"Tomorrow's Enterprise" Was Almost The 'Strange New Worlds' Series Finale
“We wrote the goodbye episode, and then we got to change it to the ‘see you later’ episode.”
In the Season 4 finale of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, we jump ahead from the year 2262 to 2263. This is the timeframe roughly just before the start of the 5-year-mission of James T. Kirk, though now this chronology seems to have reverted to an earlier 1990s conjecture of when Kirk’s mission truly began; for a long time it was 2264, and then, more recently, it was 2265. When pressed for the exact dating, showrunners Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers say that this future is set slightly before the start of The Original Series as we know it, and certainly before “Where No Man Has Gone Before.” And, if we’re all still feeling fuzzy on that, not to worry, because that very clear bridge between the SNW and TOS will be laid out next year in Season 5.
But, as Goldsman and Myers reveal, “Tomorrow’s Enterprise” was almost the finale for the series. “We wrote the ‘goodbye’ episode,” Akiva Goldsman tells Inverse. “We got to change it to the ‘see you later’ episode.” Spoilers ahead.
‘Tomorrow’s Enterprise” is brimming with classic Trek Easter Eggs
Scotty (Martin Quinn) and Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding) looking very retro in “Tomorrow’s Enterprise.”
In addition to quick mentions of Gary Mitchell, Bones, and the fact that Joseph M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun) is hanging out on the planet Vulcan (which checks out with TOS canon), visually, “Tomorrow’s Enterprise” is a love letter to classic Trek in other ways. Uhura’s (Celia Rose Gooding) uniform, hairstyle, and earrings are straight from TOS; Scotty’s (Martin Quinn) hairstyle is much closer to what James Doohan rocked in the classic series, and even Ethan Peck plays Spock with a bit more cool detachment.
Uhura and Scotty’s budding romance is a reference to their relationship in The Final Frontier, and in several scenes, we see background characters from The Animated Series, including one bird-like Aurelian, as well as M’Ress, the Catian (cat-like) officer from The Animated Series, who, essentially, served as Uhura’s relief when it came to all things communications. (This also slyly asserts that M’Ress was always on the Enterprise prior to TAS; we just didn’t see her.)
But if all of these Easter eggs seemed like something that would normally be reserved for a series finale, not a season finale, that was nearly the case.
How “Tomorrow’s Enterprise” almost became the show’s swan song
Captain Kirk (Paul Wesley) in Strange New Worlds Season 4.
As the showrunners tell Inverse, while breaking the various episodes for Season 4, it was still unclear if Season 5 was going to happen, and so, in the writing stage, “Tomorrow’s Enterprise” was conceived as a series finale.
“When we first broke this, we thought this was potentially the finale,” Henry Alonso Myers tells Inverse. “We wanted to find an ending that both talked about the present and talked about the future and spoke to the kind of show that we knew it was going to head towards.”
This isn’t to say that what was filmed still had that ethos, because as Myers explains, while “in the middle of working on this” the Season 5 deal happened, and so “we made a few little adjustments here and there throughout the episode because we wanted to hold onto some stuff.”
Goldsman also hints that the battle for the upcoming six-episode Season 5 wasn’t exactly a slam dunk.
“Henry and I fought very hard and negotiated very hard, and CBS was amazingly cooperative and collaborative,” Goldsman says of Season 5. “We went back and forth. And they said a two-hour movie. And we were like, no it’s not enough. Because either you’re just saying goodbye or you’re just lowing sh*t up. And one way or another, it’s not going to be satisfying.”
Either way, because “Tomorrow’s Enterprise” introduces a tone and aesthetic closer to The Original Series, it’s a good bet that Season 5 will look a lot like this. The future of Star Trek’s past starts right here.
