Strange New Worlds Season 3 Scene Used More Visual Effects Than You Realized [Exclusive]

Security alert! This article contains spoilers for “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” season 3, episode 9.

“Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” has taken some big swings in its first three seasons, delivering both a musical episode and a crossover episode with the animated “Star Trek: Lower Decks.” Bringing these wild ideas to life takes the work of numerous talented costumers, set designers, prop makers, and visual effects artists working in tandem, but some sequences have a lot more going on than you might expect. In season 3, episode 9, “Terrarium,” Lieutenant Erica Ortegas (Melissa Navia) ends up stranded on a seemingly deserted alien space rock with a Gorn pilot who crash-landed there and is forced to cooperate with her greatest enemy. The planet’s surface is buffeted by severe wind storms and Ortegas ends up sheltering with the wounded Gorn, even helping tend to its wounds. 

In order to bring the Gorn to life and really sell the harsh environment of the planet, the visual effects teams on “Strange New Worlds” combined cutting-edge digital effects like ARwall, which projects video as the surrounding backgrounds for the sets, with puppeteering and costume work for the Gorn itself. These days the best effects work is often a mixture of traditional and digital effects, and “Terrarium” is a showcase for how “Strange New Worlds” does it best. I recently had the opportunity to chat with Navia via Zoom and she revealed that while the combination of effects all worked out beautifully, some of the practical effects were a little tricky to deal with on set.

Navia pointed out that “sometimes people think [shooting with ARwall is] all screens, but there’s so many physical elements to it.” She explained that stuntman Warren Scherer actually played the Gorn, which was a heavy suit with an animatronic head. Though they could only shoot with him in the suit for short periods and sometimes Navia had to act and react opposite stand-ins for the Gorn suit, she said it was helpful for her performance, explaining: 

“I thought that was going to be really difficult, to act opposite the Gorn, because it’s a lot of puppetry, it’s a lot of special effects. I mean, it looks incredible. But when I was opposite him, it was just so wonderful because it was this giant beast, but what they’ve done with the eyes, with the emotions, with everything, it was like I was acting opposite one of my crew members.”

The Gorn have previously been brought to life on “Strange New Worlds” using puppetry, but the details on this rig are really impressive, and the puppetry does help make the character feel more alive than a fully digital version might. With the ARwall projecting the expansive, terrifying asteroid background and having quite a bit of the physical set there to interact with definitely helped her performance as well, but there was one practical effects aspect that Navia had a tough time with: the fans used to create the nearly-constant dust storms. 

Navia said that they used giant fans to simulate the storms on the dusty surface, and she was “so angry at the fans all the time because they were constantly running, except for when Ortegas is speaking to the Metron.” It’s ironic because so much of her performance is in quiet moments with the Gorn, and the one time she really yells it’s at the Metron (Darius Zadeh) and the fans are silent because the storm has stopped. It got bad enough that Navia says that they took photos of her yelling at the actual fans, as a joke, but thankfully she managed a great performance despite the noisy fake wind. “That was the toughest part, was the acting opposite nothing at times, and then also surrounded by giant fans where you can’t hear yourself,” she said. “And if you can’t hear yourself, you also can’t hear yourself think, which was a new experience for me.”

While the episode was a bit difficult to film because of the effects, the payoff is tremendous. “Star Trek” has used amazing effects to help tell incredible science fiction stories since the original series’ inception, and “Terrarium” is a phenomenal example of storytelling and effects working in tandem to give a fan-favorite character a serious character arc payoff. 

“Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” is available to stream on Paramount+.