Each Star Trek: Unusual New Worlds season has include one episode that has an particularly wacky premise. Season 1 had a fairy tale-themed story; Season 2 delivered each the Decrease Decks crossover and the franchise’s first musical episode; and this week on the 2025 TV schedule, we watched La’an Noonien Singh fixing a homicide thriller in a prototype of the holodeck for Season 3. As for Season 4, it has been introduced that the Unusual New Worlds solid will spend a while reworked into puppets. Showrunners Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers opened up in regards to the work that’s been poured into this upcoming episode, which included getting recommendation from some expertise who labored on the Buffy the Vampire Slayer spinoff Angel.
Whereas it stays to be seen when Unusual New Worlds Season 4 will premiere on the slate of upcoming Star Trek TV exhibits, the present’s solid and crew have already got this specific episode of their proverbial rearview mirror. Following the reveal of Anson Mount’s Christopher Pike in puppet kind at San Diego Comedian-Con, Goldsman and Myers revealed to EW that “there was simply greater than six months of labor” on this episode, and that “alongside all the opposite prep conferences for each episode, there was at all times a separate puppet assembly.” Then Myers mentioned:
I used to be accustomed to how you can do some of these things. In manufacturing, we would have lengthy conversations with our director in thoughts, particularly about how you can deal with puppets…. We needed to have numerous conversations about making puppets. We needed to have numerous conversations about how you can deal with our crew, as a result of we additionally must have an entire crew of puppeteers. It is similar to doing a really totally different kind of episode, and it requires numerous time and care to do it.
It’s arduous sufficient making a “regular” episode of Star Trek with the actors simply taking part in their characters usually, however throw puppets into the combo? Yeah, I’m not shocked it took a lot further time, particularly factoring in these puppeteers that needed to be introduced in. The Unusual New Worlds puppets had been designed by the Jim Henson Creature Workshop, and if this episode is something like a Muppets manufacturing or The Darkish Crystal, then new levels doubtless needed to be constructed to accomodate the puppeteers.
In fact, Star Trek: Unusual New Worlds is much from the primary TV present to puppetize its solid, with one other notable instance together with the Angel Season 5 episode “Smile Time.” Henry Alonso Myers bought involved with Angel author, director and producer Jeffrey Bell to choose his mind about how you can deal with this enjoyable premise, with Myers recalling:
I had simply socially a bunch of conversations with him about how they did it. That turned out to be not only a foolish dialog however a really helpful dialog.
Whereas it stays to be seen once we’ll get appears to be like on the different Unusual New Worlds characters in puppet kind, Akiva Goldsman mentioned that there are “no phrases” to explain how Christina Chong’s La’an puppet appears to be like. Chong and fellow castmates Jess Bush and Rebecca Romijn all praised the script, making me all of the extra desperate to see how this episode turned out. For now although, I’ll simply must make do with watching Puppet Pike say “Hit it!” and categorical confusion over the place everybody else on the Enterprise bridge went.
New episodes of Star Trek: Unusual New Worlds premiere Thursdays on Paramount+. The present has been renewed for a fifth and closing season consisting of simply six episodes, so I hope Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers discover a solution to squeeze in a fifth “particular” episode throughout that shortened run.