Henry Alonso Myers and Akiva Goldsman are the primary ringleaders behind “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds“, and they’re about to unleash the next cluster of 10 Season 4 episodes for their spirited space show.
With an abundance of genre-crossing indulgences that are scary, surreal, and sometimes silly, the Paramount+ hit is operating at full warp speed in this penultimate outing, the debut episode of which just premiered on July 23, 2026.
We hitched a ride with the acclaimed executive producers to learn all about their vision for “Strange New Worlds'” fourth season and why they believe it will prove to be the finest one yet, taking cues from ‘90s-style time-travel odysseys, haunted starships, noir crime thrillers, puppet mishaps, and utopian fantasies.
“It’s hard to come up through the ‘90s and not feel affected by a lot of the films that came out in that era, some of which my partner is directly responsible for,” Myers tells Space regarding the solid one-two punch of the first two episodes.
“I think part of the goal is to come out swinging when you do a premiere. It needs its own premise that stands on its own, and then you need to figure out how to set up everything else for the season through that.
“How do you tell an emotional story that expresses where the season is going to go? And also, we want something that we think is cool. The minute we started talking about doing dinosaurs [In “Valles Marineris”], we were like, ‘Yeah, let’s figure out a way to do that.’ Then it became a question of how do we fit all of this into the same box.”
For the unsettling (and pretty gruesome) horror episode titled “The Griffin Incident,” Myers admits that Goldsman is his true north for all the horror elements because the Oscar-winning screenwriter loves it so deeply.
“I always look to see his reaction if whether or not we feel like we’ve hit it. And every season we’ve tried to do one, and we’ve done some decent ones. But we haven’t quite done something like a ghost story. His reaction to that made it all worth doing.”
Goldsman finds it interesting that he understands the rules of the horror genre, yet he actually doesn’t watch that much horror anymore, short of the horror projects that he’s somehow been involved with creatively.
“The older I get, the harder it is for me to watch,” he reveals. “This particular convergence of the open-hearted optimism of ‘Star Trek’ and the kind of haunted nature of the world behind the world. There’s a cadence to this, an almost Lovecraftian sense of there’s something out there that’s more than we know and maybe not so pleasant. I just think that is really interesting in ‘Star Trek.’ So we built it and shot it like a horror movie, and for me it worked. It’s nice and scary.”
In choosing some of their favorite moments of Season 4, Myers and Goldsman share observations on a few key crew members as they embark on their own inner voyages.
“There is stuff that Uhura goes through this season that really gets me,” notes Myers. “She was the new recruit at the beginning of the show, and this is the part where she’s suddenly a bit more in charge. She also manages to risk her life and save people in ways we haven’t seen on screen. And it builds to something I love, which is she looks at who she’s going to be, and looks back at who she was, and has some really great emotional stories around that. I love seeing her on that journey.”
Picking his pair of intrepid Starfleet officers, Goldsman looks toward Sickbay.
“I think there’s a set of relationship beats between M’Benga and Chapel in the back half of the season that really deepens both those characters and helps us understand where everybody’s going that I think Jess and Babs did beautifully,” he adds. “So I’m really looking forward to that.”
“Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” Season 4 is now streaming on Paramount+.