Rebecca Romijn (Una) and Babs Olusanmokun (Dr. M’Benga) in "Strange New Worlds" season 4 (This week's chapter, titled "A Case of Chiaroscuro", airs on Aug. 13 and takes another bold swing, featuring a wartime film noir-style tale with tense galactic politics at its core.We connected with three of "Strange New Worlds'" brightest stars — Anson Mount (Captain Christopher Pike), Rebecca Romijn (Lt. Cmdr Una Chin-Riley), and Carol Kane (Commander Pelia) — to hear about this penultimate season's boundary-pushing vision delivered by executive producers Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers, and learn more about that Muppet episode called “Level-Five Transporter Accident” that's coming later this month on Aug. 20. A scene from "Strange New Worlds"' season 4, "The Griffin Incident" ( "I think the producers had more time to prepare for season 4, and every episode felt incredible on the page. Every episode felt like a really fun challenge. We just had a blast."The writers think so outside the box, and I can't believe they come up with the things they come up with," continues Romijn. "Every time a writer asks, 'What haven’t you done that you’d like to do?' I can't even think as outside the box as our writers. I leave it up to them."Mount echoes those sentiments and finds the sci-fi series to be fully engaged."It just feels like the bolts were tight," Mount adds. "We've built this incredible machine and we were able to take bigger leaps and have more fun. Even curve balls that came in season 1 and season 2. I grew tired of going to Akiva and Henry and saying, 'Are you sure about this?' And then those ended up being the episodes that really pop. So I stopped asking questions and trusted them. Also, I think the sense of consequence was heightened at the same time." Carol Kane as Commander Pelia in "Strange New Worlds" season 4 ("I feel like as we went on people were more and more willing to take risks at every level, from the writing to the acting to the cinematography to the directing and the wardrobe," Kane notes. "It was like, what the hell. Let's roll them dice. I feel that was a wonderful freedom."As fans eagerly anticipate the Muppet episode (they won’t be disappointed!), the trio all admitted that the Pelia puppet with its wild tangle of blonde hair was the one most of the cast wanted to take home with them.Sadly, none of the actors were allowed to actually keep their Muppets, though if folks saw the price tag on those puppets they’d quickly understand why."We were already working on another episode," Mount explains when the surreal time arrived to record their particular puppets' dialogue. "It was really wild going into the recording booth and trying to do an interpretation of someone else’s interpretation of your character.""Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" season 4 is now streaming on Paramount+. Jeff Spry is an award-winning screenwriter and veteran freelance journalist covering TV, movies, video games, books, and comics. His work has appeared at SYFY Wire, Inverse, Collider, Bleeding Cool and elsewhere. Jeff lives in beautiful Bend, Oregon amid the ponderosa pines, classic muscle cars, a crypt of collector horror comics, and two loyal English Setters.
For 60 years, Star Trek has explored strange new worlds, sought out new life and new civilizations, and has boldly gone where no sci-fi franchise has gone before. (It's a sentimental journey into the final frontier that chronicles the popular space opera property from its infancy as "Star Trek: The Original Series" in 1966, through 14 Hollywood feature films and numerous small screen iterations like "The Next Generation," "Deep Space Nine," "Voyager," "Enterprise," "Discovery," "Picard," "Strange New Worlds," "Below Decks," "Prodigy," and even "Starfleet Academy.""We are all explorers, driven to know what's over the horizon," declares Scott Bakula's Captain Archer from Enterprise in this misty celebratory mission down memory lane. "Star Trek" first appeared on the NBC Network on September 8, 1966. ( The cast and creators offered up an extended peek at the new season and teased the fifth and final season being released in 2027.An impressive roster of "Star Trek" luminaries made appearances to discuss Gene Roddenberry's hopeful vision of the future and the franchise's enduring legacy, including Eugene "Rod" Roddenberry, Michael Dorn, Robert Picardo, Connor Trinneer, Cirroc Lofton, Doug Jones, Michelle Hurd, Jerry O'Connell, Christina Chong, Karim Diané, and George Takei."For 60 years, 'Star Trek' has carried us beyond galaxies out of reach, to the very core of what it means to be human," "Discovery's" Sonequa Martin-Green states in the tribute's narration. "It began with a bold idea that the future could be united."Stay tuned for more "Star Trek" 60th anniversary news and events this September! Jeff Spry is an award-winning screenwriter and veteran freelance journalist covering TV, movies, video games, books, and comics. His work has appeared at SYFY Wire, Inverse, Collider, Bleeding Cool and elsewhere. Jeff lives in beautiful Bend, Oregon amid the ponderosa pines, classic muscle cars, a crypt of collector horror comics, and two loyal English Setters.
