail up on Twitter!

Paramount+ is getting ready to release the fifth and final season of Star Trek: Discovery, and fans cannot wait to see what happens next. Since the first season of Star Trek: Discovery, fans have flocked to it as one of the best in recent years of the franchise, and it has been successful enough to warrant five straight seasons. Star Trek: Discovery has already revealed that the fifth season will premiere on Paramount+ sometime in 2024, and their new San Diego Comic-Con panel has given us a new look at the series. During their panel, the streaming service revealed the first clip from the fifth season of the series.

You can check out the trailer below.

Star Trek: Discovery Will End with Season 5

Previously, Paramount revealed that Star Trek: Discovery will be ending with its fifth season on Paramount+ and one of the stars of the series are speaking out on it ending. Sonequa Martin-Green Released a statement on the series ending when it was announced.

"I can hardly believe that this mind-blowing journey with 'Star Trek: Discovery' is ending," Martin-Green said in a statement. "I'm astoundingly blessed by God to have played Captain Michael Burnham and to have taken part in a legacy alongside an extraordinary cast, phenomenal crew and remarkable writing team. To our most supportive partners at CBS Studios and Paramount+, who insisted on making television history, I'm deeply grateful. I'm also deeply grateful for the creative collaboration with our showrunners Michelle Paradise and Alex Kurtzman, as well as Olatunde Osunsanmi and the incomparable team of executive producers.

I will never forget how it felt to stand together as a show family, cradling the heirloom of 'Trek' with all those from the franchise at large and with the fans. The fans welcomed us into their hearts as we launched a new iteration of 'Trek' and an entire entertainment platform, and we'll never forget it. 65 episodes later, here's to the entire company of 'Star Trek: Discovery,' to the show and its fifth and final season, to its beloved fans and to all those who envision a better future. Let's fly... "

What is Star Trek: Discovery about?

Paramount+ describes the series as follows, "Star Trek: Discovery follows the voyages of Starfleet on their missions to discover new worlds and new lifeforms, and one Starfleet officer who must learn that to truly understand all things alien, you must first understand yourself."

What do you think about the Star Trek: Discovery clip? Are you excited to see the latest season of the series? Let us know in the comments below or by hitting up our writer @NateBrail on Twitter!

In Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2, Episode 5, "Charades," Nurse Chapel, played by Jess Bush, finally got what she wanted out of Spock (Ethan Peck). SPOILERS follow for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2, Episode 5, "Charades." Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2's latest episode gave fans Spock as they'd never seen him before, fully human. In an ironic twist, Spock's efforts to mask his transformation in order to properly honor a Vulcan betrothment ritual were successful, but his hiding the change from his betrothed, T'Pring (Gia Sandhu), led to the couple taking some time apart. Only after returning to his half-Vulcan self did Spock and Nurse Chapel finally act on the feelings they'd been harboring toward each other.

It's a complicated situation. We turned to Bush to help unpack it for us.

Jamie Lovett, ComicBook.com: What was your initial reaction when you found out that your character was going to be involved in this romantic angle with Spock? Was there at all a reaction like, "Spock? You mean the one that doesn't have emotion?" Or were there no questions or hesitations?

Jess Bush: That was something that was told to me the moment I booked the role. They were like, "This is a big part of what you are going to be doing," and I was aware of their past in canon, so I was prepared and intrigued to see how that was going to play out, for sure.

There's this crackling nervous energy between Spock and Chapel in this episode. How did you go about developing their chemistry? Were there discussions with Ethan Peck or advice from the director that helped?

Ethan and I didn't really intellectualize anything. We didn't sit down and go, "This is what's going on." Because I think that often, you just have to be in open discovery mode in order for that stuff to crackle, because in real life, you're not deciding what's going to happen when you encounter someone that you're interested in or that you have complicated chemistry with, it's often really hard to put into words. So I think that for me anyway, it was more just about paying attention to what's already there, and being curious about that and leaning into it, and allowing the physical chemistry just to be.

It's interesting watching a will they-won't they style romance in a prequel, where anyone familiar with Star Trek: The Original Series will know how it ends. Do you think there is a trick or something special that goes into making it feel exciting despite that?

I think there's this cool thing about the way that they're making the show, where there are points in the story that are recognizable and staying true to the canon, but they also have allowed for deviations from that, and new complexities in relation to it being in the 2023 world rather than the '60s. Naturally, I think that it's not a far reach to allow things to be much more complex, and it's still part of their story that's never been told, so it's exciting, it's fresh, it's new, and I feel like it makes it even more romantic and tragic that you know that it's not going to work in end. I don't know, there's something gut-wrenching about that. And it's cool to fill in the gaps and be like, "Oh, how did they make it to that weird point" They could have made it there through so many different versions of a relationship. We don't know, there could be so much that could have happened in that time, and so exploring that, I think, is very satisfying.

Is there a term for what's going on with Spock and Chapel right now? Are they in the avoiding labels stage of the relationship?

It's almost like it's beyond a relationship. It doesn't really fit inside the normal bounds of a, "Oh, you are my girlfriend, you're my boyfriend," kind of thing. It's almost deeper than that, in a way.

As Chapel says at the end of the episode, it's "I don't know, shut up."

Yeah, this is just what it is, I don't know, some kind of soul connection that's undeniable, but doesn't make any convenient sense

One of the interesting things about this episode is that Spock gets transformed into a human, but otherwise, he's fine. There's no life-threatening ticking clock that's forcing him to turn back. He could go on living a human life, which means Chapel's urgent motivation to turn him back is coming from a different place and must be mixed with some feelings about Spock finally being able to express himself in more human, emotional terms. For you, what was the balance of all that going through her mind in the episode?

Yeah, it's super messy. It's super complicated. Someone else had said to me before, it's almost like a genie in the bottle moment, where you get your one wish that he is fully human, and can express to you, and is available, and animated, and can read what's going on for him. But it's also like you say, he's not going to die, but if he was to stay human, there would be a death of sorts, there would be a loss. And that's the person, the real Spock, the half-Vulcan Spock, is actually the person that she developed these deep feelings for, and for a reason. And so while it might feel good in the moment, it's not real, it's not him.

And there's also this moral counterpart, where even if she did want to just entertain that for a while and see what that was like, she would never do that. That's not her decision to make. This would be changing the course of Spock's life forever, and that's not her decision, and she'll do everything she can to make sure that she preserves the thing that is best for Spock.

I think the ending speaks to that too. She doesn't even seem to consider the idea until he's half-Vulcan again. She never settles for whatever is going on with him at that moment until the real Spock comes back.:

Totally. Yeah, because he's not in his full right mind. I think it feels iffy for her, morally iffy, to be taking advantage of that.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 has already shown us a few different sides of Chapel. There's the romantic stuff going on, but also the badass/traumatized soldier veteran fo the Klingon War. Is there a particular side her that you most enjoy playing? And are we going to see additional sides, or more digging deeper into these as the season progresses?

Definitely digging deeper into what we've broached already. In terms of the first part of your question, I don't think it's that I prefer one or the other. When I have the opportunity to explore a side of her that's more hardened, more action-based, more of a fighter, experiencing that then also informs when I'm in a softer space or having an emotional, somewhat more romantic time, the information from that other experience comes into her, just like it would for a person in real life. We're a big, complex, circular, swirling smoosh of experiences and emotions, and I don't think it really separates out. I think that it's all more

Before I let you go, just anything else you'd like to say to fans of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds? Any teases of what's next for Chapel throughout the back half of the season?

Just way more. The second half of the season for Chapel is so sick, so I had a great time. So I'm really excited for you guys to see what we've put together. There's some cool stuff.

