’Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' drops clues to events already seen

“We have work to do when it comes to characters who you haven’t seen enter into canon beyond our show,” executive producer Akiva Goldsman says. “We want to do that work with thoughtfulness and muscularity and collaboration with the actors who have been as much the driver of this narrative object as we have.”

Before that connection occurs, “there will be some surprises that hit on the way,” producer Henry Alonso Myers says. “We want to show you the thing that you don’t know.”

While some of the “Star Trek” series adopted a serialized approach to storytelling, others have embraced an episodic tone. “Strange New Worlds” wants the best of both.

“If you watch the whole season, you really see that we’ve gone on a journey, and the goal is to apply to both,” Myers says.

Anson Mount, who plays Christopher Pike, the captain of the USS Enterprise before William Shatner’s Kirk, wanted him to be a bridge between other leaders.

“Kirk was machismo, and Picard was the intellect, but I wanted Pike to represent the heart,” Mount says. “He’s full-focused on the person (he’s talking to) because he knows that his greatest asset is his crew. I wanted to continue this idea of him turning the bridge into a ‘bigger mind, best idea wins’ kind of thing.”

Mount first played the character on “Star Trek: Discovery,” then was invited to join “Strange New Worlds,” where he has been able to fill in more gaps.

More on the horizon

Plenty of Easter eggs will be dropped into the fourth and fifth seasons of the series. Rebecca Romijn, who plays Number One, says there’s one in the fifth season that will surprise. “It’s a visual thing,” she says.

Goldsman, who wrote the fourth season opener and the fifth season closer, says science fiction is a carnival mirror.

“It lets us see parts of ourselves, our culture, our characters that feel too unsafe when we do it in straight drama,” he says. “When we look at the world around us today, there’s a tremendous amount of pain and suffering, and I think that was true when ‘Star Trek’ began in the ‘60s. What ‘Star Trek’ can do in a very particular, unique and beautiful way is to show us ourselves and challenge us without becoming so overwhelming that we turn away. Central to its core is the idea that empathy solves many of our problems and saves the day. I think that is a hopeful vision of the future and one that we yearn for … we just have to choose it.”

Mount agrees.

“There’s something in us that is fascinated by the horizon,” he says. “If you look at our space programs, on the page they’re a terrible idea. ‘You’re going to spend billions of dollars to send someone to walk on the moon? Why?’ But, at the same time, everybody on the planet agrees that we should be doing that. We are driven to see what’s over the horizon or walk away from the firelight to see what’s in the darkness. That’s what science fiction helps us do imaginatively.”