Inside the ‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Season Finale: Evil Gorn! Shocking Ending! And Introducing [SPOILER]!

SPOILER ALERT: This story discusses major plot developments for the Season 2 finale of “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds,” currently streaming on Paramount+.

The second season of “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” took a large number of big swings: Spock (Ethan Peck) becoming human for a time; an alternate universe James T. Kirk (Paul Wesley) romancing La’an Noonien-Singh (Christina Chong) in 21st century Toronto; the crossover episode with the animated series “Star Trek: Lower Decks”; and the musical episode featuring a Klingon boy band group.

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The Season 2 finale, “Hegemony,” attempts to top them all. The terrifying reptilian aliens from Season 1, the Gorn, return with a vengeance, decimating a brand new human colony that the Gorn believe falls within their territory. That would be trying enough for Capt. Christopher Pike (Anson Mount) and the crew of the Enterprise to deal with, but the Gorn also happened to attack the colony while Pike’s girlfriend, Capt. Marie Batel (Melanie Scrofano) and Spock’s ex-girlfriend, Nurse Christine Chapel (Jess Bush), are visiting the planet. Batel is trapped on the surface with her crew and some of the other colonists; Chapel is stranded on the decimated remains of Batel’s ship, the Cayuga. And the Gorn have erected a device that prevents the Enterprise from beaming anyone off of the surface.

Written by executive producer Henry Alonso Myers, “Hegemony” plays like an action-packed thriller — which is partly why Myers and his fellow showrunner Akiva Goldsman decided to end the episode on a surprise cliffhanger. And yet, somehow, they also managed to include the introduction of one of the most beloved “Star Trek” characters: engineer Montgomery “Scotty” Scott.

In “Hegemony,” we meet Scotty as a precocious junior officer and engineering prodigy who was once a student of Enterprise’s current chief engineer, Pelia (Carol Kane). The character was originated on the original series (or TOS) in the 1960s by James Doohan; for the younger version on “Strange New Worlds,” Myers says he wanted to find an actor “who was actually Scottish” to play the character. He estimates he looked at 30 to 50 actors for the role, and “our casting folks saw many, many, many more,” before casting stage actor Martin Quinn (who recently appeared in an episode of “Derry Girls”).

Myers and Goldsman talked with Variety about how they decided to bring Scotty onto “Strange New Worlds,” why the Gorn have become the Big Bad of the series and where they see the show heading for Season 3.

Henry, you and I talked last year about how the Gorn had become the central antagonistic aliens for Season 1. Did you always plan to revisit them for the Season 2 finale?

Henry Alonso Myers: We always knew we were going revisit them — the finale is just where it ended up. We were trying to do something really big and seeing the adult Gorn was a thing we knew would take time. It takes a lot of design; one of the reasons it came later in the season was we knew that we’d have a lot of work to do. It just sort of worked out as a finale.

The Gorn are a powerful threat on this show, but they’ve never been much of a factor in any iterations of “Trek” that come later in the timeline. Some of that, of course, is because as they were conceived on “TOS,” the Gorn were a little silly looking — it was just a man in a rubber suit.

Myers: It was hard to do it well. It was hard to do respectfully.

Do you intend to resolve that tension in “Strange New Worlds,” to explain why as the timeline evolves, the Gorn as a threat seem to have diminished?

Myers: Well, this is one I would like to punt to Akiva, but only because a lot of what the Gorn became for the show was a vision that he had — this was something that had not really been explored that we had an opportunity to make in a way that had never been done.

Akiva Goldsman: The Gorn, for me, were not intentionally comedic — they were just executed about as well as they could be executed at that point in the run of the show at that time. Like, it was just a bad suit — and let’s not even talk about the Metrons. But I looked at the intention, which is: scary, scary, scary, Other, Other, Other. One thing that we always do in “Star Trek” is we empathize — that’s in large part the purpose of our show. We’re kind of an empathy generator. It’s a carnival mirror on modern society.

But in our desire to express compassion first, which I think is the right desire, sometimes we forget that real monsters exist. I thought it was important for there to be real monsters in our galaxy. That doesn’t mean that 10 years, two seasons from now, we won’t be having a nice chat with the Gorn. But right now in Seasons 1 and 2 and 3, they’re the monsters. By the way, many of the other “Star Trek” antagonists began as alien, as Other — forgive the use of “alien” — but we learned to connect with them. Not so the Gorn. The Gorn are not understandable to us in this way, not relatable to us in this way. Part of our galaxy is be good, be kind, be empathetic, and also understand that evil exists, because seeing with compassion does mean you should be blind to horror. The Gorn are monsters.

How did you decide to introduce Scotty in the finale?

Myers: We’ve been talking about ways to surprise the future of the story. It just sort of came up as we were talking about the story. Initially, it had been someone else completely. And then Akiva and I were talking and I was like, “Well, what about Scotty?” And then we both fell in love with the idea. We started doing some searching for the people who could play Scotty and what kind of character that would be and then it took its own it took its own life at that point.

By introducing Scotty, you’re inevitably raising the possibility that the show will also be introducing other characters from the “TOS” era, like Bones or Sulu. Should fans expect that to happen as the show progresses?

Goldsman: The longer we stay on the air — do we still say that? — the longer we stream, the longer we do whatever it is we do to let people watch us, the more likely it becomes. Given our druthers — because Henry and I are both greedy and gluttons for punishment — we’d go right into the TOS era and see what happens. So, if we’re around long enough, sure.

Myers: The one thing I will say is — I try to respect everyone’s approach to this. But we’re not telling the story of who they are [in the future], we’re telling the story of who they are now. They don’t know who they’re going to be. That is the unique opportunity of our show that allows us to tell these stories in ways that they haven’t been told before. That’s the fun of it for us. If we meet other people, they will surprise you. That’s all I’ll say.

This season took some major risks. What other boundaries are you considering pushing for Season 3?

Goldsman: We’re going to keep going. We genre hop. So where we haven’t been, we will try to go. Henry’s watchwords for Season 2 were, “Let’s do Season 1, just bigger and better.” That’s become the truth of Season 3. We’re always doing the thing that we do best, which is secretly just a lot of relationship stories in space. We’ll keep unfolding those hopefully in ways that are different, in the same way that the tones of our episodes will be different. But yeah, ambition will taper off only when we can’t figure out a thing to do we haven’t done before.

Myers: The joy of doing the show — Akiva and I spent a lot of time on this — is trying to come up with something really great and cool and different for our actors. The more challenging stuff you bring them, the harder they will work. We want to bring them great material so that they will continue to do incredible things.

Season 3 for “Strange New Worlds” was announced in March, well after production on Season 2 had ended. How confident were you that you’re going to be able to resolve this cliffhanger?

Myers: The best way to approach this is with a deep sense of confidence. We were very upfront with all of our folks internally about what we were doing. They were very supportive of it. We wanted it to be a surprise. I remember how the [“Star Trek: The Next Generation” cliffhanger episode] “The Best of Both Worlds, Part 1″ made me feel. That was what we wanted to revisit for the audience, to really surprise them.

By the time we were shooting that episode, the first season had come out and it did very well. We were trying to take risks. We knew it was going to be challenging, but it’s crazy if you don’t try the challenging things. The opportunity when you have a show like this is to make it as interesting and surprising as you possibly can. Sometimes that just means taking risks. This was a big season of risks. So by the finale, we had done so many risks, it was kind of like, “Yeah, sure!”

This interview has been edited and condensed. 

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