How to watch Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 debuts new episodes on Thursdays on Paramount+ in the United States, the U.K., Australia, Latin America, Brazil, France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. The second season will stream on Paramount+ in South Korea, with a premiere date still to be announced. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds airs on Bell Media's CTV Sci-Fi Channel and streams on Crave in Canada and SkyShowtime in the Nordics, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, and Central and Eastern Europe.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 1 is also streaming on Paramount+. It is also available as home media on Blu-ray, DVD, and 4k UHD.

Editors note: This interview was conducted prior to the SAG actors' strike.

The ComicBook Nation Crew breaks down the SAG-AFTRA strike and what it means for so many movies and TV projects, including Deadpool 3, Fantastic Four, House of the Dragon, and more! We also deliver a full preview of 2023's San Diego Comic-Con, discuss Xbox and Activision's big win against the FTC, and review Final Fantasy 16 and this week's biggest comics!

The SAG-AFTRA Strike and Effects on Comic-Con

SAG-AFTRA has decided to strike and we are already seeing a host of productions in movies and television shut down as a result. We're also seeing promotion for current and future projects grind to a halt, with the cast leaving the Oppenheimer premiere and more talent pulling out of San Diego Comic-Con. There's also been a host of panel and event cancellations on several fronts, and the list of projects affected is growing by the minute.

SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher announced the strike and spoke about why it's necessary to do something now. "What makes you think they're not interested in what's happening here?" Drescher said during the SAG-AFTRA press conference announcing the strike. "I think that they have an allegiance to all of us because we bring joy to their lives, and during COVID, they turned to us for everything. So I don't think that your assumption that they don't really care about anything but being entertained over the summer is the bottom line, when the people that give so much to them and enrich their lives in so many ways, are saying, 'We are being taken advantage of in a terrible way.' And if we let this happen to us, dollars for doughnuts, it's gonna happen to you and your family, your children, and everybody that you work with too. That's how threatening this moment is in our nation's history."

Final Fantasy 16 Review

Matt Aguilar and Logan Moore dive into Square Enix's latest Final Fantasy and if it's worth your time, and while there's even more to explore in the game, Moore is excited to do just that. In his review in progress, Moore wrote "The review embargo has finally lifted for Final Fantasy XVI so I can now tell you that the latest game in Square Enix's long-running RPG series is pretty great -- at least based on what I've played so far. Unsurprisingly, Final Fantasy XVI is a long game and it's one I want to spend as much time with as possible before writing our full review for ComicBook.com. If you're planning to pick up FFXVI for yourself and play it in the coming days, though, I have a hard time imagining that you'll be disappointed."

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A new Star Trek roleplaying game is coming later this year. Today, Modiphius Entertainment announced Captain's Log Solo Roleplaying Game, a new solo tabletop roleplaying game that will be released in August 2023. The game uses a streamlined version of the Star Trek Adventures rules, with players writing their own captain's log as they explore the galaxy in either creator or randomly generated adventures. Notably, Captain's Log Solo Roleplaying Game will let players play in any era of Star Trek, ranging from the 21st to 32nd century.

The game also allows for cooperative play with friends serving as senior staff, or with a gamemaster facilitating the answers. Star Trek Adventures gamemasters can also use the random story tables in Captain's Log when planning Star Trek Adventures campaigns.

Modiphius has published Star Trek Adventures since 2017, with supplements covering how to play a variety of characters in the Star Trek world. While initial supplements focused on Federation crew members and ships, the game expanded to cover the Klingon Empire and dozens of other alien species for use in character creation. In the past year, Modiphius has released a sourcebook based on Star Trek: Lower Decks and player character sheets for characters from current Star Trek shows.

Several other Star Trek board games have either been released or are due for release this year, including the PvP focused Star Trek Away Missions and the puzzle focused Star Trek Cryptic.

Digital PDFs of Captain's Log Solo Roleplaying Game are available now, and print copies of the game are expected to be available in August 2023.

Fisher-Price's put an pop culture spin on their iconic Little People toys with Collector lineup of special edition figures that are targeted for adults. They've been a hit with adorable 2.5-inch figures based on characters from classic shows like Parks and Rec and The Office as well as movies like The Lord of the Rings series. Today they added the the original Star Trek crew to the collection with a set that's earmarked as an Entertainment Earth San Diego Comic-Con 2023 exclusive, but interested parties can reserve one online right here at EE for $24.99 (free US shipping on orders $59+ using the code FREESHIP59 at checkout).

Naturally, the set includes Captain James T. Kirk with a phaser, First Officer Spock with a tricorder (he might also be giving the Vulcan salute, though it's hard to tell), Chief Communications Officer Nyota Uhura, and Chief Helmsman Hikaru Sulu. Each figure is wearing its iconic Starfleet uniform with the delta insignia and stands about 2 1/2-inches tall. Also make sure to take a close look at the packaging when it arrives. Fisher-Price loves to plant all kinds of Easter eggs on the boxes.

Entertainment Earth notes that "this item will first be sold at San Diego Comic-Con 2023 at the Entertainment Earth Booth #2343. If supplies remain after the show, your order will be filled and shipped to you then, in August 2023." You won't be charged until it ships, so you have nothing to lose if they all sell out at SDCC.

While you're at it, you might want to check out Little People Collector sets that launched back in June that are based on The Big Lebowski, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Suicide Squad (Comics), The Notebook, and the upcoming Barbie Movie. That's right, Ryan Gosling does double duty in this wave, which is probably some sort of record for the line. Pre-orders for all of the new Little People Collector sets can be found via the links below priced at $24.99 each.

• The Big Lebowski Little People Collector Figure Set: Order at Entertainment Earth / Amazon: Includes Jeffrey "The Dude" Lebowski with his signature drink, Donny Kerabatsos and his bowling ball, Walter Sobchak with his "cheap urn" coffee can, and Maude Lebowski dressed in her dream sequence Viking costume
• Brooklyn Nine-Nine Little People Collector Figure Set: Order at Entertainment Earth / Amazon: Includes detectives Jake Peralta and Rosa Diaz, plus Captain Raymond Holt with Mr. Hootsworth and Sergeant Terry Jeffords with his beloved yogurt.

• The Notebook Little People Collector Figure Set: Order at Entertainment Earth / Amazon: Includes characters Noah Calhoun and Allison "Allie" Hamilton, both styled in likenesses from a famous scene in the film.
• Barbie: The Movie Little People Collector Figure Set: Order at Entertainment Earth: Includes Barbie in a gingham dress, a President Barbie figure in a pink & gold dress, Ken in his beach attire, and Barbie's business meeting-ready friend, Gloria.
• Suicide Squad Little People Collector Figure Set: Order at Entertainment Earth / Amazon: Includes Harley Quinn with her mallet, Deadshot, Captain Boomerang and Killer Croc.

Star Trek: Prodigy's final Season 1 episodes are getting a physical media release. Star Trek: Prodigy: Season 1 - Episodes 11-20 is available to pre-order now on Blu-ray and DVD from Amazon. When Paramount+ removed Star Trek: Prodigy from its library after canceling the previously announced second season of the Star Trek series, it made the second half of Star Trek: Prodigy Season 1 only available by purchasing episodes digitally from storefronts like Amazon and Apple TV since only the show's first 10 episodes had been released on physical media. Amazon now lists the Star Trek: Prodigy: Season 1 - Episodes 11-20 Blu-ray and DVD for release on September 26th. Fans should probably pre-order soon since the Blu-ray of Star Trek: Prodigy: Season 1: Episodes 1-10 sold out at multiple retailers, including Amazon, Target, Walmart, and Best Buy, after Paramount+ announced its removal (it's back in stock now).

