[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 3 Episodes 1 “Hegemony Part II” and 2 “Wedding Bell Blues.”]

The good news: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is just as fun as ever. There’s a reason it’s the most entertaining Paramount+ Trek series, and the beginning of Season 3 continues to show that.

The bad news: Over the course of the first two episodes, Spock (Ethan Peck) and Chapel (Jess Bush) part ways when she goes off on her fellowship, then she returns with a new boyfriend Korby (Cillian O’Sullivan), the landing party escapes and is rescued from the Gorn — resolving the Season 2 finale — but Ortegas (Melissa Navia) is seriously injured and beginning to show the effects of her trauma, and Pike (Anson Mount) is facing losing Batel (Melanie Scrofano) due to the Gorn infection.

Below, stars Jess Bush, Melissa Navia, Celia Rose Gooding, and Martin Quinn and executive producers Henry Alonso Myers and Akiva Goldsman break down the first two episodes and tease what’s ahead.

The Spock-Chapel-Korby love triangle

Before Chapel leaves the Enterprise, she tells Spock not to wait for her. But when she returns, he’s eager to see her, with a gift, only for her to beam aboard with Korby.

“We’re bad people?” Goldsman says with a laugh when TV Insider asks why. Adds Myers, “It would be boring to wait for them to come back if you were like, ‘And that’s it.’”

They added in the complication of Korby because “we’re always in the business of keeping things alive in situ and also trying to figure out where we’re going,” explains Goldsman. “We have this box, this very delightful box that we live in, and we kind of know the walls of it. Most certainly, we know the endpoint for us, so we know that there’s a frustrated romantic relationship somewhere in Chapel’s mind when it comes to Chapel and Spock in The Original Series. I’m sure when people found that we were having those two characters get together in our show, they felt it would lead directly to that, so of course we wanted to subvert that expectation and make it not lead directly to that, and so off we went.”

Bush jokes that Chapel returning with Korby is “ruthless.” But as for what her character had thought the time away would mean for them and if she’s really moved on from Spock, “I don’t think she knows,” she admits. “I think that Chapel’s freedom of movement is very important to her, and when she leaves to the fellowship, she’s prioritizing. She doesn’t want to compromise her dreams and her ambitions for a relationship at that point in time, but that doesn’t mean that she doesn’t love Spock. I think that it just feels very important to her to not compromise in that moment.”

Thanks to the introduction of Trelane (Rhys Darby), who grants a wish of Spock’s, the half-Vulcan and Chapel do have a wedding (but no one says “I do”). Korby, then Spock are the only ones aware of the manipulation at time of the ceremony.

“To Chapel, it’s just a beautiful wedding day,” Bush says. “And honestly, it was one of the strangest days at work I’ve ever had to, when I turned the corner to start walking down the aisle and I don’t know how many people, it was like 100 people, all turned to look at me and all my crew mates are there and Spock is standing at the altar and I’m like, ‘This feels real.’ It’s so beautifully produced. I’m not married at this point in my life, so it was strange. It was like, this is my first experience of getting married, and it’s like a room full of aliens and beautiful cakes, and it was really strange to feel the realness of my own wedding in that set of circumstances in this crazy gown. And it was a super surreal moment to feel that.”

Ortegas’ trauma

All Ortegas wanted was to go on a mission, but when she finally does, it goes horribly wrong, and she’s among those taken by the Gorn at the end of the Season 2 finale. She, La’an (Christina Chong), M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun), and Sam (Dan Jeannotte) fight their way off the Gorn ship, but in the process, Ortegas is seriously injured. The end of Episode 2 begins showing the aftermath of that, with Ortegas leaving the party following the non-wedding, going to work out with a heavy punching bag, and seeing a Gorn in the mirror.

That is “just a manifestation of her trauma, but I also think it’s a reflection of places that she will go to deal with, explore, and confront this season in a big way,” teases Myers.

Navia was excited for fans to finally get the resolution to that finale cliffhanger “that we’ve waited a decade to resolve,” she jokes, before turning to her character’s arc this season. “It’s one of those times we haven’t seen before on screen where she doesn’t come out on top, and it doesn’t all work itself out, and she sees that she is human and that she did almost not make it. And so she’s struggling with what that means and what’s haunting her. I love that we got to see a different side of Ortegas. I got to play different layers that I just didn’t have the opportunity to do within the storylines of Seasons 1 and 2. She definitely goes on a ride. And is she going to want to never go on an away mission again? We shall see. Or is that exactly what she needs? I’ll leave that there.”

