The Hell on Wheels star reaches for the stars in the new Paramount+ series.
Paramount+ just released a teaser trailer for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, the new Star Trek sci-fi adventure set to launch May 5 with Anson Mount in command of the USS Enterprise. And while we’re certain we’ll be pleased to see one of our favorite actors boldly going wherever his Captain Christopher Pike goes during the years before Captain James T. Kirk was in charge of the Enterprise, we have to admit: What excites us most about this trailer is seeing the Hell on Wheels star on horseback again, however briefly.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds “is billed as a return to the classic planet-of-the-week space exploration format of the 1960s Star Trek. It also stars Rebecca Romijn as Number One and Ethan Peck as Science Officer Spock. The series is a spin-off of Star Trek: Discovery, which introduced these new iterations of Pike, Number One and Spock during its second season.”
When we interviewed Mount last year for our cover story celebrating the tenth anniversary of Hell on Wheels, he noted that series and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds have key elements in common.
“It’s the reason the first four words of every episode in the original Star Trek show are, ‘Space, the final frontier,’” Mount said. “Gene Roddenberry saw Star Trek as the natural extension of the wagon trains going west. And yeah, to him it was a Space Western. Now it turns out he may very well have been wrong, that space may not be the final frontier. After the original series ended, we’ve gained deeper understanding of multidimensionality and the multi-verse theory. But when I think about that, those ideas, I’m not disappointed, dejected, or feel put upon by the idea that there’s even more to be discovered. I am naturally excited, and I think most other people are naturally excited, by that.
“And I think that there’s something deeply human about that feeling, about that emotion, which is at the heart of not only what Roddenberry was trying to capture about our exploratory nature, but also is what drove the wagon trains west. My favorite Gene Roddenberry quote is, ‘Star Trek speaks to some basic human needs — that there is a tomorrow.’ I think that there’s something deeply human in our need to gather around the campfire and hear a story told together — which is why I think movie theaters will never go out of fashion. And it’s equally human about those of us who need to turn around and walk out of the firelight to see what’s out there in the darkness.”