While the new Blu-ray and DVD release guarantees that Star Trek: Prodigy's first season will be available via physical media, there's been no further word on finding a new home for Star Trek: Prodigy's still in-production second season. Paramount+ previously announced plans to release Star Trek: Prodigy Season 2 in winter 2023 with work on the season said to be nearing completion. But now, rather than streaming it on Paramount+, Paramount will try to sell the series to another streaming service or television network. Without a new home for If Star Trek: Prodigy Season 2, several of the animated series' dangling plot threads will go unresolved, including the fate of Star Trek: Voyager favorite Cakotay, voiced by original actor Robert Beltran, for whom Adrmial Janeway, voiced by Kate Mulgrew, has been searching.

What is Star Trek: Prodigy?

Star Trek: Prodigy follows the young crew of the USS Protostar, which the characters discovered on the prison colony of Tars Lamora, deep in the Delta Quadrant. Though aimed at kids, Star Trek: Prodigy excited longtime Star Trek fans by bringing back Kate Mulgrew to voice Kathryn Janeway in both Hologram Janeway and Admiral Janeway forms

Star Trek: Prodigy's voice cast also included Brett Gray (Dal R'El), Ella Purnell (Gwyn), Rylee Alazraqui (Rok-Tahk), Angus Imrie (Zero), Jason Mantzoukas (Jankom Pog), Dee Bradley Baker (Murf), John Noble (The Diviner) and Jimmi Simpson (Drednok). The recurring voice cast includes Daveed Diggs (Commander Tysess), Jameela Jamil (Ensign Asencia), Jason Alexander (Doctor Noum), Robert Beltran (Captain Chakotay), and Billy Campbell (Thadiun Okona).

Star Trek is beaming into Hall H once again for this year's San Diego Comic-Con. Paramount+ will bring Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Star Trek: Lower Decks, and Star Trek: Discovery to the event for a Star Trek Universe panel that promises "exclusive content" from each of the shows. The panel happens on Saturday, July 22nd from 1:30 p.m. to 3 p.m. local time. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is in the midst of its second season on Paramount+ and will also have a booth on the convention floor (3529). Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 4 will debut later this year. Star Trek: Discovery will have its fifth and final season on Paramount+ in 2024. With both Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and Star Trek: Lower Decks featured on the panel, perhaps fans will get to see footage from the upcoming Star Trek: Strange New Worlds episode guest-starring characters from Star Trek: Lower Decks.

Star Trek will also celebrate the 50th anniversary of Star Trek: The Animated Series with a celebration panel on Friday, July 21st from 10:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. in Room 25ABC. The panel, run by the Star Trek brand team, promises to reveal "the latest in publishing, gaming, and beyond with one-of-a-kind giveaways, exclusive sneak peeks, and special panelists," suggesting new books, comics, and merchandise tied to Star Trek: The Animated Series could be revealed during the panel.

Star Trek Strange New Worlds Season 2 continues

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds returned to Paramount+ for its second season in June. At four episodes in, the season has brought back classic Klingons, included a tense legal drama, a doomed love story through time between Captain Kirk and one of Khan's descendants, and revisited the traumatizing mission from Pike's past (with some great costumes), which also finally gave Lt. Ortegas her time to shine.

Next week's episode sees Mr. Spock and Nurse Chapel flying into a rift in space-time. The crossover episode with Star Trek: Lower Decks, directed by Jonathan Frakes, is still to come.

How to watch Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds stars Anson Mount as Christopher Pike, Rebecca Romijn as Una Chin-Riley, Ethan Peck as Spock, Jess Bush as Christine Chapel, Christina Chong as La'An Noonien-Singh, Celia Rose Gooding as Nyota Uhura, Melissa Navia as Erica Ortegas and Babs Olusanmokun as Joseph M'Benga. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 also brings back special guest star Paul Wesley as James T. Kirk and adds Carol Kane in the recurring role of Pelia.

CBS Studios, Secret Hideout, and Roddenberry Entertainment produced Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2. Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers are co-showrunners. Alex Kurtzman, Akiva Goldsman, Jenny Lumet, Henry Alonso Myers, Aaron Baiers, Heather Kadin, Frank Siracusa, John Weber, Rod Roddenberry, and Trevor Roth serve as executive producers.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 debuts new episodes on Thursdays on Paramount+ in the United States, the U.K., Australia, Latin America, Brazil, France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. The second season will stream on Paramount+ in South Korea, with a premiere date still to be announced. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds airs on Bell Media's CTV Sci-Fi Channel and streams on Crave in Canada and SkyShowtime in the Nordics, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, and Central and Eastern Europe.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 1 is also streaming on Paramount+. It is also available as home media on Blu-ray, DVD, and 4k UHD.

The ComicBook Nation Crew reveals the best, worst, and most surprising content (movies, TV, games, comics) of 2023 so far, as we reach the mid-year point! PLUS, we reveal our early reaction to Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One, recap the new episode of Secret Invasion, and talk about the biggest comics of the week!

Mission: Impossible 7 Reactions

Host Kofi Outlaw had the following to say about Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One:

After rewatching multiple installments I can say that #MissionImpossible Dead Reckoning Part 1 falls somewhere in the middle of the franchise for me. Too overstuffed with characters, and too simplistic in narrative turns - despite gripping tension & some truly awesome stunts.

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Each episode has a deep dive into the current biggest discussion topics and debates within geek culture: movies, tv, comics, and video games are regular features, with genres like sci-fi, anime, and wrestling also featured regularly. The ONLY show covering ALL THINGS Geek Culture!

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When I spoke to Melissa Navia during the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 press junket, she told me about how excited she was to begin peeling back the layers of the awesome onion that is her character, ship's helmsman Erica Ortegas. That process finally began in this week's episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. SPOILERS follow for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2, Episode 4, "Among the Lotus Eaters." The latest Star Trek episode begins with Ortegas excited to be part of an away team mission for a change and enthusiastically dressing for the part (thanks to Bernadette Croft's stellar costume work). However, plans change and, for the ship's safety, Captain Pike (Anson Mount) has to order Ortegas back to the helm for the duration of the mission. The story that follows involves nearly everyone aboard the ship and on the away team losing their memory and Ortegas falling back in love with being a pilot.

That's how Navia put it when I spoke to her during a more recent chat over video call. During our conversation, we discussed Ortegas' first spotlight episode, the character past a soldier, and what her future might hold. Here's how that went:

Jamie Lovett, ComicBook.com: How disappointed were you that you did not have more scenes with the hat?

Melissa Navia: I know. The whole outfit! That whole outfit took multiple people to put on me. The tension and the stress going into that scene where she's getting dressed and she's checking herself out in the mirror, the funny thing is, behind the scenes, it was like four people were putting different pieces on me. It was a whole thing. And then I'm like, after this, I don't even get to wear it into battle, which is so sad, but who knows? Many stories to come, right?

Did they take the hat back? Did they let you take it as a souvenir?

No. I'm so good when it comes to wardrobe where I'm always like something can be used later on, so I didn't even ask for it. But I got a whole lot of selfies in the trailer in everything, so I will definitely post some. But the whole outfit was very cool.

I look forward to the cosplays in Las Vegas and elsewhere this year.

Yes!

There was a lot of talk about how Ortegas didn't get a spotlight episode last season, and this is her first. What was your initial impression when you read this script and saw what this whole episode was going to be about, that it tied into "The Cage," and all that?

Fans last year were phenomenal and there's nothing better for an actor to hear that a character that they play, that fans want more of that character. They want more backstory. They can tell already that there's so much more story to be told and they want to see it. I'll say that the showrunners and the writers, that was always their intention, but we have this ensemble cast that's really unlike any other, I feel, on TV where everyone's just got an extraordinary backstory and the actors are doing a fantastic job. There's only so much screen time in 10 mini-movie episodes that can be told.