Pike’s struggle with Batel’s Gorn infection

In the Season 2 finale, Batel was infected by the Gorn, which previously was fatal. However, thanks to Una’s (Rebecca Romijn) Illyrian blood and Chapel and Spock working together to figure out how to make Batel’s body reabsorb the Gorn embryos, she’s still alive. And this comes as Pike and Batel continue to navigate their relationship, with him admitting that he hopes she doesn’t find her ship so soon, but doesn’t know what he means exactly. He’s also grappling with the fact that he knows his own deadly future.

“He’s struggling” with what he wants their future to look like, says Goldsman. “He’s trying to figure it out. ‘I know I’m going to die. Does that mean I can’t love?’ Well, we’re all going to die actually, so that’s pretty poor reasoning, but I understand. And also, she’s in trouble, so it’s a complicated, hopefully quite grown-up relationship that they have to sort through. Then everything will go haywire in the back half of the season.”

Romance for Uhura?

Ortegas may not like it, but there certainly seem to be sparks between Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding) and Ortegas’ brother Beto (Mynor Luken). The first two seasons really focused on showing how Uhura excels at the job. Is this season turning to her figuring out her personal life?

“There are many turns in the back half of this season. It’s interesting. The more we talk about it, the more fascinated I am by the prospect of what it’s like to watch the first half of the season,” Goldsman tells us. “It’s a little bit fool’s gold because things don’t go as expected, but we did certainly want — more than anyone, Uhura is growing up. She’s the kid on the block, and so starting to delve into a romantic relationship when God knows everybody else on the ship seems to be doing it was something we wanted to explore.”

Marni Grossman / Paramount+

Adds Gooding, “I think in the first two seasons, we established Uhura as this incredibly brainy, very inquisitive, very curious person, intellect-wise. And I think something that the fans really appreciated about Uhura in TOS was her ability to be this incredibly strong and capable officer while also this incredible talent, this excited, very liberated, playful individual. And so to now, in Season 3, get an opportunity to weave a little bit more of that into her sort of character quilt, it’s a really wonderful opportunity. I think fans are going to see a side of herself that is incredibly recognizable, but is a bit of a relief after all that she’s been through in the first two seasons. She has had great losses, and I think it’s going to be really nice to see her sort of gain some things and be treated and sought after in the way that she deserves.”

Scotty’s losses and adjusting to the Enterprise

Strange New Worlds introduced Scotty (Martin Quinn) in the Season 2 finale (he was heard in another timeline in Season 1), with the Enterprise crew running into him while rescuing Batel and her from the Gorn after he’d lost his previous shipmates. But with life aboard the Enterprise one adventure after another, as we continue to see with these first two episodes of Season 3, does he have much time to process his losses while also finding his footing in his new situation?

“No one on our show has any time to do this,” Myers points out, “so they have to learn to do it kind of together. A lot of what we talk about is more that as you go on a space adventure, and by space adventure, I mean quotes around your life, you still have to deal with all the other elements of your life. And that’s part of what we really try to display with Scotty, which was that he’s someone who — there’s a lot from his past that we don’t necessarily know about. We’ve set up some things, and it’s stuff that he’s going to have to deal with before he becomes the person that we come to know on the Enterprise. He is not that person yet. He has a journey to go on, and we really want to see it on screen, and he’s one of those rare characters who gets to be both extremely funny and also really dramatic, and it’s something that we really absolutely wanted to show as much as we could on screen.”

According to Quinn, his character is “keeping himself busy and not thinking about it, building up a new community, building up confidence, but then when things do go wrong …  I think that he’s backed down to remembering the Stardiver and what happened there. And I don’t want to give too much away, but yeah, I think that comes up a couple of times. He kind of has moved on with his life, and then everything goes wrong and back to square one.”

Una moving forward

At the beginning of the series, Una was hiding the fact that she’s Illyrian, but that truth came out at the end of Season 1, leading to her being arrested and a subsequent trial, and ever since then and with her learning about her future in the Lower Decks crossover, it seems like she’s more comfortable with who she is. That will continue, but Myers cautions, “We’re not just going to see her be happy because that would be boring television. We’re going to see her step up into her role as she moves towards her goal of becoming a captain on ship. As we see her move in that direction, things are challenging and more complicated than she imagined.”

What did you think of the first two episodes of Season 3? Let us know in the comments section below.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Thursdays, Paramount+