Star Trek is one of the peaks of Paramount‘s mountain of properties. Just look at the dazzling visuals in the first trailer for season 4 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, full of cutting-edge CGI and incredible costumes. The trailer promises high tension as it heads toward its fifth and final season, including more exploration, the resolution of Captain Pike’s arc, and, of course, more bonding between future shipmates/slash fiction originators, Kirk and Spock.
Yet, for old school Trek fans, the most incongruous moments in the trailer invoke the most nostalgia. Shots of a T-Rex bearing down on the crew, a dragon breathing fire onto the Enterprise‘s saucer section, and La’an in a sword fight with a couple of Game of Thrones types. These genre-blending scenes recall a time when Star Trek was broke, and Gene Roddenberry had to make whole episodes by borrowing sets and costumes from other shows.
As most pop culture aficionados know, Star Trek came into being in part, of course, because TV executives were compelled by Roddenberry’s pitch (“Wagon Train to the stars”), because Lucille Ball advocated for the show, and because Roddenberry course-corrected after the network passed on his first pilot. Yet, for all the Original Series had going for it, the show had a minuscule budget, especially for a series intended to take viewers into unexplored parts of the galaxy.
To make ends meet, Roddenberry and his co-creators would send the Enterprise to planets that looked a lot like Earth at various points in history, or resembled aspects of Earth’s mythologies. Thus, we get “A Piece of the Action,” in which Kirk and Spock deal with 1930s gangsters, the haunted house adventure “Catspaw,” or the confrontation with Greek gods in “Who Mourns for Adonis?”.
The Next Generation had a moderately more stable budget, but it carried on the tradition with its holodeck episodes. When Picard became hard-boiled PI Dixon Hill or Data became Sherlock Holmes, the show paid homage to the TOS genre-busters. Later ’90s series continued the tradition, with Doctor Bashir channeling 007 on Deep Space Nine and Voyager‘s Janeway creating her own bodice ripper in an idyllic Irish town.
As a prequel to TOS, Strange New Worlds doesn’t have a holodeck to play with (outside the uneven self-parody/murder mystery “A Space Adventure Hour” from last season). Yet, they’ve found ways to play with other genres, most obviously in the delightful fantasy episode from season one, “The Elysian Kingdom.”
The genre-mashup is just one of the many nods to classic Trek in the season 4 trailer, which not only has cheeky winks toward Kirk and Spock’s relationships, but also has Andorians, an SOS that turns out to be a trap (Kobayashi Maru?), and… is that Scotty and Uhura kissing, a la Star Trek V?
It remains to be seen if all of those things will come to fruition before Kirk starts his five-year mission as Captain. But at least we’ll know Strange New Worlds will be making its new lives and new civilizations the old school way, big budget be damned.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season four premieres on Paramount Plus on July 23, 2026.