So when I saw that Erica was going to get this spotlight in this episode, and it focused on her job, I thought it was so perfect because, last season, so much of what we learned about Erica was about her job, that she is the pilot of the Enterprise. Nothing really happens without her, and I think that's also why fans really took to her, because she's the helmsman and she's someone who Pike trusts, and you can see that camaraderie with all of her crewmates, which is such a special part of Star Trek and what fans really love to see.

So when I saw that it had to do with her getting stuck on the ship, first of all, and you get to see that wall of "everything's cool and I'm confident and I can take care of it and everything's great," you see her get grumpy and you see her kind of be like, "ah, I'm doing this again," which is a thing that she loves, but when you do that thing that you love all the time, sometimes you forget why it was that you fell in love with it in the first place.

And you get to see her have to remember who she is. And for me personally, I was very open with fans about the personal grief that I was going through last year. I was going through all of that as we were filming Season 2. And so, to have this highly emotional episode where Ortegas is falling apart and has to remember that she is capable of doing all these things that she has suddenly forgotten how to do, that aligned very closely to what was happening in my own life.

Grief knocks you down, and you suddenly don't know who you are anymore, and you feel like you can't be the person that you were and you can't do the things that you did. Here I am having to play it as a character while also having to be a professional on set and not fall apart, so there were a lot of layers that went into everything, especially the scene in her quarters, which I was so happy that she got quarters. It looked exactly like the room I envisioned for her. That was a team effort and I was very happy with how it turned out, but you really see her having to go through the emotions of remembering who you are and then telling yourself that you are up to the task.

In the end, Ortegas' ability to pilot the ship is so ingrained in her that she can do it even with the effects of this memory loss. Were there things you drew on there as an actor? Are there things you feel like in your life that are that deeply ingrained in you that you could draw a parallel?

It's a part of you, and without it, you're not whole, right? So what I was channeling at the time was what was happening in my life, where you feel like something that has separated from you or something that you cannot feel and it's not tangible, but you know it's there. And you have to dig deep, but then when you dig deep, it's there, right? It's that thing that, like you said, it's in your bones, right?

So I was also thinking "family" because that's where I would go. And so, there was even when we did all these takes of "I'm Erica Ortegas," I fly the ship, there was even takes where I went full on [with more of an accent], "I'm Erica Ortegas," and I was digging deep into my Columbian background and my family. I'm like if I suddenly forgot everything, what would be the first thing that comes up inside me? And I'm like, it would be my sisters. It would be my parents. It would be those things that make me who I am.

And so, that Latina side to her, and that rage and that fury of "I am the only one who can fly the ship." That's what I pulled on, or rather, I touched on, was what is it that makes you you and that you couldn't find yourself ever being separated from. And for me, really, storytelling and acting is that, right? I don't think I'd be able to do what I do if storytelling wasn't in my bones.

How do you think Ortegas is changed by this experience? I assume we'll see more as the season progresses, but do you think there's a significant change here where she realizes, "This is who I am? So what if I didn't get to go on the away mission?" Not that she's ever lacked confidence before, but might she be more confident, more secure, in her place on the bridge?

Yeah, I think the cool thing about what happens in this episode is that it's like these moments in life, of epiphany, where you're just like, this thing that you've always done, you have to be reminded of why you fell in love with it in the first place. So what I took from it and put into it moving forward is that she almost falls in love again with being a pilot and being the pilot that Pike trusts at the helm of the enterprise.

Like you said, is it possible for her to be even more confident? I feel like fans love that confidence, and then I think there are also certain people that, seeing a woman in this place as the cocky pilot when we've seen it in so many movies and so many TV shows, and it's never a problem, but here we have a female at the helm who's wise-cracking and makes jokes and is able to pull off crazy maneuvers while also being super cocky about it. I'm so happy that we have a character now that we can look to as an example of that.

So you're going to continue to see that. I think she falls in love again with being a pilot, and I think she stops being like, "They never send me on an away mission." Without giving too much away, what does that end up looking like and what happens when you forget that you wanted something so badly? Isn't that when it then happens?

What can you say about what the rest of the season holds for her? I've noticed in this season there's still that spotlight being shared around from character to character, but some of the episodes are more two-handers or group-focused, Is she in the mix for one of those other episodes or might we have to wait for the next season for that?

Yes. So definitely, definitely you're going to get more Ortegas for sure. We're going to see some of her backstory as a soldier, which I feel like in Season 1, I always knew about that backstory and the showrunners knew about it and the writers did, but we didn't get to touch on it too much. And so, we're going to see more of that. We're going to see her camaraderie with her fellow castmates and we're going to see her with Chapel and with M'Benga and Uhura.

What else can I say? You're just going to see other sides of Erica. I'll say that because that covers all the bases. And then, we haven't picked up for season three, and I can't say anything about anything, but just patience is a virtue and there's a lot more story to tell. I'll say that.

You mentioned that background as a soldier. Something distinctive about Strange New Worlds is that many of the crew are veterans of this war that just happened. It isn't entirely unique in Star Trek -- Deep Space Nine had an extended, ongoing war and the Discovery crew went through the same Klingon War that you all did, though that show deals with its aftermath differently -- but Strange New Worlds is often fun and light, and I think it's easy to forget what some of these characters lived through recently, and that's a shared experience that's come up a couple of times this season already. Do you think that sets your crew apart from the rest of the franchise?

Yes. I love that question. Absolutely. And that was something that I was aware of and that I thought about and I worked on as we were going through episodes in season one, was that they have been to war. Captain Pike has seen his future and his future is not necessarily what he would have wanted, and he becomes a changed man. And how do you go through life knowing what's going to happen in 10 years and it's not necessarily positive? And for Ortegas, I knew that she'd been to war, and so, when we have that scene in Season 1 with Hemmer's service, his funeral, and she speaks, she understands grief. She understands what it's like to lose people. She has lost friends. She has lost family.

We touch on that in an alternate universe way in the season finale of Season 1, where some fans were concerned that, well, why does Erica feel this way toward the Romulans? But the backstory there was that it's an alternate side of an Erica that you don't necessarily like at first, but somebody who has developed this grudge against the Romulans because she has lost family and friends to them over and over again. And we see, by the end, that she sees that there are Romulans that are not completely bent on destroying her and her friends.

In the regular timeline, she's been through grief. She's been through death. So have her friends. We see it with M'Benga and Chapel in Episode 1 of Season 2, and I think that that's a great thread that runs throughout our show and our crew, that we have the lightheartedness, the camaraderie, that joyfulness, the hope that I think is what has made Star Trek such an endearing cultural phenomenon. It's the hope that this is a future that we want. But at the same time, everyone has, like you said, this darkness. But that's life, right? It's Episode 2, like literally, we're getting to the stars through hardship, and I think that's something that we can all relate to in different ways.

I know, last thing I'll say, is fans that have reached out to me from Season 1 to Season 2, and telling me that they've lost people. They've lost people who they were watching Season 1 with. They've lost people who they were excited to watch Strange New Worlds with. They're going through grief. They're going through death. They're going through loss. They're going through darkness. And so, you're getting to see these characters that are doing the same thing, and we get to do it an adventure at a time with a serialized piece that runs through the whole thing.

How to watch Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds stars Anson Mount as Christopher Pike, Rebecca Romijn as Una Chin-Riley, Ethan Peck as Spock, Jess Bush as Christine Chapel, Christina Chong as La'An Noonien-Singh, Celia Rose Gooding as Nyota Uhura, Melissa Navia as Erica Ortegas and Babs Olusanmokun as Joseph M'Benga. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 also brings back special guest star Paul Wesley as James T. Kirk and adds Carol Kane in the recurring role of Pelia.

