Spoiler Warning: Beware of spoilers for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Seasons 1-3 and the trailers and teasers for Season 4. Spoilers are also present for Discovery Season 2 and Picard Season 3.
I haven’t had as much to say as usual over the past few weeks, but we’re slowly getting back into the swing of things – and the website isn’t going away, so don’t worry about that! A few days ago, though, we got to catch another glimpse of Strange New Worlds’ impending fourth season! So I thought it could be a bit of fun to go through the trailer and share my thoughts on how the season is shaping up. In addition to the trailer, we also got a release date for the season premiere – the 23rd of July, which is a little over eleven weeks away at time of writing. These spring and summer months can pass quickly, so it won’t be long before we’re sitting down to watch the next batch of episodes – and, disappointingly, Strange New Worlds’ final ten-episode season.
If you want to check out what I thought of the first Season 4 clip we got, back at last year’s Comic-Con event, you can find that by clicking or tapping here. And it goes without saying, but there will be spoilers for all of Strange New Worlds – including Season 4 – from here on out!
First of all, I’d like to start by saying that a July broadcast date is a little earlier than I expected. Starfleet Academy only wrapped up its first season a few weeks ago, and while we’re still a long way away from 2022’s incredibly poor scheduling, with Star Trek shows tripping over one another… I wouldn’t have objected to Paramount-Skydance giving the franchise a bit more of a break. There are only two more seasons of Strange New Worlds left, and maybe it’s just me… but I really don’t wanna rush through these remaining episodes! I’d have been happy to leave Season 4 until the autumn/winter season, or even into the first part of 2027, if that in turn would’ve meant the remaining season of Starfleet Academy and Strange New Worlds’ own swansong could’ve also been pushed back a bit. As this current era of Star Trek winds down… that kind of thing has been on my mind.
And as another aside, we got news recently that the sets and stages for both Starfleet Academy and Strange New Worlds are to be fully dismantled. That seems to put the final nail in the coffin of any kind of resurrection for Starfleet Academy or for the Year One spin-off idea that we discussed last year. Neither seemed likely to me, so this news is really just a confirmation rather than a shock. But as we look at the trailer for Season 4… I can’t escape the fact that we’re looking at a show cancelled before its time, and that the curtain is already beginning to fall on this era of Star Trek.
The first thing to say about the trailer is this: for something that was barely a minute long, there seemed to be a lot of discussion about danger – and perhaps even death. Strange New Worlds has killed off characters before: Hemmer and Captain Batel, to name just two. But with the show winding down – and, crucially, the production team being aware of that and trying to pivot to their Year One pitch… could we see another main character death this season? If so, it would obviously have to be one of the original characters: La’an, Pelia, or Ortegas. I suppose we could throw Una into the mix, too, as her fate beyond the end of the series is also unconfirmed.
That could be a total overreach, but in a short trailer, I thought it was at least noticeable that some of the only lines of dialogue we got involved the danger of Starfleet’s mission and the risk of injury or death to Federation personnel. Hemmer’s death in Season 1 was admirable, in some ways, for its sheer brutality and the impact it had on the crew, but it’s also a plot point I’ve criticised, as I felt we hadn’t really spent enough time with Star Trek’s first Aenar main character (and first blind character to be portrayed by a visually-impaired performer). However, now that we’re three-plus seasons in and we’ve gotten to know these characters a lot more, a main character death – if handled well – could be an incredibly powerful moment. I don’t necessarily think it’s something the series “needs,” but if it was well-written and the story could carry such a powerful emotional beat… I do believe it could work.
Speaking of Hemmer, one of the clips in the trailer showed a suspiciously pale hand on La’an’s shoulder. Could that be a hint that Hemmer might return for a cameo or single-episode role, as he did in Season 2? If this moment were taking place in the past, either as a flashback or through some kind of time-travel shenanigans… well, anything’s possible. And as Connor Trineer told the audience at a Star Trek convention just last year, in sci-fi, no one is ever *really* dead, right? I mean, if Data can come back after everything that happened to him… why not have a story in which Hemmer once again features?
The very next frame of the trailer shows La’an standing in Main Engineering, speaking to a crowd. And if you look closely, one of the people closest to her in the crowd looks like an Andorian or Aenar. So… Hemmer’s return is confirmed! Just kidding, there’s been no official word on that so far. But it’s interesting, in any case, to even be considering Hemmer as a possible returning character this time around.
Inset: Could the highlighted character be Hemmer?
Obviously, the dinosaur has picked up the most attention from fans coming out of the trailer, and it was undeniably a cool “Jurassic Park”-inspired moment. I’m going to reserve judgement on the dinosaur until we know a bit more about this story; will it be a wonderful homage to classic monster movies, or is there something else being planned? Will the creatures be actual Earth dinosaurs, or dino-like aliens from another world? And will they even play a major role in the episode that features them, or is this all just a bait-and-switch; a cool visual for the trailer to get viewers interested? Without knowing more, it’s hard to say.
