[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 3 Episode 5 “Through the Lens of Time.”]
The Gorn may be off the board — for now, at least, as Star Trek: Strange New Worlds executive producer Henry Alonso Myers is quick to note, “The Gorn aren’t out of the way, you’re going to see them again” — but there’s already a new Big Bad.
In the latest episode, a landing party of Chapel (Jess Bush), La’an (Christina Chong), Spock (Ethan Peck), Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding), Beto (Mynor Luken), and Ensign Gamble join Korby (Cillian O’Sullivan) on a planet only to end up in what they, only later, realize is a layered dimensional prison — and one of the prisoners injures and infects Gamble (destroying his eyes). Held inside is an evil, known as the Vezda, and it does eventually leave Gamble’s body (he’s already dead) after Pelia (Carol Kane) shoots it. Scotty (Martin Quinn) then encloses it in a capsule and beams it away to nowhere.
But at the end of the episode, while M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun) mourns the death of Gamble, since they had grown close while the latter worked for the former during Chapel’s fellowship — “There’s more to that story,” promises executive producer Akiva Goldsman — the text on the screen about the Vezda briefly changed to a different language. The executive producers confirm to TV Insider that the Vezda is the new Big Bad.
“We have to go through the same thing that we do with every Star Trek villain, which is we have to evolve them over time and learn more about them. So we wanted to once again find something that seemed evil. We like evil in our show because we believe that evil exists,” Goldsman explains. “We needed to find something that we could make both terrifying, but also something that wouldn’t suddenly vanish out of the blue when we got to TOS. So that’s sort of this game that we’re always playing. So certainly in this season, the Vezda shall return.”
In comparing the two Big Bads, he adds, “The Gorn are very flesh and blood. They’re the brick-and-mortar version of a villain. The Vezda are very, very cthulhu, they’re very the world behind the world. They’re very much a personification of a kind of almost non-anthropomorphic darkness, and that’s another kind of evil.”
The Gorn have certainly left their lasting effects on the crew, however. Captain Pike (Anson Mount) is dealing with his girlfriend, Batel (Melanie Scrofano), still recovering from being infected and the subsequent treatment (which involved the Gorn), and we see a new side of that in this episode when she faces off with the infected Gamble. Both Goldsman and Myers say that you should be very worried about her.
Myers then recalls what happened with Hemmer (Bruce Horak) in Season 1 when he died as a result of an encounter with the Gorn. “It’s a tragedy, and it’s an incredibly emotional experience for them to go through. And it was all building up to this moment where we saw Batel at the very end of last season infected by the Gorn and how is she going to get out of it? They couldn’t help Hemmer,” he says. “And so part of the goal was she survives at a great cost, and the cost is what we wanted to explore because it affects both the ship and it affects, more importantly I think, their relationship because it’s really about how is the relationship between her and Pike told in story.”
What do you think of the Vezda? What do you think is going on with Batel? Let us know in the comments section below.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Thursdays, Paramount+