CBS Studios, Secret Hideout, and Roddenberry Entertainment produced Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2. Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers are co-showrunners. Alex Kurtzman, Akiva Goldsman, Jenny Lumet, Henry Alonso Myers, Aaron Baiers, Heather Kadin, Frank Siracusa, John Weber, Rod Roddenberry, and Trevor Roth serve as executive producers.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 debuts new episodes on Thursdays on Paramount+ in the United States, the U.K., Australia, Latin America, Brazil, France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. The second season will stream on Paramount+ in South Korea, with a premiere date still to be announced. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds airs on Bell Media's CTV Sci-Fi Channel and streams on Crave in Canada and SkyShowtime in the Nordics, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, and Central and Eastern Europe.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 1 is also streaming on Paramount+. It is also available as home media on Blu-ray, DVD, and 4k UHD.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 went to court in its second episode, "Ad Astra per Asperum." The episode resolved the cliffhanger from Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' first season finale, in which Starfleet arrested Commander Una Chin-Reilly (Rebecca Romjin) upon discovering she's a genetically-modified Illyrian. Such modifications are illegal in the United Federation of Planets, and Una hiding her nature from Starfleet for years lands her in front of a court martial tribunal. Captain Pike (Anson Mount) seeks out an old friend of Una's, the Illyrian civil rights lawyer Neera (Yetide Bakari) to come to Una's defense. Though tensions are high, Neera wins the case by portraying Una as a refugee who sought sanctuary in the Federation.

It's a powerful episode with timely themes and the latest in a line of courtroom dramas set in the Star Trek Universe. Valerie Weiss directed the episode and ComicBook.com had the opportunity to talk to her about how that legal drama lineage influenced the episode, as well as how her background as a scientist helped form the narrative's point of view. Here's what she had to say:

Jamie Lovett, ComicBook.com: "Ad Astra per Aspera" is a courtroom drama set in the usual Star Trek sci-fi. The courtroom drama is a very popular television genre on its own, but Star Trek has a history with it. When I spoke to Yetide Bakari, the actress who plays Neera, she brought up the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Measure of a Man" as an example. Did you look back on those Star Trek legal drama episodes when you were preparing to film this episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds? Did you avoid them to make sure this episode felt appropriately modern?

Valerie Weiss: No, definitely didn't avoid it. You have to understand where you're coming from. Especially if you do want to put your stamp on it, you need to know what the foundations are. Luckily these foundations are brilliant, that's why they've stood the test of time. I watched "The Menagerie," and "Court "Martial," and "The Measure of a Man," and they were just fabulous. They were so great. I was like, "I have to stop watching... I could watch everything, but now, I need to get to work. There's a lot of work to do here."

It was just important to watch and get them in my bones and understand the ethos and also get great ideas like having the lie detector instrument that they all put their hands on and the floppy disc that goes into the computer when they read the transcripts. And it was really fun. I was looking for elements we could add that make it timeless but also, like you said, it's a fresh, modern story, and unfortunately, one that we have to keep revisiting because humans don't really learn from history. But there are a lot of modern aspects to this like genetic modification. It was exciting to get to put my stamp on something so timeless in this franchise.

Did it take a certain finesse or a nuance to deal with the real-world resonance of this story? I talked about this with Yetide Bakari as well. In "The Measure of a Man," there are things that reflect our reality, but it being about an android makes it feel more sci-fi, more hypothetical. Here, Una is depicted as an immigrant, or refugee, which is a very real thing we're dealing with. What's it take to capture that in a way that is exciting and compelling to the audience without making it feel like you're sensationalizing something without giving it the respect it deserves?

I think it's this tethering that has to happen between the past and the present and the future. The injustice that's happened -- I guess it's still happening in the current day of the episode -- but really, they're revisiting a past trauma that happened to the relationship when the Federation came in and separated Illyrians and non-Illyrians. You have to not let the current characters of Una and Neera be plagued or limited by that, yet show the strength of who they are today.

I think that's why it feels so watchable. They're not hemmed in or made lesser in terms of what they want out of life because of a society that tried to tell them they were lesser. And so it's a story with heroes that we want to watch who feel fully actualized, who are fighting for something, despite the fact that society told them that they shouldn't or that they don't deserve what they have. I think that's the engine and energy that propels this episode as you watch it. I think that's the key to visiting these issues that are very modern and things that we're dealing with today, but not from a sad perspective, but a powerful perspective of, "let's change it." No one's going to tell us who we are. No one's going to stop us and we're going to fight and we're going to do it together as a team.

Given everything you just said, when read this script and got a sense of the weight of it, was there any part of you that wished for one of the lighter episodes of the show, or were you immediately excited by that challenge?

100%, I loved it. I mean, I used to be a scientist, so for me, thinking about big concepts and ideas about the world we live in. there's so much repair to do. If we're not making the world a better place, we're just taking up space on an Earth that already is very crowded. And so for me to get to do something that really can change minds and hearts through this incredible writing, and the script by Dana Horgan was just a gift, and then to get to do it through beautiful characterizations is exactly what I love to do as a filmmaker. But then having moments of lightness with Spock and Pasalk, that's great because you need that contrast. If you're going to have something serious and emotional, it's that much more poignant if you let the audience have a release and a contrast to that. And so I think those moments were so well distributed throughout the episode that it really drove home the emotional impact and the philosophical and political impact even more.

Speaking of Pasalk, played by Graeme Somerville, I think a lot of viewers may be wondering, what is his deal? He looms over the episode even though he says nothing until near the end. How did he figure into the calculations of this episode for you?

He has such a strong presence. The casting really provided a lot, and then I really wanted moments where he was just so intimidating to Batel, like when she goes to stand up and he just takes two fingers and stops her from standing. It's infuriating, and it's scary, quite frankly, to have that person who you can't appeal to on an emotional level, it's purely logic, but honestly, he's doing what he's supposed to do. That's his job.

Legally and logically, they did break the law. Until Neera comes up with that great closing argument, it is a losing case because they're wrong. They're maybe not politically or ethically wrong, but by the letter of the law, they do lose. And that's why Neera's line, ["A law does not make something just'], I think that's why it's going viral because that's true. It's up to us citizens to fight and have a really important debate in our judicial system to make the laws reflect the society we want to live in. And hopefully, this episode goes far to inspire people to do that. And so he is a great foil and counterpart in this argument. If you didn't have a strong antagonist, then you wouldn't have a strong episode. So I think he's great.

What was it like introducing and guiding Neera through the episode? Because she comes off strong in the opening of the case with her questioning of April, and I feel like without the right direction, she could have come off as a villain, but she doesn't. How did you approach her depiction in the episode?

I think there were two tracks that we needed to be tracking with Neera. There's the personal journey that she's on as well as her professional journey and while she's there, they're intrinsically linked. We talked a lot about her personal journey. She's got real hurt. It's so hard to confront a friend or a sibling about an old trauma, an old rift to your relationship. It's harder for her to do that than it is to go win this case, quite frankly, and it's just as important, so we talked a lot about what that vulnerability looked like and when it would surface and how Rebecca and Una would respond to that.

So there was that, and then there was also, okay, let's make sure your arc from the beginning to the end really is variable because we don't want to see the very strong Neera from the beginning and just keep hitting that same note the whole time, and so really there was a reluctance to even go at first, or at least that's what she put out there with Pike, and then a bit of an insecurity about being in the Federation. So really just modulating the vulnerability versus the strength, but also pulling on the personal insecurity that she may have felt about their relationship and bringing that into it when it needed to be, I think is what made it such an interesting performance.

You mentioned that you have a science background you mentioned. While the Illyrian's genetic enhancements are mostly used as a metaphor here, genetic modification is something that's beginning to become more of a reality for us, and the pace of technology these days is incredible. How much did your knowledge of science and the scientific community influence how you portrayed the situation in this episode? Because it seems to me there's a lot of nuanced given to the situation with the Illyrians.

