Star Trek: Strange New Worlds EPs Dive Deep Into The Finale's Retro Nods To The Original Series — And Promise A 'More Tonally Cohesive' Final Season

Warning: This post contains spoilers for Thursday's "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" finale.

"Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" stepped into the future in this week's Season 4 finale... and that meant connecting back to the franchise's past.

In Thursday's finale, Uhura had a "temporal incident" where she was able to communicate with herself a year in the future, complete with a hairdo straight out of the original "Star Trek" series. Both Uhuras were in a race against time to save Scotty's life — and in the future, Uhura and Scotty are a romantic couple! — so our Uhura had to navigate a future Enterprise much like the one from the original "Trek," with Paul Wesley's Kirk at the helm as captain. The two Uhuras combined forces to save the day, of course, and along the way, our Uhura learned an important lesson about living in the present.  

TVLine reached out to "Strange New Worlds" co-showrunners and executive producers Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers to break down the time-tripping season finale, the nods to the original "Star Trek" series, and Uhura and Scotty's surprise romance. Plus, we get them to look ahead to the upcoming final season: "We're also saying goodbye, and we're doing that very thoughtfully and very consciously."

TVLINE | Celia Rose Gooding hasn't really had a big showcase this season, but the finale certainly made up for that, giving us two Uhuras: a present one and a future one. So why was Uhura the right character to center this story on?
HENRY ALONSO MYERS | Well, one of the things that we have tried really hard to do on the show is give everyone at least one big episode where we allow them to reach up and try something, something they hadn't tried before. One thing we were really trying to do in Season 4 was just kind of switch up the order, not do it exactly the way that we've been doing it before. And at the time, we really didn't know if we would have another season. We didn't know if it would be the end. We didn't know a lot of things. So we felt like she was sort of a perfect character to imagine the future, both for the Enterprise and for the show, and to show her thinking about herself as someone in the present and thinking about who she's going to be, which is something that I think is fundamental to the show, and try to express that through drama, and try to express that through something exciting, and also try to express that through what we felt was important to the character. Who is she now? Who will she be? And how did she become who she would become?

AKIVA GOLDSMAN | And to reinforce what Henry said, we managed to find our way to a final season through some negotiation, and so for a while, "Tomorrow's Enterprise" was going to be the last episode of the series. And so, in some ways, certainly when it comes to legacy characters, and I think for the show as a whole, the narrative eye, the audience surrogate, has very much been Uhura. Someone that the fans knew, but had never met this version of. A character who's young and who is what you want in a narrative surrogate, right? It's all brand new, and so the audience could experience it with her. So for new audiences as well, Celia's portrayal of Uhura was a way in, and so we wanted to close with her as well, to sort of go into the future with her, too. A bunch of things shifted when we discovered that we were going to have a final season, but that did not. It was always essentially her story.

MYERS | We made some internal adjustments, basically to leave us some room for things to discover. We didn't want to play every card.

TVLINE | That's interesting: I can kind of see it, now that you say that, that this could have been a series finale, had you made a few adjustments. Is that why we got to see a year ahead and see Kirk at the helm of the Enterprise and see Uhura with the original hairdo and things like that, the kind of things that we associate with "Trek"?
GOLDSMAN | Yeah, it was. You know, this series has always been a promissory note to fans. The series has always promised that we would we come right up to the edge of "TOS" [the original "Star Trek" series], and we really got to, which is something that I know Henry and I are tremendously proud of. But that was about to be it. So we were going to get there the best way we knew how. If you look closely at the episode, I shall not disclose, but there were some quick substitutions, switches, changes in order for it not to actually entirely open up "TOS" before it was time.

MYERS | One of the interesting things you learn — I mean, I think this is a TV thing — is that you basically have to treat every ending like it's the ending, meaning: You have to go in as hard and as fast as you can. Try the best version you can, really reach for things, because you don't know if there's going to be a tomorrow, and so that was literally our approach to it.

TVLINE | You gave future Uhura a romance with Scotty, which is not something I remember seeing in the original series. What made you decide to go there? And now that you have a few more episodes, is that something you'll explore further in the final season?
MYERS | So there has always been a flirtation. It kind of came out more in the movies between the two of them: an implication that they had history, that they had something going on. What we were trying to do was just reach out and imagine a deeper version of the thing that didn't get to make it on screen. On the original series, that was not a big concern of theirs. Scotty played probably more comically in that regard... We wanted to bring it to their current [versions]. She's a real character with real stakes, real emotion, and we thought it would be nice to imply that the things that we had seen already had a purpose in the past.

TVLINE | Also, in the future, we know something has happened to La'an, but we don't know what, and Pike won't reveal what, exactly. Is that another question that will be answered next season? Or is that something that, if this were a series finale, you were just going to just leave unanswered?
MYERS | I will say straight up that at the time we wrote that, we weren't certain of what it would be. But I will say that the future, which was undecided, is something that we've eventually come to.

GOLDSMAN | Yeah, we will locate everybody, both canon and non-canon characters. You won't have to wonder.

TVLINE | You have just six episodes in Season 5 to wrap everything up. What can you tell us about what we can expect? Will it be one serialized story, or do you still have room to tell standalone stories?
GOLDSMAN | Much to the joy of those who will find the genre swings more of a test, it is more tonally cohesive, the final season. Certainly, we do have beginnings, middles, and ends to all our stories. But we're also saying goodbye, and we're doing that very thoughtfully and very consciously. It is, in fact, a season about how to say goodbye, and so in that sense, there's probably more consistency tonally across the face of Season 5.

Alright, Trekkies, it's your turn: Give the finale — and Season 4 as a whole — a grade in our polls, and then beam down to the comments to share your thoughts.