Key Points
Showrunners Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers speak with EW after the big Star Trek Universe Comic-Con panel.
“Easily more than six months of work” went into the making of season 4’s puppet episode, Myers says.
Myers also says he had informal conversations with a producer pal who worked on the Angel puppet episode for tips.
With San Diego Comic-Con came news from the Trek sphere that Star Trek: Strange New Worlds will be turning their main cast into puppets for a season 4 episode. Fans also got a first look at Puppet Pike, a.k.a. Anson Mount’s Captain Pike in puppet form.
Showrunners Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers shared more details with Entertainment Weekly in a post-panel interview. “I wanna say there was easily more than six months of work on it,” Myers reveals.
“Alongside all the other prep meetings for every episode, there was always a separate puppet meeting,” Goldsman adds.
Photograph by Jonny Marlow
Paul Wesley, Christina Chong, Ethan Peck, Rebecca Romijn, and Jess Bush for EW’s Comic-Con photo shoot
The duo began having conversations about puppets around the making of season 3, which is currently dropping weekly episodes on Paramount+. “I was familiar with how to do some of this stuff,” Myers says. “In production, we’d have long conversations with our director in mind, specifically about how to handle puppets…. We had to have a lot of conversations about making puppets. We had to have a lot of conversations about how to handle our crew, because we also have to have a whole crew of puppeteers. It’s just like doing a very different type of episode, and it requires a lot of time and care to do it.”
He also had conversations with Jeffrey Bell, his friend in the biz who worked on Buffy the Vampire Slayer spinoff Angel as a writer, director, and producer. Angel‘s 14th episode of season 5, “Smile Time,” similarly involved puppets. “I had just socially a bunch of conversations with him about how they did it,” Myers recalls. “That turned out to be not just a silly conversation but a very useful conversation.”
What was it like seeing the crew in puppet form for the first time? “You cannot believe the Chrissy puppet. There are no words,” Goldsman says, referring to Christina Chong (La’an), who spoke with EW separately with some of her castmates at Comic-Con. “Insane” is the word Chong uses to describe reading that episode for the first time.
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“Pure joy,” Jess Bush (Chapel) adds.
“It’s an amazing script,” Rebecca Romijn (No. 1) comments.
“There’s so many things that are hard and challenging about this,” Myers says, “but then you’d go and look at the puppets and everything was okay.”
New episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 3 continue to roll out on Paramount+ every Thursday.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