To be honest, we should look at everything all the time with nuance. There are two sides to every story and unfortunately, so often just a blanket law or rule or statement is put in play because people don't take the time to understand it and evaluate it and make a specific choice about a specific situation. That's something really unfortunate about the world we live in. Because of the fact that I really understood what genetic modification means and what adaptation means historically throughout humanity and evolution, I think I never felt intimidated by the subject matter. In fact, rather than these terms feeling scary or instantly things that we should prohibit, I took a more balanced view and I actually thought it was so cool that this whole Illyrian culture has the ability to adapt by genetic modification.

I mean, we're destroying our earth right now. I do tons of fundraising for the World Wildlife Fund, and I'm on the Sustainable Future Committee for the DGA. It's so important to me. Soon we're going to have an Earth that's not as habitable as it is now, and so you have a race of humans that can actually adapt and live in places where others can't? That's a positive thing. And here we are denigrating them and punishing them. So I instantly went to that place in my mind of celebrating the Illyrians as heroes, not just saying, "Oh, no, they're equal to all of us. We should respect that." It was like, "No, we need them. They're awesome. And you were treating them like that."

And so I feel that way about anybody who has a different point of view that balances the world we live in, and I think I saw that, felt that, and celebrated that in my own storytelling, and I think it comes through in the costumes. That's why I wanted Bernadette to have all the extras in the Illyrian scene in bright colors. They're celebrating their achievements and how awesome they are. That perspective, I think I was able to bring into it because science doesn't intimidate me and it doesn't make me make quick assumptions that just because it's potentially artificial or not natural that it's bad.

How to watch Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds stars Anson Mount as Christopher Pike, Rebecca Romijn as Una Chin-Riley, Ethan Peck as Spock, Jess Bush as Christine Chapel, Christina Chong as La'An Noonien-Singh, Celia Rose Gooding as Nyota Uhura, Melissa Navia as Erica Ortegas and Babs Olusanmokun as Joseph M'Benga. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 also brings back special guest star Paul Wesley as James T. Kirk and adds Carol Kane in the recurring role of Pelia.

CBS Studios, Secret Hideout, and Roddenberry Entertainment produced Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2. Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers are co-showrunners. Alex Kurtzman, Akiva Goldsman, Jenny Lumet, Henry Alonso Myers, Aaron Baiers, Heather Kadin, Frank Siracusa, John Weber, Rod Roddenberry, and Trevor Roth serve as executive producers.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 debuts new episodes on Thursdays on Paramount+ in the United States, the U.K., Australia, Latin America, Brazil, France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. The second season will stream on Paramount+ in South Korea, with a premiere date still to be announced. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds airs on Bell Media's CTV Sci-Fi Channel and streams on Crave in Canada and SkyShowtime in the Nordics, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, and Central and Eastern Europe.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 1 is also streaming on Paramount+. It is also available as home media on Blu-ray, DVD, and 4k UHD.

The latest episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' second season sent La'an Noonien Singh, played by Christina Chong, back through time in a team-up with Paul Wesley's Captain James T. Kirk. SPOILERS follow for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2, Episode 3, "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow." La'an finding herself in an altered timeline was surprising enough. Finding herself falling for Captain Kirk's signature charm might be even more surprising, especially since fans know that, years from now, La'an's ancestor, Khan Noonien Singh, will become Kirk's nemesis. The episode then concludes with a significant alteration to Star Trek's timeline and La'an having to make a difficult decision about her lineage.

ComicBook.com had the opportunity to speak to Chong about the episode, including how she pulled off the emotionally raw ending and how she feels about La'an's choices. Here's what she told us:

Jamie Lovett, ComicBook.com: What was your first reaction when you got the script for "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" and saw that you'd be doing a star-crossed lovers story with Captain Kirk that also involves time travel and a "Would you kill baby Hitler" style dilemma?

Christina Chong: They told me that my main episode was going to be episode three, "You're going to be two-handed with Paul Wesley." I hadn't met Paul. I had one brief conversation with him in season one, so I didn't really know how fun it would be. I just knew that it was a challenge, and it was going to be cool, something I'd never done, but I didn't realize I was actually going to be in every single scene.

So when I got the script, I was like, "Oh, wow, okay, this is exciting, but also pressure." And then seeing the ride of emotion she goes on and ending with the scene on the bed, and the first time I read it, I teared up, because that's how good Dave Reed's writing is, and the same when I did the Zoom readthrough, because we were still in COVID at that time, still doing the readthroughs on Zoom. I hadn't done hardly any work on it at that point, and I couldn't not. I just felt her so much, and I feel like at that time, in a way, I was going through similar things as La'an, so it just helped to bring that humanity to her.

I wanted to touch on that scene on the bed at the end because it's striking and raw. What was it like prepping for that scene and shooting it?

So that scene was a long scene because she comes into the room, she sees the agent, and then the agent leaves, and then she's on her own, and then she goes to the bed, and then that's where it ends. But it meant there were a lot of setups. I knew that I wanted to go there, but as an actor, it's hard to plan that. It either happens or it doesn't. You can do preparation, but if it doesn't work in the moment, it doesn't work.

And so I'd asked Amanda [Row], the director if I could shoot it a certain way, but we miscommunicated with each other, and it ended up not being the way that I thought was going to be most conducive to getting that end result. We were filming it a few times, that last bit, and it wasn't coming, it wasn't coming, and I was like, "Oh." Amanda must have said something or something happened and I was like, "Okay, one more time, let me go one more time." Because I knew that was the performance I wanted to get.

And then it just happened, and Amanda caught it in the perfect way. Like I said before, it was very close to something I was going through at the time, so that's why it felt real for me in the moment and felt, I guess, easier for me to do. So I personalized it, basically, personalized La'an's journey and what she's going through.

You mentioned that you were going through something similar to La'an. I don't want to get into your personal life, but I know last time I talked to you, you talked about the single you put out, "Twin Flames," and the story behind it. Are those both connected to the same something that you were going through?

Oh, yeah. And it just happened. It was funny, this single was about my twin flame, who is somebody that I'm not with anymore, but we were told we met in several lifetimes, we've been together in several lifetimes, and the last one was in the 1800s in Sicily somewhere, so it's very similar, and that's crazy that I wasn't thinking about La'an and Kirk when I was writing that song, but it just happened.

That was the last song of the EP that I wrote, actually. I didn't know which song was going to go out first, and this one just felt more me. I identified with that song the most out of all of the EP that we had, and so we thought, "Let's put that out first." But it went out with the first episode, and then we were like, "Hang on a minute, this is perfect," because La'an and Kirk are essentially twin flames. They've met in another lifetime, and it didn't work out, and that's the whole thing about twin flames. Somebody once told me they meet every four lifetimes, but it's often that they can't be together because one's a runner, one's a chaser, and one has to do work, and if they end up doing enough work on themselves, then maybe they can be together, but it just was so perfect. I didn't plan it like that, but it works.

How keen do you think La'an is on taking the time agent's advice regarding keeping what transpired a secret?

I think that is super hard, and I think that's what really hits her, the fact that she has just been on this incredible, insane journey of love and loss and adventure, and she can't tell anyone. It makes her feel more alone than ever, and that's her whole thing, right? La'an feels alone because she doesn't have family. She finds it hard to connect. So it's like her biggest insecurity and her biggest desire, the need to connect, is upfront and personal with her at that moment on the bed.

Toronto gets to be Toronto in this episode, which feels rare. It's notorious for playing everything but Toronto, especially New York, so Kirk's line where he thinks he is in New York is funny if you're aware of that. How was it for you to be out in Toronto for a change?

