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:
I was familiar with how to do some of this stuff. In production, we'd have long conversations with our director in mind, specifically about how to handle puppets.... We had to have a lot of conversations about making puppets. We had to have a lot of conversations about how to handle our crew, because we also have to have a whole crew of puppeteers. It's just like doing a very different type of episode, and it requires a lot of time and care to do it.
It’s hard enough making a “normal” episode of Star Trek with the actors just playing their characters normally, but throw puppets into the mix? Yeah, I’m not surprised it took so much extra time, especially factoring in those puppeteers that had to be brought in. The Strange New Worlds puppets were designed by the Jim Henson Creature Workshop, and if this episode is anything like a Muppets production or The Dark Crystal, then new stages likely had to be constructed to accomodate the puppeteers.
Of course, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is far from the first TV show to puppetize its cast, with another notable example including the Angel Season 5 episode “Smile Time.” Henry Alonso Myers got in contact with Angel writer, director and producer Jeffrey Bell to pick his brain about how to tackle this fun premise, with Myers recalling:
I had just socially a bunch of conversations with him about how they did it. That turned out to be not just a silly conversation but a very useful conversation.
While it remains to be seen when we’ll get looks at the other Strange New Worlds characters in puppet form, Akiva Goldsman said that there are “no words” to describe how Christina Chong’s La’an puppet looks. Chong and fellow castmates Jess Bush and Rebecca Romijn all praised the script, making me all the more eager to see how this episode turned out. For now though, I’ll just have to make do with watching Puppet Pike say “Hit it!” and express confusion over where everyone else on the Enterprise bridge went.
New episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds premiere Thursdays on Paramount+. The show has been renewed for a fifth and final season consisting of just six episodes, so I hope Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers find a way to squeeze in a fifth “special” episode during that shortened run.
