With “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds,” premiering Thursday on Paramount+, the franchise goes once again into the past, with a series you can consider, in quantum fashion, both as a spinoff from “Star Trek: Discovery” and a belated order for the original series’ rejected pre-Shatner pilot, “The Cage,” which starred Jeffrey Hunter as starship Enterprise Captain Christopher Pike and Leonard Nimoy as Spock. When “Star Trek” repurposed that footage into the two-part “The Menagerie,” it made Pike canon, and established that he and Spock were crewmates before James T. Kirk ever entered the picture.
Before it jumped 1,000 years into the future, “Discovery” brought back Pike, played by Anson Mount, as an interim captain in its second season, along with Ethan Peck as a younger Spock and Rebecca Romijn as Una Chin-Riley, a.k.a. Number One (a character from “The Cage,” played by Majel Barrett, not picked up for the series). And here they are, back home on the Enterprise, with some other familiar, less familiar and unfamiliar shipmates.
Characters with roots in the old show include Nyota Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding), still a cadet, not yet a lieutenant, but a “prodigy” who speaks 37 languages (like Nichelle Nichols’ Uhura, she sings, and does that thing where she puts her hand to her ear when she’s at her post); nurse Christine Chapel (Jess Bush), originally played by Barrett, a recurring “Star Trek” character; and Dr. M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun), a guest character now getting a regular gig. New are Christina Chong as tough-cookie security officer La’an Noonien-Singh (as in top villain Khan Noonien-Singh, a relation); Melissa Navia as pilot Erica Ortegas; and Bruce Horak as Hemmer, an Aenar Andorian and the new chief engineer. He has antennae. A “Kirk” is also mentioned, about a quarter of the way through the pilot, creating an expectation.