Oh, that was so cool, to be at Dundas Square especially, and I think Dundas Square was the first thing we did, on or near the alley off of Dundas Square. I didn't realize because I hadn't seen Paul's work before -- I knew he was in a thing called Vampire Diaries, but I hadn't seen it -- and so suddenly we are there shooting in Dundas Square, and at the end of the scene, there'd be these crowds surrounding. I was like, "What is going on?" There are all these fans. After every scene, there'd be a swarm of fans waiting at the end for wherever Paul was, to the point where by the end of it, we had security guards following us around for the whole shoot whenever we were outside.

I didn't realize that's what they were at first. I was like, "Who are these lovely gentlemen following us around?" And then I was like, "Oh, and they're taking me to the toilet and everything." And I was like, "That's very weird, but okay." And then Paul's like, "Oh yeah, there's the security." I was like, "Oh my God." Because people were seeing him from all the condos in Toronto, they're just everywhere, and they were seeing him from the 10th floor of a condo and coming down to say hello. I very quickly understood how famous Paul Wesley is.

La'an has to make a big decision regarding Khan in this episode. It's a version of a classic sci-fi philosophy question, which is usually hypothetical but not for her. What were your feelings about La'an's decision, how she made it, and why? How did it sit with you?

I mean, listen, I don't judge the character. I go with what they give me because they're the people who know best. So I go with what is on the page. But for me, it's that thing of acceptance, and bad things happen, but there's power in accepting it and looking for the good in it so that you can move forward and move on. That was the key moment where I think La'an was finally like, "Do you know what? That shame that I felt for being judged for all these years, yes, okay, I am related to him, but I'm not him, and I'm showing that I'm not him by not killing this little boy, and saving this little boy." It's acceptance. I think that's the word. Acceptance.

How to watch Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds stars Anson Mount as Christopher Pike, Rebecca Romijn as Una Chin-Riley, Ethan Peck as Spock, Jess Bush as Christine Chapel, Christina Chong as La'An Noonien-Singh, Celia Rose Gooding as Nyota Uhura, Melissa Navia as Erica Ortegas and Babs Olusanmokun as Joseph M'Benga. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 also brings back special guest star Paul Wesley as James T. Kirk and adds Carol Kane in the recurring role of Pelia.

CBS Studios, Secret Hideout, and Roddenberry Entertainment produced Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2. Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers are co-showrunners. Alex Kurtzman, Akiva Goldsman, Jenny Lumet, Henry Alonso Myers, Aaron Baiers, Heather Kadin, Frank Siracusa, John Weber, Rod Roddenberry, and Trevor Roth serve as executive producers.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 debuts new episodes on Thursdays on Paramount+ in the United States, the U.K., Australia, Latin America, Brazil, France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. The second season will stream on Paramount+ in South Korea, with a premiere date still to be announced. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds airs on Bell Media's CTV Sci-Fi Channel and streams on Crave in Canada and SkyShowtime in the Nordics, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, and Central and Eastern Europe.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 1 is also streaming on Paramount+. It is also available as home media on Blu-ray, DVD, and 4k UHD.

Star Trek: Lower Decks comes to the Star Trek Adventures RPG, Modiphius Entertainment's acclaimed roleplaying game, via the Star Trek: Lower Decks Campaign Guide. Paired with the Star Trek Adventures Core Rulebook, the Star Trek: Lower Decks Campaign Guide offers game masters everything they need to send their players on Star Trek: Lower Decks-style adventures and campaigns in the final frontier, both in terms of the types of challenges they face and the tone of the storytelling. Jim Johnson, Line Editor and Project Manager on Star Trek Adventures told ComicBook.com how eager he and his team were to bring Star Trek: Lower Decks to the game practically from the moment the Star Trek Universe's first animated comedy debuted on Paramount+.

"The conversation really started when Lower Decks first aired," Johnson says. "We had already been four years into doing Star Trek Adventures at that point. We didn't have the Lower Decks license yet. Lower Decks came out. We watched it, obviously, just independently, thought it was amazing. We're like, 'Okay, when can we start?'"

But adapting Star Trek: Lower Decks' signature brand of Star Trek storytelling posed unique challenges for the Star Trek Adventures team. The TTPRG had previously focused on the straightforward sci-fi adventures that the Star Trek franchise is known for with different sourcebooks and supplementary materials detailing how to set those adventures in the Star Trek: The Original Series, Star Trek: The Next Generation, or Star Trek: Discovery eras.

But what sets Lower Decks apart isn't a particular place on the Star Trek timeline but its signature humor that draws on all of Star Trek history for its punchlines. Bringing that to the table required a new approach. "There are certain things you can do and certain things you can't do, but to tell someone, 'Go be funny,' oh gosh, it's really hard to do," Johnson explains. "In the book, we provide guidance on how to bring that tone in and how to hit the science fiction tropes and how to fit humor possibilities into it."

Because of this, the Star Trek: Lower Decks Campaign Guide has a universality that may surprise some readers. Having gotten to look over a copy of the 240-page hardcover book full of frames from the show and new artwork in its style, its section on Star Trek tropes, detailing various interstellar phenomena a crew might encounter in a Star Trek story, feels like it could be applied to any sci-fi game. The advice on bringing humor to the table is similarly helpful for any situation where the gamemaster hoping to elicit some laughs.

"There's plenty of stuff in this Lower Decks book that could be ported into anything like Traveller or Firefly, or even if somebody wanted to run an Orville game," Johnson says. 'There's no reason you couldn't fully lift sections out of Lower Decks and some of our other products and use it in your games, especially this Lower Decks book."

That universality applies within the Star Trek Adventures ecosystem, as the Star Trek: Lower Decks Campaign Guide contains tools and information for any Star Trek Adventures campaign, even if the playgroup isn't looking for a more comedic campaign. "The book isn't just about [Star Trek: Lower Decks]," Johnson emphasizes. "This is about the lower decks experience for Starfleet and for other polities, that whole lower decks experience in general. If you're an up-and-coming officer, there's loads of advice in this book that will be useful to you no matter what kind of campaign you're running."

He continues, "There's a load of advice in the book about support operations. If a first-line ship comes in and does something awful and horrific and then they're off to their next adventure the following week, a support team comes in to smooth things over and do the diplomatic negotiations. There's a wealth of advice in the book about that whole support arm of things, and that's something we haven't really touched on in other books and should provide game masters and players with a whole new universe of opportunities for storytelling. If they don't want to do a traditional exploration game, they could do this whole support type of role that you see on the show and bring that into their game as well, whether it's Starfleet or Klingons or whatever other polities they want to play."

One aspect of the Star Trek: Lower Campaign Guide drawn distinctly from Star Trek's lore is its new playable character alien species. Star Trek: Lower Decks offered the designers the opportunity to provide mechanics for eight Star Trek aliens that are new and old, including the fearsome Gorn, the antagonistic Pakleds, and my personal favorite, the Cetaceans, who are, essentially, space dolphins, all of which can become player characters. With Star Trek: Lower Decks' bend toward humor, players may feel encouraged to take on an eccentric alien persona, like the Tamarians, who speak only in metaphor, or the Exocomps, who are sentient drone-like robots.

"I have no idea if there are players out there who would actually want to play an Exocomp or actually want to play a Tamarian, but why not?" Johnson says. "There's so many. I mean, IDIC is what Star Trek's all about, right? Infinite Diversity, Infinite Combinations. So we're like, 'Let's do this.'"

The Star Trek: Lower Decks Campaign Guide doesn't stop at playable alien beings. In addition to providing stat blocks for such recognizable Star Trek aliens as Armus and the mugato, the book includes a section called "The Menagerie" with rules for gamemasters to create their new alien beasts and creatures from unfamiliar worlds.

"For the first time in Star Trek Adventures, we created a full system for creating your own creatures," Johnson tells us. "I think Lower Decks did an amazing job of doing world-building in the sense where you go to a new planet and there's this strange, exotic creature that you think is going to just utterly destroy you, but it turns out to be a spider-cow. It looks like a horrible, scary Shelob-like creature, but it's actually just a very tame, docile spider-cow. They love to subvert those expectations. And that's a classic comedy trope, make something look horrible, but actually be very gentle or make something very gentle be just absolutely horrific. You play with those expectations."