I will say, though, that last season’s “zombie episode” was in pretty much the same camp for me! When we glimpsed what appeared to be Klingon zombies in the Season 3 trailer, I was cautiously excited – but I wanted to wait and see what the finished episode would be like. Shuttle to Kenfori ultimately turned out to be a great story, a horror-tinged outing that was fun and frightening in equal measure. So I’m cautiously optimistic that this season’s upcoming “dino episode” will go the same way. It’s definitely something different for Star Trek, and I continue to appreciate that Strange New Worlds is willing to try different things and explore not only the Final Frontier, but also new genres and different ways of telling stories.
Speaking of new forms of storytelling, we didn’t see anything of the puppet episode this time around, which I think is a noteworthy omission from this trailer. We’ve known for a while that the Jim Henson Company has created puppets for one Season 4 episode, and I guess Paramount-Skydance doesn’t want to spoil too much more of that story at this early stage. I know the puppet announcement wasn’t met with universal support from Trekkies, but I’m definitely curious to see what kind of episode it’ll turn out to be – and whether the writers and creative team have been able to take full advantage of a very different medium to put together a story that we may not have seen in Star Trek before.
The young Vulcan cadet whom we’d caught a glimpse of in last year’s clip also made a return, this time serving as a stand-in transporter chief. This would seem to indicate that this character might be a slightly bigger presence on the show, perhaps appearing in more than one episode (and certainly appearing in more than one scene). In both of her appearances, she was paired up with one of Strange New Worlds’ younger characters – Uhura last time, and now Scotty. I think that could be interesting, and I like the idea of one or both of those characters getting an arc that could take them from being the younger, less-experienced trainee to a mentor of sorts to a new, up-and-coming cadet.
There were two points in the trailer where we seemed to see a “black hole” – or at least a space phenomenon which greatly resembles one. First, we saw the Enterprise approaching one right at the beginning of the trailer, and later, we saw one of the female characters – Uhura, perhaps, or La’an, I couldn’t really tell – flying towards a black hole-like phenomenon in a space suit. These clips are probably from the same episode (it would be kinda repetitive to re-use the same kind of CGI creation twice in one season), but at the same time, I felt that the scale of the black hole was different when you look at the two clips side-by-side.
Black holes in Star Trek have been a kind of magical macguffin in the past; a real-world scientific name that has been bent and twisted to fit the whims of generations of storytellers! But it will be interesting to see something like this up close again; my mind wanders back to Season 2 of Discovery, where the Talosians projected an imaginary black hole as a shield to hide their planet. I’m not saying a return to Talos IV is on the cards, of course. But there’s precedent for things not being entirely as they seem!
Kirk and Spock – who’ve been building up a friendship across several episodes now – seem to get another turn in the spotlight. Their hug – or rather, Kirk’s hugging of Spock – seems to indicate that this friendship is progressing even more, bringing both characters closer to how we remember them from The Original Series. Strange New Worlds has already done a lot to lay the groundwork for this relationship, so I don’t think we need to go overboard with this younger version of Kirk. One storyline with Spock should be all it takes, as Strange New Worlds enters the latter part of its run, to get Kirk exactly where he needs to be.
Speaking of Kirk, I hope we’ll get to see him with other characters this time around, too. Season 3’s “backdoor pilot” for the Year One spin-off saw Kirk meeting Chapel, Scotty and Uhura, as well as Spock, and Kirk also got a B-plot with Scotty in the comedy episode Four-and-a-Half Vulcans later in the season, so there’s plenty of room to build up some of those relationships a little more. Perhaps it’s because I’m beginning to feel a little burned out on this version of Spock (after so many “Spock comedy” and “Spock relationship drama” stories), but I’d quite like to see Kirk teamed up with other characters this time around… at least for some of the time.
One of the CGI clips showed a planet (or moon, I guess) being destroyed in a way that felt eerily similar to Star Trek 2009′s destruction of Vulcan. I don’t think we’re going to get things like Red Matter or the Kelvin timeline in Season 4, of course, but there’s gotta be an explanation for this destroyed planet… and the advanced-looking starship of unfamiliar design seen in orbit as it blew up.
Pike’s voiceover, which carried through the first part of the trailer, was interesting. At first, I thought it sounded like it could be one of the captain’s typical inspirational speeches… but now I’m not so sure. Could Pike’s words – if they’re taken from the season and weren’t written for the trailer itself – actually be a eulogy? Think about it: Pike starts by reading what seems like a quotation about exploration, and specifically the *dangers* posed by exploration, then goes on to say that “space is limitless in its beauty… and in its terror.” He concludes with the line “sometimes, things still don’t work out the way we’d hoped.” Could he be speaking to his crew after someone’s death? Could this speech be a eulogy delivered at a wake or a funeral? Combined with La’an’s line about how “any of these missions could be our last,” I think we’ve got at least enough evidence to posit a theory!
