Strange New Worlds: season 3 – Boldly genre-hopping where no Trek has gone before (trailer).

Brace your warp cores, rehydrate your tribbles, and try not to get emotionally attached to any redshirts—Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is returning for its much-anticipated third season in 2025, and from the looks of the just-dropped trailer, it’s doubling down on the glorious chaos that made season two such an unexpected delight.

For the uninitiated (who presumably haven’t been assimilated by now), Strange New Worlds is the love letter to classic Trek fans we never thought CBS would have the nerve to write. It follows Captain Christopher Pike (Anson Mount’s glorious hair and the rest of him) at the helm of the Enterprise, alongside the emotionally repressed Spock (Ethan Peck, still figuring out feelings and facial expressions) and the perpetually underappreciated Number One (Rebecca Romijn, wielding gravitas and eyebrow raises in equal measure).

Season 3 promises more of what this series does best: actual episodic storytelling in a franchise that often forgets it doesn’t always have to be saving all of reality every single week. Showrunners Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers are keeping with their inspired “one-episode, one-genre” structure, so expect more sci-fi madlibs: gothic horror on a moonbase, musical holodeck malfunctions, courtroom dramas, body swaps, Spock in a rom-com, Pike in a western, and if we’re lucky, Nurse Chapel goes full John Wick again.

The trailer teases tantalising glimpses—a phaser duel under red alert lighting, Spock playing what might be a Vulcan lute and grappling with the burden of logic (standard Thursday for him), and Number One giving a stirring monologue while casually piloting the ship through an exploding nebula. Oh, and is that Klingon opera being sung in slow-motion over a montage of Pike looking haunted while stirring a space omelette? Probably. We’re here for all of it.

Following season two’s finale cliffhanger—with a Gorn-sized standoff and Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding) transmitting Morse code like her life depended on it—season 3 seems poised to dig deeper into the evolving crew dynamics. After all, we’ve now had a few years to fall in love with Christina Chong’s La’an Noonien-Singh and her simmering internal monologue of doom, and Babs Olusanmokun’s Dr. M’Benga, who continues to be the most competent man in Starfleet while dealing with some serious combat PTSD and a medical bay that appears to be held together with chewing gum and honour.

Martin Quinn returns as the new Scotty, fresh from his surprise appearance in the season two finale, and judging by early whispers, it looks like he’ll be sliding into the role of the cheeky miracle worker with the same mix of charm and “please don’t touch that, it’s about to explode.” Meanwhile, Ensign Ortegas (Melissa Navia) is still the undisputed queen of helm sass and deserves her own spinoff where she just glares at malfunctioning systems until they behave.

While official plot details remain tightly under wraps—Starfleet secrecy, and all that—we do know that directors like Jonathan Frakes (who could direct Trek in his sleep at this point, but never phones it in) are back behind the camera, and episode titles remain classified, as if we wouldn’t watch it regardless. Given the trajectory of the show so far, we can expect a season filled with deep character arcs, legacy nods to The Original Series, and the sort of high-concept sci-fi premises that make you question the fabric of time and space—or at least your viewing schedule.

And yes, before you ask: Jeffrey Combs hasn’t yet been spotted playing a smug alien bureaucrat, but we can dream.

Here at SFcrowsnest, we’re thrilled to see Strange New Worlds getting the long mission it deserves. After years of moody, continuity-burdened Trek (no shade, Discovery, but maybe a little shade), this show is a breath of fresh warp plasma—mixing optimism, adventure, and enough phaser fire to keep us all oddly stunned.