Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Showrunner Confirms Whether The Vezda Will Return [Exclusive]

This article contains spoilers for "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" season 3, episode 4, "Through the Lens of Time."

The latest episode of "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds," called "Through the Lens of Time," sees the discovery of an impossibly ancient temple located underneath a mountain. Although its age is mind-boggling, the technology embedded in the temple still works. In order to gain access through its nostril-like entryway, Nurse Chapel (Jess Bush) has to insert her hand into a blood-extracting device. Ancient temples, ineffable technologies, and blood offerings all give "Through the Lens of Time" a Lovecraftian feeling. 

Inside, the crew find a series of small glowing glass orbs that contain something they can't identify. One of the orbs ends up bursting open, sending shards of glass — and a mysterious energy of some kind — flying into the eyeballs of Ensign Gamble (Chris Myers). Ensign Gamble's eyeballs are destroyed, but something even more horrifying happens to him once he's back up on the Enterprise: He begins to read people's thoughts, and cackle at their unhappy memories. Ensign Gamble is possessed by some sort of demonic force. He is possessed by an entity referred to as a Vezda Lifeform. 

The Vezda are the first "villain" species that is unique to "Strange New Worlds," and they're rather scary. They're like the pah-wraiths from "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine," but not nearly as silly. "Through the Lens of Time" is their introduction ... and, as /Film recently learned, it won't be their final appearance. 

/Film's own Jacob Hall recently sat down with the showrunners of "Strange New Worlds," Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers, to talk about the third season of the series, and what we might expect from anything coming in the near future. Goldsman has confirmed that the Vezda will indeed come back very shortly. 

Goldsman pointed out that "Strange New Worlds" can't do too much dramatic stretching on the show, as it will eventually have to sync up with the events of the original "Star Trek." "Strange New Worlds" is set on the U.S.S. Enterprise a few years before the original Gene Roddeberry series, and concerns the fate of familiar legacy characters like Spock (Ethan Peck), Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding), Scotty (Martin Quinn), and even the young James T. Kirk (Paul Wesley). None of those characters can be killed, nor can the Enterprise be destroyed. The Vezda can be a threat, but not so existential a threat that they would still be part of the conversation in about five years. 

That said, Goldsman says that, yes, the Vezda will provide a unique, new threat to the crew, and that their introduction was just that: an introduction. In his words: 

"There's a future for the Vezda in, certainly, this season. [...] I'm not sure we're looking to establish Big Bads for canon, per se, because part of our job is to work towards TOS. So it would be kind of tricky to create a Big Bad that was out there, that you suddenly stopped hearing about a couple of years from now (in terms of story continuity). But the Vezda were, as you've intuited, an attempt to do something pretty scary. There's a sort of Cthulhu thing going on here. And what lives in the world — behind the world — was enticing to us." 

Cthulhu, of course, is one of the destructive, ineffable elder gods from H.P. Lovecraft's destructive theogony. 

Goldsman then added, however, "They won't be here forever, but they are now." So judging by his comment, it seems the Vezda will indeed return in the back half of the third season of "Strange New Worlds" (at the very least), but that they will be contained, defeated, or removed from the "Star Trek" universe in some way. This means Trekkies get to look forward to a clever, and hopefully unexpected, solution.

/Film also asked about how calculating Myers and Goldsman allowed themselves to be when creating the Vezda. Were they meant to be a new, recurring villain, perhaps designed — from a creative standpoint — to be compared to great "Star Trek" monsters like the Borg, the salt vampire, or Species 8472? Myers responded by saying that, yes, he and Goldsman were aware of previous Trek villains, but merely sought to make them stand apart. They needed to have a unique modus operandi or, Myers knew, viewers would merely compare them to something from before: 

"We spend a little time talking about: what is a surprise? We spend a little time talking about: what does this villain show us about the world that is different from other villains we've seen before? Because if every villain is out for the same thing, it gets kind of boring. The hardest thing — which is challenging — is it needs to reveal something about humanity, in its own way. How does it change how we look at things? So that's a lot of what we spend time talking about." 

He also admitted that a big point of contention about the Vezda was how cool they could be. "What can we see them do," he asked himself, "that would be very different?" He said modern Trekkies are a sophisticated lot, and he, along with the other "Strange New Worlds" writers, need to keep them on their toes. He continued:

"I imagine when they came up with the Gorn, that was probably the most amazing, different thing that they could think of. So our thing is because we are making 'Star Trek' for the current era, I think we have an audience who is a bit more difficult to impress. So how can we impress them?" 

The effort is certainly appreciated.

"Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" season 3 is currently airing on Paramount+.