Star Trek has long pushed the limits of sci-fi, expanding the genre into bold new realms, but perhaps no other show in the franchise has done so more than Strange New Worlds.
Everything from musical stylings and body-swap comedy to a classic '60s-style whodunit episode have helped the show stand out as one-of-a-kind across its first three seasons.
It seems that nothing's been off the table for Strange New Worlds, not where genre is concerned. But even so, news that season 4 would transform the crew into puppets seemed like the show's biggest swing yet in that regard.
"The episode itself is such a risk," says Anson Mount. And it turns out he found it especially tricky to find the right tone, balancing those muppet-style antics with the usually rather serious Christopher Pike.
"My problem is I realised that I was not going out on a limb with the episode, I was trying to ground it in what Pike normally does. And there are times when being the responsible straight man is just not the right choice. There are times you've just got to go for it."
Rebecca Romijn, who plays Pike's Number One, Una Chin-Riley, revealed more about why tone was so key to the success of this episode, which could have been either too serious or too silly if not handled right.
View Green Video on the source website"We recorded the table read for the puppeteers who were all there with us," says Romijn. "They really wanted to get a good handle on who we are as actors, as we play our characters. We also recorded all of our dialogue separately for the puppeteers to work with. It sounds like there were several tone meetings about how they wanted that dialogue to come out.
"We did several rounds of ADR to get the tone just right," adds Romijn, "so it was still based in reality, but also heightened as puppets".
Romijn herself found that balance hard too, reflecting on a table read that ended up being "one of the more uncomfortable moments for me personally on set".
"I went all puppet at the table read and we came back to set. Then Anson and Ethan [Peck] both went, 'Is that how you're gonna do it?' I literally ran back to the room and said to the director, 'I'm sorry I did voices,' and she goes, 'Yeah, I noticed.' And I was like, 'Was that bad?'"
"I turned around to Akiva [Goldsman] and Henry [Alonso Myers], and they were both still wiping tears from their face. I said, 'Guys, I want to apologise. Maybe I took it too far.' They were like, 'No, we need to have some tone meetings. We gotta figure out exactly where we're going with this.'"
"So I went back feeling still uneasy, but when we came back in and they made us go all the way heightened, I was like, 'I was right.' I felt such vindication."
Anson's puppet was the first one that the cast got to see for themselves as a kind of prototype. "That was nuts," recalls Mount.
Celia Rose Gooding, who plays Nyota Uhura, couldn't get enough of seeing hers once it arrived.
"We were shooting something else at the time because they were trying to maximise our time economy, and I remember during every break I was like, 'Can I go look at my puppet again?' because it's just really exciting."
It's not every day you get to see yourself as a fully-realised puppet, not even on a show as wild and strange as this one.
Gooding adds: "We do so much genre-wise on our series, but I never thought that puppets were gonna be an option. So when we got to see it in real time, to touch our puppets and take pictures with them in our uniforms, I was so jazzed."
And jazzed she should be. Beyond the gimmick of just seeing our faves reimagined as puppets, the episode is also one of this season's best, a laugh riot that pokes fun while giving the crew much to think about, too.
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