Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks crews will meet in a crossover event

Photo: Marni Grossman/Paramount Plus

Rest easy, Trekkies: The best new Star Trek show is on its way back. On Saturday, Paramount Plus released some tantalizing news about the second season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds at the streamer’s San Diego Comic-Con panel in Hall H. Worlds will collide in an upcoming crossover event between Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks, with crew members from the U.S.S. Enterprise and the U.S.S. Cerritos meeting up for the first time.

Anson Mount, who plays Captain Christopher Pike in Strange New Worlds, made the announcement on stage just as Lower Decks stars Tawny Newsome and Jack Quaid (also of The Boys) “crashed” the SNW panel. Given that SNW is live-action and LD is an animated series, you may be wondering how exactly such a crossover will work, and we don’t know yet! But ensigns Beckett Mariner (Newsome) and Brad Boimler (Quaid) will find themselves among the crew of the Enterprise. The episode will be directed by Star Trek: The Next Generation and Picard actor and director Jonathan Frakes.

Created by Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers, SNW spins off from season two of Star Trek: Discovery. Strange New Worlds follows Captain Pike and his crew aboard the Enterprise in the years before James Kirk takes over. The cast includes Ethan Peck, Jess Bush, Melissa Navia, and Babs Olusanmokun.

Season 1 of Strange New Worlds ended on a few cliffhangers: Chief Engineer Hemmer (Bruce Horak) died to save the crew, leave his protege Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding) behind. La’an (Christina Chong) left the Enterprise to search for the family of someone she rescued. Perhaps most pressingly, Una “Number One” Chin-Riley (Rebecca Romijn) was arrested for being a person with genetically modified DNA, a fact she’s been hiding for years to stay in Starfleet.

Those threads will all certainly get woven into the new season. But Myers says the show won’t stray too far from the episodic formula that gave it such a good throwback Trek vibe.

“The show is still very much an adventure of the week,” Myers told Inverse about season 2 plans. “We do different genres, we try to go for broke with regard to those genres, and none of that has changed. I would say it’s the same character storytelling that we do. But, I will say Season 2 is on a grander scale.”

That will include introducing a new chief engineer to replace Hemmer — not Scotty, don’t ask again — who Myers said is “a very different person, a completely different type of engineer.”

There’s no word on when Strange New Worlds season 2 will premiere, but Lower Decks will be back for a third season on Aug. 25.

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Source: Polygon