The gritty production design of "Planet of the Apes" in a slice from the official poster (Invading the hallowed grounds of director Franklin Schaffner’s 1968 original "Planet of the Apes" was risky business at best, but 20th Century Fox rolled the dice with their long-gestating $100 million remake and a competent cast that included Mark “Markie Mark” Wahlberg, Tim Roth, Helena Bonham Carter, Michael Clarke Duncan, Paul Giamatti, David Warner, and the lovely Lisa Marie.The studio no doubt hoped a modern makeover of one of the most respected science fiction films ever would reignite interest in the franchise and spawn a bunch of sequels similar to what Schaffner’s Charlton Heston-starring classic did. Tim Burton's "Planet of the Apes" swung into theaters on July 27, 2001. ( That ended any lofty dreams of triumphantly resurrecting Ape mania for another decade, until director Matt Reeves rebooted everything once more in 2011 with "Rise of the Planet of the Apes."Treading upon sacred cinematic territory was a brash move, one even considered by filmmakers like Peter Jackson, Oliver Stone, Chris Columbus, and James Cameron at one point.But Tim Burton was anything but timid, and he prematurely plunged into his "Planet of the Apes" project with unbridled enthusiasm. The aftermath was a strange mix of superficial camp and chaotic action that doesn’t really add up to anything of interest, and it remains a curious addition to Burton’s incredible 40-year filmography.So, let’s peel back the polarizing "Planet of the Apes" to find some of the sweet and sour!Rick Baker's Fantastic Makeup Tim Roth as General Thade battles Mark Wahlberg's lost astronaut Leo Davidson. ( Well, except for Helena Bonham Carter’s Ari chimp character, which often looks like something out of Dr. Seuss's Whoville with her pronounced muzzle and rodent-like appearance (An apt comparison since Baker also did the special makeup effects for "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" the previous year).That aside, Baker’s practical magic on the movie is fantastic and one of the production’s finest achievements. The man who created the makeup for "King Kong," "An American Werewolf in London," "Michael Jackson’s Thriller," "Harry and the Hendersons," "Men in Black," and "The Wolfman" designed some of the best simian masks ever seen on screen.Baker’s earlier work on films like "Gorillas in the Mist" and "Mighty Joe Young" made him a natural for the job, and he truly shined here. Charlton Heston even made a cameo appearance as Zaius, a character from the 1968 original.The Baffling Time-Tripping Plot The crumbling remains of an ancient derelict spacecraft in "Planet of the Apes" (It’s a soulless retelling of the 1968 version that relies on a few bad one-liners and uninspired performances by a cadre of fine performers, relegated to delivering flat dialogue and clunky exposition amid some cheap-looking soundstage sets.A miscast Wahlberg plays Captain Leo Davidson, an astronaut scientist marooned on the planet Ashlar where apes are the masters and humans their inferior slaves.He follows
(Not only does this week mark the 50th anniversary of Viking 1 touching down on the surface of the red planet, new research from University of Oxford scientists recently suggested that Mars once had an active, interconnected system of magma beneath its surface. If accurate, this discovery might have made our Solar System next-door neighbor more habitable in its distant past.While life on Mars has long been an obsession of sci-fi creators — from HG Wells' "War of the Worlds" to "Doom" via John Carter and John Carpenter — "Star Trek"'s Martians have tended to be human expats. Indeed, by the 24th century of "The Next Generation", "Deep Space Nine" and "Voyager", it's home to the Utopia Planitia Fleet Yards that would later be destroyed by rogue synths ahead of "Star Trek: Picard"'s debut season.SPOILERS AHEAD! ANYONE YET TO WATCH "VALLES MARINERIS" SHOULD PROCEED WITH CAUTION TO AVOID VIOLATING TEMPORAL PRIME DIRECTIVES.Homegrown Martians had traditionally been in shorter supply, however, until "Valles Marineris" paid them a visit. The only catch? Captain Pike and his USS Enterprise crew have to travel a mere 65 million years back in time to say hi.There's something undeniably delicious (though not, luckily, the crew) about Una Chin-Riley (Rebecca Romijn), La'an Noonien-Singh (Christina Chong) and Erica Ortegas (Melissa Navia) getting to visit the real Jurassic Park (technically Cretaceous Park) on an away mission to recover the iridium they need to repair an Enterprise stricken by its accidental trip through a quantum entangled spatial anomaly. ( It also, according to star Rebecca Romijn, features an actual puppet from the original "Jurassic Park", and gives La'an that rare opportunity to punch a dinosaur in the face. That's definitely one to tell the grandkids — assuming, of course, you can avoid stepping on a bug, unleashing a butterfly effect, and preventing them (and the entire human race, for that matter) from ever being born.But it's no coincidence that Pike has a copy of Edgar Rice Burroughs' "A Princess of Mars" on his bookshelf, because it's what happens in orbit that makes this episode such a pulpy sci-fi joy.Although Battle Commander Cassell (Saffron Burrows) and her crew have the familiar, human-esque appearance of most "Star Trek" aliens, Martian evolution has got them there millions of years before Vulcans, Klingons, and the rest become top dogs in the galaxy. (Spock notes that Martian DNA is present in many modern-day species, though it's unclear how their family tree aligns with the "Progenitor" origin story of "TNG"'s "The Chase".) ( Science purists will note that this strange new world is not the famously gaseous Jupiter, but an extra, science textbook-rewriting ball of rock located roughly where the Asteroid Belt is now.Unfortunately, once Cassell has sneaked a peek at a future where her "homeworld is a barren red wasteland", she's in no mood to listen to Federation lectures about finding diplomatic solutions. She subsequently steals some of the Enterprise's antimatter and fashions a makeshift weapon of mass destruction to eliminate the Dol'Drm once and for all. But the shockwaves of this cataclysmic blast will stretch far beyond the fifth planet.Spock confirms that many of the fragments left behind by the obliteration of the Dol'Drm homeworld will form the Asteroid Belt, essentially a riff on the so-called "Disruption Hypothesis" of the belt's origins. (
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