How Star Trek's Most Kickass Doctor Keeps Strange New Worlds Grounded
Babs Olusanmokun is the badass the Final Frontier needs.
Since its debut in 2022, the prequel/spinoff Star Trek series Strange New Worlds has done more than one Freaky Friday-esque body-switching episode, featured familiar intrepid space explorers bursting into song and dance, dressed up the entire crew in a Hollywood murder mystery, crossed over with an animated cartoon Trek series (Lower Decks), and, most recently, turned the entire crew (minus Spock) into puppets. For casual viewers, this would mean that Strange New Worlds is the zaniest Trek that has ever boldly gone, and yet if we take a look at some of the other episodes, we’ll find many stories are somber, reflective, and surprisingly down-to-earth. Interestingly enough, the character who is often central to the more serious SNW storylines is the incomparable Babs Olusanmokun as Dr. Joseph M’Benga.
As Strange New Worlds hits its midpoint in Season 4, Inverse caught up with the actor to reflect on the duality of M’Benga — a healer who is also the most deadly member of the crew, a secret weapon hiding in plain sight. Plus, Olusanmokun gave us a preview of his thoughts on how and why M’Benga will, at some point, step down as the chief medical officer of the Starship Enterprise.
Mild spoilers ahead for SNW Season 4, Episodes 1-5.
How Olusanmokun’s M’Benga keeps Starfleet more realistic
M’Benga often becomes a mentor to his shipmates, especially during tense, dangerous missions.
So far, one of the standout episodes from Strange New Worlds Season 4 is easily the noir-inspired “A Case of Chiaroscuro,” an episode in which M’Benga, Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding), and Una (Rebecca Romijn) are all forced to go undercover on a Klingon-occupied planet, bathed in black-and-white light. While SNW (and other Trek shows) have often featured episodes in which the characters play dress-up (see: multiple holodeck episodes from the TNG/DS9/VOY era for proof), what makes “A Case of Chiaroscuro” somewhat unique is that the anachronistic aesthetic isn’t for laughs; instead, the episode plays it straight. And it’s no surprise M’Benga is at the center of it all, having been on more undercover missions than Una and Uhura.
“For me, it was very easy to embrace that story and just to live that noir atmosphere,” Olusanmokun tells Inverse. “I’m truly trying to solve a problem and trying to stay safe. With Una and Uhura, I’m trying to just give tips, like: ‘Listen, we want to make it back alive. Here’s how to do that.’”
As SNW has previously established, M’Benga is as much of a warrior as he is a doctor, having taken out many, many Klingons in the military conflict that exists in the Discovery Season 1 era of Trek. Basically, when you need a doctor and some muscle on your away team, M’Benga is both. He’s also, in a sense, a therapist for people who need to figure out how to become badasses.
“It's not a terrible thing. It simply shows the breadth of his experience across Starfleet,” Olusanmokun says. “I think he’s an officer that’s dealt with a lot; his background of taking care of people goes across the whole spectrum. If you’re in a bed in sickbay, he’s got a way about him. But if someone needs to go further afield, he’s got an idea or two. He’s a Swiss Army knife, really.”
Why Olusanmokun likes a darker tone in Star Trek
A tense moment in sickbay between Nurse Chapel (Jess Bush) and Dr. M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun ). This partnership represents a huge part of what makes SNW tick.
In Season 4, Episode 4, and the upcoming Episode 6, “Off Hour,” M’Benga is in familiar territory: The somewhat serious, grounded character, grappling with the realities of how difficult it is to be a soldier and a doctor in deep space. In the 2009 Star Trek film, Dr. McCoy (Karl Urban) famously said: “Space is disease and danger wrapped in darkness and silence,” but M’Benga is a character who actually allows the audience to feel the weight of that sentiment, without making a joke about it. In talking about “A Case of Chiaroscuro” and the tone of Episode 6, “Off Hour,” Olusanmokun reveals the fact that, yes, he very much likes to go dark, or at the very least, explore the straightforward aspects of his character.
“You know what? I love laughing, and I have a lot of laughter in my life, but I'm also deeply attracted to pieces where it's just a sober truth and a dramatic truth,” Olusanmokun says. “I like the exploration of that and the sincerity of those pieces. I don't need a wise crack in the middle of the heaviness of reality.”
Dr. M’Benga’s canonical future is looming
M’Benga and La’an in Strange New Worlds (left) and in The Original Series (right), with Chapel and Scotty.
Although Dr. M’Benga is technically a legacy character from The Original Series, the version played by Booker Bradshaw in just two episodes (“A Private Little War” and “That Which Survives”) doesn’t seem totally aligned with Olusanmokun’s M’Benga. At least, not yet. Could we picture M’Benga demoting himself and working, part-time, under McCoy? We actually don’t know much about M’Benga’s timeline on the Enterprise during the Kirk years; maybe he was just visiting during those TOS episodes. Plus, since SNW Season 1, there’s always been the notion that M’Benga had one foot out the door.
This feeling grows larger in SNW, especially with some of the events of Episode 6. For Olusanmokun, it’s all more signs of the dimensionality of M’Benga, the notion that this is a realistic character, existing in a fantastic and sometimes hyperbolic world.
“It’s almost like he’s grieving a loss before it happens,” Olusanmokun says. “I try to color that in there. There is a kind of transitional doubt and uncertainty. He’s wondering, ‘Am I really in the place I need to be? Maybe I’m a little too familiar with these people?’”
All of that being said, Olusanmokun feels that as much as he tries to “imbue” M’Benga with a sense of hesitation and reserve, the future is not yet revealed. “This is a man perhaps preparing to leave the people he loves dearly behind,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean that’s exactly going to be what happens.”
