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Strange New Worlds S4 teaser strikes a more serious tone

“I have ever been prone to seek adventure and to investigate where wiser men would have left well enough alone.”

Jennifer Ouellette – | 34
Enterprise crew members on an alien planet hunched down and surveying the terrain
Credit: Paramount+
Credit: Paramount+
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Paramount+ unveiled a new teaser for the upcoming fourth season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds at CCXP in Mexico City over the weekend.

(Some spoilers for prior seasons below.)

The third season of Strange New Worlds was admittedly a bit uneven, with serious plot lines mixed in with some downright silly ones that divided fans.  Arguably the most significant moment was bidding farewell to Melanie Scrofano’s Marie Batel, Pike’s (Anson Mount) love interest. Her parting gift to Pike: an illusory alternate life where she and Pike got to grow old together. So expect Pike to be dealing with her loss in the upcoming season, among other challenges.

A four-and-a-half minute clip from the S4 was unveiled last October at New York Comic-Con. It was an extended sequence in which Pike and his crew responded to a distress signal from another ship, only to encounter a massive space storm that knocked out almost all their systems. They decided to take a shuttle to a nearby planet to gather some much-needed iridium to power their warp drive. We also know there will be a puppet episode, and if the new teaser is any indication, there will be a Wild West-like setting and even dinosaurs, because why not? On the whole however, the new teaser seems to confirm a return to a more serious Trekkie tone.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds premieres on July 23, 2026, on Paramount+. The series will have a truncated fifth and final season of six episodes (which has already completed production). While it’s possible a few crew members might not survive the series finale—we hear La’An (Christina Chong) say the “any mission could be our last”—we will see the introduction of Leonard “Bones” McCoy (Thomas Jane) and Hikaru Sulu (Kai Murakami) in S5. That pretty much brings the show in line with The Original Series in the Star Trek chronology.

With the cancellation of Starfleet Academy after its second season airs next year, that should bring the current crop of streaming shows in the franchise to an end. The producers had pitched another series, Star Trek: Year One, focused on Kirk’s first year as Enterprise captain, but that looks unlikely in light of recent news that the SNW‘s Enterprise sets have been dismantled.

 

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Jennifer Ouellette Senior Writer
Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban.
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