Star Trek: Strange New Worlds star Anson Mount says that he's seen the first three episodes of the new Star Trek series and is very satisfied with them.
"I don’t like to see it until it’s all put together and [my wife and I] have seen the first three so far," Mount explained during an Instagram Live event. "And I’m really happy with it. Very, very happy with it. We’re going to watch episode four tonight, and I have been hearing amazing things. The network, fellow directors, everybody has been saying episode four is really special. So, I’m looking forward to seeing that."
Mount did a season-long arc on Star Trek: Discovery as the U.S.S. Enterprise's pre-Kirk captain, Christopher Pike. The popularity of the performances of Mount as Pike, Ethan Peck as Spock, and Rebecca Romijn as Number One led to the announcement of a Star Trek spinoff for these characters set on the Enterprise before Kirk took command of the ship.
Strange New Worlds is expected to focus on individual episodic stories rather than season-long arcs. Co-showrunner Akiva Goldsman explained that the one exception to that would be that the characters would have arcs, unlike the original series. "It's not like Jim Kirk will see Edith Keeler die one week and be fine the next week," Goldsman explained. "...Our characters will carry with them what they suffer from, or what they learned, from episode to episode."
Goldsman recently confirmed that the announced character from the upcoming series, La'an Noonien Singh (Christina Chong), is indeed related to the infamous Trek villain Kahn Noonien Singh. "We don't want to bring folks into the show to be splashy," he said. "We want to dig deeply into characters that are part of our ensemble and then, obviously, we're open to getting our arms … but right now, what you see is what you get."
Goldsman also admitted to tweaking the design of the Enterprise from its appearance in Discovery to make it closer to that of the original series. "Yeah, I would say we iterated one more time," Goldsman said. "I think that the organizing principle for our iteration was our view of canon. But having said that, we body English the shit out of some things in order to make it work."
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds begins streaming on Paramount+ on May 5.