Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, which just finished production, debuted a teaser for the fourth season of the series at the San Diego Comic-Con 2025. In it, Captain Christopher Pike sits atop the captain’s chair of the Enterprise, and as the chair swivels around to face the camera, we see that the character has been turned into a puppet.
Executive producer Akiva Goldsman had this to say, “There might have been an unexpected and terrible transporter accident. Which might have had some unexpected felt-like effects.”
Though surprising, this reveal is not exactly unexpected either, given that Goldsman had teased the puppet episode previously in a 2024 Variety cover story, when asked whether there was any genre that the show would not touch, “As long as we’re in storytelling that is cogent and sure-handed, I’m not sure there is. Could it do Muppets? Sure. Could it do black and white, silent, slapstick? Maybe!”.
The puppets were fabricated by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop specifically for the episode. Though it is seemingly out of this world to have the show’s characters replaced by puppet avatars, it keeps with Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ approach of treating each episode as a chance to explore a unique genre, including horror, costume fantasy, screwball comedy, musical and even a crossover episode that saw a collaboration with the animated series Star Trek: Lower Decks.
Further underscoring the show’s novel approach to genre-hopping, the following episode of Strange New Worlds, a period murder mystery titled A Space Adventure Hour, was broadcast to completion for the Comic-Con audience.
As the show enters its fourth season, fans are undoubtedly wary that the show is rapidly coming to an end, ahead of its fifth and final season. Interestingly, none of the newer Star Trek entries have ever lasted longer than five seasons, which may perhaps have to do with Captain Kirk’s declaration of a five-year mission since the franchise’s early days, so at least fans can be content knowing that the show is going out on its own terms, maintaining its stellar quality.
Conversation with Ting Wei is like chatting with a weird AI bot programmed only with One Piece lore and theories, sitcom quotes and other miscellaneous pop culture references. When he’s not sleeping, he’s highly likely reading manga. In fact, the only thing he reads more than manga is the Bible, and it’s honestly pretty close.
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