The original Enterprise crew is nearly complete. When Strange New Worlds drops its final season in 2027, the classic crew will be complete. In a just-confirmed press release, Paramount+ has revealed that the characters of Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy and Hikaru Sulu, originated by DeForest Kelley and George Takei in Star Trek: The Original Series, will appear in the very last episode of Strange New Worlds Season 5.
As with the rest of Strange New Worlds, Bones and Sulu will be played by new actors in Strange New Worlds, each becoming the third performer to take on these immortal roles.
Here’s the official statement from Paramount+:
“A holiday surprise for the fans! The Paramount+ Original Series Star Trek: Strange New Worlds reveals casting of iconic and fan-favorite characters for the final episode of season five of the beloved series, which recently wrapped production and promises to deliver unforgettable adventures aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise.”
Kai Murakami and Thomas Jane.
So, who is playing Bones and Sulu? Well, for science fiction fans, the new Bones will be a very familiar face: Thomas Jane, famous for The Expanse and the 2004 version of The Punisher. Meanwhile, Sulu will be played by Kai Murakami, who Paramount refers to as a “rising star.”
Bones and Sulu in the Star Trek Timeline
The crew of the Enterprise, including Sulu and Bones in “The City on the Edge of Forever.”
Presumably, Strange New Worlds Season 5 — the season coming in 2027 after Season 4 in 2026 — will bring the events of the series up to the realm of 2265, the first year that the USS Enterprise was commanded by Captain James T. Kirk. Interestingly, only one episode of TOS takes place during this inaugural year, the 1965 second pilot for the show, “Where No Man Has Gone Before.” Even stranger, Bones isn’t even in that episode, and Sulu, at that time, isn’t the helmsman!
When “No Man Has Gone Before” was filmed, it was a light reboot of the show, after the first pilot, “The Cage,” had been rejected by NBC. Since then, both “Where No Man Has Gone Before” and “The Cage” have been retconned into regular canon, but several inconsistencies and oddities exist in “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” including Spock wearing gold and Sulu in blue, working in the sciences division of the ship.
Sulu, Scotty, and Dr. Piper — NOT Bones — in “Where No Man Has Gone Before.”
Official tie-in novels and comics have attempted to reconcile these details, partiuclarly the absence of Bones in “Where No Man Has Gone Before.” In the regular series, Bones is the main focus of the first aired episode ever, “The Man Trap,” and he is also prominent in the first regular episode filmed, “The Corbomite Maneuver.” But it’s not like there’s any onscreen explanation for where Dr. Piper went, and fans wouldn’t have wondered anyway, since “Where No Man Has Gone Before” aired third, making Piper the temporary sub for Bones, not the other way around.
In 1986, Vonda N. McIntyre’s novel, Enterprise: The First Adventure, attempted to explain why Bones was, in fact, present at the start of Kirk’s Five-Year Mission, despite the whole Piper debacle. In 1985, DC’s Mike Barr attempted the same thing with a story called “All Those Years Ago...” which linked the first mission of the Enterprise with something happening in the contemporary timeline of the comics, which, back then, included Kirk in command of the Excelsior(Sulu’s future ship!) following the events of The Search for Spock. (The DC Star Trek comics in the 80s often attempted to guess at the events of future films, getting things wrong on most occasions.)
The Strange New Worlds cast in 2025.
But, from a real-deal Prime Universe point of view, we’ve never actually seen Sulu and Bones have their first day on the USS Enterprise. The J.J. Abrams 2009 film Star Trek, of course, showed Bones (Karl Urban) and Sulu (John Cho) on the Enterprise’s first mission, but that is a totally alternate timeline, and actually puts everyone on the ship several years earlier in 2258, not 2265.
So, with Strange New Worlds Season 5, showrunners Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers are in a unique position to make Star Trek history. The question is, after we see this new, vintage version of the Enterprise crew, will there be more adventures for them after that, filling in the missing gaps of 2265? If not, there is a very nice set of 79 episodes, which started 60 years ago, that fans can watch right away.