Then there’s Kirk’s scream as turbolift doors are closed. What’s happening on the other side of those doors, behind the camera? Is Kirk… leaving someone behind? It could be Spock, of course – perhaps Spock is saving Kirk’s life or putting himself in danger in some way, and that could be what leads to the hug and the strong bond the trailer is hinting at. Or… this could be another piece of the puzzle hinting at a main character’s death, perhaps a death involving self-sacrifice to save their comrades.
Okay, I’ll drop the “death” angle for now. But that was a big part of the tone and presentation of this trailer, in my opinion, and while of course it could be the case that the trailer was deliberately cut this way to generate interest, excitement, and trepidation… somehow, some way, by the end of next season, Strange New Worlds will have to explain what’s coming next for its main characters. Why, as of The Original Series and Kirk’s tenure in the captain’s chair, were the likes of Ortegas, Una, La’an, and Pelia no longer serving aboard the Enterprise? They could be promoted, transferred, demoted, arrested… any of that. Or… one or more of them could be killed in action.
A few final thoughts, then, before we wrap this up. The cliff or canyon, with flying creatures, would seem to be taken from the same episode as the T. Rex; I read those flying animals as being pterodactyls, or similar winged dinosaurs. The shot of the canyon was pretty, though, and I liked that it seems to be a unique location rather than a re-used outdoor filming site. The same can’t be said, though, for the away mission to the crystal cave, which looks like it might’ve been filmed at the quarry near Toronto that has been seen quite a few times since Discovery premiered.
Speaking of familiar locales… was the moment with Pike and Una being fired at taking place in a similar complex to last season’s Vezda prison? The dark stone, the angles of the plinths… it kinda looked like that to me. Again, that could be a coincidence (or a consequence of recycling sets), but it could also indicate that the Vezda storyline hasn’t been entirely wrapped up. I hope that isn’t the case; it would make Captain Batel’s sacrifice feel a lot worse if the enemy she gave her life to stop came back just a few episodes later! But that very brief clip definitely reminded me of last season and the Vezda prison.
We saw a brief shot of characters on horseback; Pike is known to be an equestrian, but we haven’t seen him in the saddle since Season 1. It would be neat to get another sequence of Pike on horseback, and perhaps see him introducing some of his shipmates to the joys of riding. The next clip seemed to show an all-female away team, comprised of Una, La’an, and Ortegas, which was interesting. We can also briefly see a shuttle in the background, which could suggest that Ortegas gets another chance to show off her piloting skills.
The alien ship seen in orbit of the destroyed planet seems to have some kind of energy field or weapon which we briefly saw encroaching on the Enterprise; will this be another “they just wanted to communicate!!1!” story, or could we be seeing the introduction of a new villain? I didn’t recognise this ship, and the blue colour used for its engines and weapons is also not something we’ve seen a lot of in Star Trek before. While I think it’s fun to welcome back alien races and villainous factions from the past, it’s also interesting – and healthy for the long-term prospects of Star Trek – to introduce new ones. As with characters, striking a balance between new and returning alien races is important.
So I think that’s everything for now. I wanted to take a look at the trailer, even though I’ve been absent and not really posting much over the last few weeks. I guess Starfleet Academy’s cancellation – and the realisation that this era of Star Trek really is winding down – kinda hit me harder than I expected, and while my website has never been *only* about Star Trek, that news has kinda sapped some of my enthusiasm for writing about the franchise – or writing in general, I guess. So… sorry about that. I’ll try to get back into the swing of things over the next little while.
This trailer did what it needed to do. It piqued my curiosity and got me a little more excited for the upcoming season. I wouldn’t necessarily have rushed Season 4 out the door this summer (and TV shows tend to perform worse in the summer months, which is another great reason to wait), but now that we have a confirmed date of the 23rd of July, I promise to be here with individual episode reviews! So I really hope that you’ll join me for those in what we can officially say is “just a couple of months’ time!”
Dinosaurs, black holes, and Spirk. Oh my.
Until next time… and Live Long and Prosper, friends!
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 will premiere on Paramount+ on the 23rd of July 2026. Seasons 1-3 are available to stream on Paramount+ now, and are also available on DVD/Blu-ray. The Star Trek franchise – including Strange New Worlds and all other properties discussed above – remains the copyright of the Paramount Skydance Corporation. Some still frames used in this article were edited using A.I. tools to remove logos and watermarks. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Trekking with Dennis 