Strange old challenges on “Strange New Worlds”

It’s not easy to inhabit the strange old world of “Star Trek.”
Consider Rebecca Romijn, who plays First Officer Una Chin-Riley in “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” (Thursdays on Paramount+). For this fourth season (shown here, with Uhura at the controls), she was busy learning to speak Klingon.
It was “a challenge I never knew I wanted,” she told the Television Critics Association. “But I really embraced it, because there are at least 20 people in the world who speak Klingon perfectly.”
Or consider Carol Kane, who joined the show in its second season. To play Pelia, a Lanthanite, she concocted an accent. “It just descended out of my mouth one day,” she said. “I really had no idea where it came from.”
Or Anson Mount. Most of the time, his character (Capt. Pike) is the picture of captain-ly calm. Then there are episodes that toy with his persona.
“I really like what I call ‘Oh (crap) episodes,'” he said “It’s where you read the script and you go, ‘Oh (crap), how am I gonna do this?'”
One such moment is in this season’s second episode (July 30). It’s a twisting mental route, with some people playing perverse versions of their characters.
That episode points to one of the show’s charms. “Sometimes, what we’re doing is something they used to do a long time ago,” said Akiva Goldsman, the co-creator and co-showrunner.
Long-ago, TV had anthologies — everything from Disney to “Twilight Zone,” from “Police Story” to “Death Valley Days.” Episodes varied wildly .
That’s clear as the season begins.
The opener (July 23) has full-scale adventure; Romijn leads a landing party onto an unforgiving world. The second is tight and internal;. It’s sort of like a Jules Verne adventure one week and a psychological horror film the next.
Science-fiction has that sort of range, Goldsman said. It makes it possible “to use genre as a way of driving emotional storytelling.”
He has 10 episodes this season and six in the final one, as thisshow’s era moves closer to the original “Star Trek” one.
“Strange New Worlds” already has younger versions of some of those first “Trek” characters — Spock, Uhura, Scotty. Even the future Capt. James T. Kirk is sometime there; for now, he’s a mere lieutenant commander, about to have his mind blown in the second episode.