He continues, "So we created a whole system of how you can create your own creatures with a lot of options and add to them. And I'm really excited about that. Because I really want to see what players and game masters do with it and what kind of crazy amazing creatures they add to their own Star Trek canon. Because that's something historically we haven't really been able to fit into a book yet. And it felt like Lower Decks was the right one, partly because of what we've seen on the show to date is there are all these amazingly weird creatures that they're creating for the episodes. Why not give players and game masters that tool? You want to go create an amazingly weird creature? Here's a rule set, here's some guidance on how to do that, go have fun and make it amazing."

The Star Trek: Lower Decks Campaign Guide opens with an introduction from Star Trek: Lower Decks creator Mike McMahan and concludes with a three-part mini-campaign focused on junior officers that can be set during any era of play or within any polity. The Star Trek: Lower Decks Campaign Guide is available to pre-order now and is expected to ship in August.

Star Trek confirmed a change to its timeline and how that timeline works. SPOILERS follow for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2, Episode 3, "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow." As the title hints, the third episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' second season involves time travel. La'an Noonien Singh (Christina Chong) gets caught up in a Department of Temporal Affairs mission gone awry. Soon, she's walking the streets of 21st-century Toronto with Captain James T. Kirk (Paul Wesley) of the USS Enterprise from an altered timeline. Toronto is notably not in ruins, a reasonable expectation since Star Trek's timeline suggests that Earth should be recovering from the deadly Eugenics Wars caused by La'an's ancestor, Khan Noonien Singh, and his genetically enhanced peers.

That is at the crux of the changes cemented by "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow." Star Trek is supposed to occur in our future, but the Eugenics Wars were meant to begin in the early 1990s. That hasn't taken place in the real world and previous Star Trek episodes involving time travel -- including Star Trek: Voyager's trip to the 1990s "Future's End" and almost the entirety of Star Trek: Picard Season 2 occurring the 21st century, even referencing Khan in its finale -- show no evidence of worldwide war, suggesting they didn't take place on time there either.

Previously, these inconsistencies have been hand-waved with suggestions of inaccurate records due to the destruction caused by the war or that perhaps the locales shown in these episodes weren't on the front line of the conflict. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds takes a much more direct and deliberate approach to Star Trek's future history.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Changes the Star Trek Timeline

"Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" reveals that the specific dates of Star Trek's timeline are continuously altered by time travel, including conflicts like the Temporal Cold War introduced in Star Trek: Enterprise. Agents go back in time to try to prevent the United Federation of Planets from ever forming by preventing the events leading to it from occurring. Yet, those events -- including Khan's rise to power -- keep "reinserting" themselves into the timeline, as if time is fixing itself. The result is events happening at a delayed rate, which raises several questions about things like the butterfly effect, but does keep the Eugenics War indefinitely in Star Trek's past and Star Trek in our future, at least until reality reaches the 22nd century.

Speaking to CinemaBlend, Star Trek; Strange New Worlds co-showrunner Akiva Goldsman confirmed the change to Star Trek's timeline and explained why. "This is a correction. Because otherwise, it's silly, or Star Trek ceases to be in our universe," he said. "By the way, this happened in Season 1, so this is not a Season 2 [issue]. It's a pilot issue. We want Star Trek to be an aspirational future. We want to be able to dream our way into the Federation as a Starfleet. I think that is the fun of it, in part. And so, in order to keep Star Trek in our timeline, we continue to push dates forward. At a certain point, we won't be able to. But obviously, if you start saying that the Eugenics Wars were in the 90s, you're kind of fucked for aspirational in terms of the real world."

How to watch Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds stars Anson Mount as Christopher Pike, Rebecca Romijn as Una Chin-Riley, Ethan Peck as Spock, Jess Bush as Christine Chapel, Christina Chong as La'An Noonien-Singh, Celia Rose Gooding as Nyota Uhura, Melissa Navia as Erica Ortegas and Babs Olusanmokun as Joseph M'Benga. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 also brings back special guest star Paul Wesley as James T. Kirk and adds Carol Kane in the recurring role of Pelia.

CBS Studios, Secret Hideout, and Roddenberry Entertainment produced Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2. Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers are co-showrunners. Alex Kurtzman, Akiva Goldsman, Jenny Lumet, Henry Alonso Myers, Aaron Baiers, Heather Kadin, Frank Siracusa, John Weber, Rod Roddenberry, and Trevor Roth serve as executive producers.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 debuts new episodes on Thursdays on Paramount+ in the United States, the U.K., Australia, Latin America, Brazil, France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. The second season will stream on Paramount+ in South Korea, with a premiere date still to be announced. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds airs on Bell Media's CTV Sci-Fi Channel and streams on Crave in Canada and SkyShowtime in the Nordics, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, and Central and Eastern Europe.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 1 is also streaming on Paramount+. It is also available as home media on Blu-ray, DVD, and 4k UHD.

The Star Trek: The Next Generation (and Star Trek: Picard Season 3) crew will embark on a mission for Halloween hijinks in a new Star Trek comic series this October. IDW Publishing has announced Star Trek: Holo-Ween, a four-issue miniseries from writer Chris Sequeira (Justice League Adventures) and artist Joe Eisma (Morning Glories) that combines the classic Star Trek: The Next Generation holodeck episodes with the spooky season spirit. Francesco Francavilla provides Cover A for Star Trek: Holo-Ween #1, and Eisma provides Cover B. Star Trek: Holo-Ween's plot sees Captain Jean-Luc Picard and the rest of the U.S.S Enterprise crew attempting to unwind after a difficult mission by celebrating the Earth holiday of Halloween. While the Enterprise crew aims for the celebration to be a treat, things quickly start going wrong. Here's the official synopsis from IDW Publishing:

"After enduring an anxiety-ridden passage through a solar storm, Captain Picard and the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise take to celebrating Halloween to reset the mood. But while the Earth holiday involves sweet treats and other festivities, they soon learn that fear is in season when crew members begin to go missing one by one."

Star Trek: Holo-Ween #1 is one of several new Star Trek comics coming from IDW Publishing in October, as the publisher has been expanding its line of Star Trek Universe comic books. Star Trek: Picard's Academy, a new series following Jean-Luc Picard during his days as a Starfleet Cadet at Starfleet Academy, also launches in October. Star Trek's first comic book crossover event, "Day of Blood," concludes in Star Trek #12, but Star Trek fans can relive its events through the eyes of Shaxs' from Star Trek: Lower Decks in the Star Trek: Day of Blood: Shaxs' Best Day one-shot.

The Star Trek: The Motion Picture miniseries Echoes also concludes in October, while Star Trek: Defiant embarks on its next story arc, "A Piece of the Action." Star Trek: Strange New Worlds will continue its second comic book miniseries, The Scorpius Run.

Star Trek: Holo-Ween #1 goes on sale on October 4th. The issue's official solicitation text follows.

• Star Trek: Holo-Ween #1
• JUL231235
• (W) Christopher Sequeira (A) Joe Eisma (CA) Francesco Francavilla
• Acclaimed writer Chris Sequeira (Justice League Adventures) and Eisner-nominated artist Joe Eisma (Morning Glories) are bringing horror to the holodeck in a new four-issue miniseries! After enduring an anxiety-ridden passage through a solar storm, Captain Picard and the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise take to celebrating Halloween to reset the mood. But while the Earth holiday involves sweet treats and other festivities, they soon learn that fear is in season when crew members begin to go missing one by one.
• In Shops: Oct 04, 2023
• SRP: $3.99