Every Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season has come with one episode that has an especially wacky premise. Season 1 had a fairy tale-themed story; Season 2 delivered both the Lower Decks crossover and the franchise’s first musical episode; and this week on the 2025 TV schedule, we watched La’an Noonien Singh solving a murder mystery in a prototype of the holodeck for Season 3. As for Season 4, it's been announced that the Strange New Worlds cast will spend some time transformed into puppets. Showrunners Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers opened up about the work that’s been poured into this upcoming episode, which included getting advice from some talent who worked on the Buffy the Vampire Slayer spinoff Angel.
While it remains to be seen when Strange New Worlds Season 4 will premiere on the slate of upcoming Star Trek TV shows, the show’s cast and crew already have this particular episode in their proverbial rearview mirror. Following the reveal of Anson Mount’s Christopher Pike in puppet form at San Diego Comic-Con, Goldsman and Myers revealed to EW that “there was easily more than six months of work” on this episode, and that “alongside all the other prep meetings for every episode, there was always a separate puppet meeting.” Then Myers said:
