Star Trek: Strange New Worlds star Anson Mount on episodic storytelling: “the big idea of the week needs room to breathe”

(L-R) Ethan Peck as Spock, Anson Mount as Christopher Pike, and Rebecca Romijn as Number One in Star Trek: Discovery, soon in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

APRIL 22, 2021 - Speaking with Collider in an interview published this week, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds actor Anson Mount shared his thoughts on the episodic format planned for the upcoming series.

“I think that Star Trek is, by nature, episodic,” Mount said, echoing comments made last year by Strange New Worlds Executive Producers Akiva Goldsman and Alex Kurtzman. Mount went on to suggest that the franchise wasn’t limited to that format, adding, “Star Trek can be a lot of things, as we've seen in every iteration of it. But classic Trek is really founded on the big idea of the week, and the big idea of the week needs room to breathe.”

Part of that “room to breathe” could mean not letting the show get too tied up in serialized structure. But that doesn’t mean that Strange New Worlds won’t have a cohesive storyline. Kurtzman said last year that the series will have “more stand-alone episodes. There will be emotional serialization. There will be two-parters. There will be larger plot arcs, but it really is back to the model of ‘alien of the week’.”

In his Collider interview, Mount explained further why episodic is better for his new series, even if he personally prefers to work on serialized. He said, “In serialized structure, you’re trying to take care of so many relationships that there doesn’t tend to be a lot of room for [the big idea of the week...] Normally, serialized is my taste, as an actor, but [Strange New Worlds] really felt like it needed to be episodic.”

While it’s likely to be a while before we see Star Trek: Strange New Worlds on our screens, what with three other series already expected to come out in 2021, you can get yourself ready for its eventual debut, by catching up with both The Original Series and Star Trek: Discovery season two, now streaming on Paramount+.