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New Star Trek videos pave the way for Strange New Worlds

Casual Trekkies think that Star Trek began with Captain Kirk, Spock, and Dr. McCoy in the original series. However, the most passionate fans know that it all started with Captain Pike, his first officer, Number One, and a noticeably younger Spock in the unaired pilot, “The Cage.” Nearly six decades later, the original crew of the Enterprise is finally getting its own show in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. And to set the stage for next week’s series premiere, Paramount+ has released two new videos to allow both new and classic fans to boldly go into the future.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | Bringing A New Series To Life | Paramount+

In the first featurette, Anson Mount reveals that his character, Christopher Pike, has been haunted by the vision of his death from a pivotal episode in Star Trek: Discovery. This is Pike’s fate in the original series, and now he knows he can’t escape it. While Strange New Worlds features almost entirely stand-alone episodes, the emotional arc for Pike is about him coming to terms with that future.

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Perhaps the most intriguing part of that video is the reveal that Christina Chong’s La’an Noonien-Singh is Pike’s security chief on the Enterprise. Her distant relative, Khan Noonien Singh, was a genetically enhanced superhuman who became one of Kirk’s deadliest foes. But at this point in the timeline, no one knows that Khan is still out there waiting to be found.

Anson Mount in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.
Image used with permission by copyright holder

In the second video, former Star Trek: The Next Generation actor Wil Wheaton hosts an extended preview for Strange New World that kicks off with an interview with Mount and series co-creator Akiva Goldsman.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | Inside The Series | Paramount+

Rebecca Romijn also stars in the series First Officer Una Chin-Riley/Number One, alongside Ethan Peck as Spock, Babs Olusanmokun as Dr. M’Benga, Celia Rose Gooding as Nyota Uhura, Jess Bush as Christine Chapel, Melissa Navia as Erica Ortegas, and Bruce Horak as Hemmer.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds will premiere on Friday, May 5.

Blair Marnell
Blair Marnell has been an entertainment journalist for over 15 years. His bylines have appeared in Wizard Magazine, Geek…
10 best episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise, ranked
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Every Star Trek series is someone’s favorite (Star Trek: The Animated Series stans, we see you), but when it comes to the 18-year Golden Age of Trek between 1987 and 2005, the prequel series Enterprise is easily the least beloved. Airing on UPN for an abbreviated four-season run, Enterprise was meant to shake things up after three consecutive series set in the late 24th century.
Imagined as a sort of origin story for Star Trek in the style of The Right Stuff, creators Rick Berman and Brannon Braga wanted to capture the danger and excitement of United Earth’s early interstellar space program, even planning to spend the entire first season on Earth preparing for the launch of Starfleet’s very first Starship Enterprise. The network, however, had other ideas, insisting that Berman and Braga not meddle with the consistently successful Star Trek formula. Thus, despite taking place two centuries earlier, Enterprise became, essentially, “more Voyager,” which in turn had been “more Next Generation,” a once-great sci-fi procedural that was nearly a decade past its peak.
That’s not to say that the series didn’t improve throughout its four-season run. After two years of struggling to justify the show’s very existence, Berman and Braga swung for the fences with a radically different third season that reinvented Enterprise (now renamed Star Trek: Enterprise) as a grim and gritty serialized drama unpacking the aftermath of a 9/11-scale attack on Earth. While immediately more compelling, the revamp failed to boost the show’s sagging ratings, and it was reworked yet again the following year, and leaned further into the “prequel to Star Trek” angle under new showrunner Manny Coto. This, many fans will argue, is where Enterprise finally found its legs, but it was too little and too late to prevent its cancellation. Still, each iteration of the troubled spinoff had its highlights and our list of the 10 strongest Enterprise episodes is spread fairly evenly throughout the run of the show.
Warning: This article contains spoilers for each listed episode.

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In just a few days, we'll all be living in the future world of 2024, which isn't anywhere near as advanced as we hoped. Artificial Intelligence is intruding upon our daily lives, and our phones have never been more powerful, but it's not quite the technological leap forward we expected when we were kids. Fortunately, as we head into New Year's Eve, some great sci-fi movies offer a glimpse of where technology could go and an exploration of whether humanity has a future in the stars.

All of our picks for the three great sci-fi movies to watch on New Year's Eve offer different takes on what's coming down the road. Happy endings are in short supply here, but there's at least some hope that we can all pull through together and make it through another year.
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As much as fans love to praise Star Trek as groundbreaking science fiction, it’s important to remember that, for most of the franchise’s history, Trek was weekly procedural television. Until the streaming era, each series was churning out roughly 26 episodes a year, and by the later seasons of Star Trek: Voyager, some of the creative crew had been in the business of making Star Trek for over a decade. The franchise was a crossover commercial success, the kind of success that the money men like to leave exactly as it is for as long as it’s doing steady numbers.
The operation was essentially on rails, and there was a lot of pressure from the studio and the network to keep it that way, which accounts for the general blandness of Voyager and the early years of its successor, Enterprise. The waning years of Trek’s golden era were plagued by creative exhaustion and, consequently, laziness. Concepts from previous series were revisited, often with diminishing returns, and potentially groundbreaking ideas were nixed from on high in order to avoid upsetting the apple cart.
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10. Counterpoint (season 5, episode 10)

Counterpoint drops the audience into the middle of an ongoing story,in which Voyager is boarded and inspected by agents of a fascist government, the Devore. The Devore treat all travelers through their space with suspicion, but are particularly concerned with capturing and detaining all telepaths, who they view as dangerous. Despite the risks, Captain Janeway is attempting to smuggle a group of telepathic refugees to safety, all while putting on a show of cooperation for smiling Devore Inspector Kashyk (Mark Harelik). Much of the plot takes place in the background, obscured from the audience in order to build suspense. The real focus is on the evolving dynamic between Janeway and Kashyk, a rivalry that simmers into one of the Voyager captain’s rare romances. Kashyk works in the service of what are, transparently, space Nazis, but when he offers to defect to Voyager, can his intentions be trusted?
Beyond its intriguing premise, Counterpoint is a particularly strong production with a lot of subtle hints of creative flair. Director Les Landau and director of photography Marvin Rush, who had been both working on Star Trek since the 1980s, shoot the hell out of this story, breaking from Voyager’s even lighting and predictable camera moves to make some very deliberate choices that build a great deal of tension around what is essentially a bottle episode. The makeup team, supervised by equally seasoned Trek veteran Michael Westmore, supplies a memorable and imaginative makeup design for an alien astrophysicist who appears in all of two scenes in this episode and is never utilized again. Most of all, Kate Mulgrew provides what may be her most subtle, human performance in the entire series, embodying Janeway’s famous conviction and strength of will while also granting a rare glimpse at her more vulnerable side without ever straying into melodrama.

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