Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Season 4 Finale Was Almost the Show’s Last Episode

Oct 01, 2026 - 22:20

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Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Season 4 Finale Was Almost the Show’s Last Episode

Published Oct 1, 2026, 2:00 PM EDT

Willa Rowe is a contributing writer at Polygon, covering games and entertainment. She is a New York-based journalist and critic whose work has been featured in Kotaku, Digital Trends, the A.V. Club, GamesRadar+, and more. She also co-hosts the Girl Mode podcast.

'Tomorrow's Enterprise' would have been a fitting end

Last week marked the conclusion of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 4. The finale, "Tomorrow's Enterprise," was a touching story that crossed time and felt like a love letter to the entire sci-fi franchise on the occasion of its 60th anniversary. If you didn't know better, you might think the episode felt like a goodbye. Turns out, it almost was.

Talking to Space, Strange New Worlds' showrunner Akiva Goldsman revealed that "Tomorrow's Enterprise" was "almost the episode to end the show with" as it was written before the team knew whether it would be renewed for a fifth season. Goldsman explained that the crew "built a thing that was going to serve as a potential season finale," before re-engineering it once they got the good news that season 4 wouldn't be the end.

The episode itself is a deserved showcase of Celia Rose Gooding, who has been stellar as Uhura since the show's start. Due to time-travel shenanigans — a likely occurrence in Starfleet — Uhura meets a future version of herself. This allows for the series to do a lot of retrospection. It simultaneously lets audiences look back at the series' roots, as the future Uhura is from roughly the time of the original series, while giving Strange New Worlds' Uhura an opportunity to look into her future, something we know about, but she does not. It is understandable that this was almost the show's end, but let's be thankful it isn't.

What we know about Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 5

In 2025, Paramount+ announced that Strange New Worlds would recieve a fifth and final season. The downside is that season 5 will be truncated and contain only six episodes, as opposed to the typical 10 episodes in previous seasons. Goldsman, co-showrunner Henry Alonso Myers, and series co-creator Alex Kurtzman said that they were "deeply grateful to Paramount+ for the chance to complete our five-season mission, just as we envisioned it, alongside our extraordinary cast and crew."

While we don't have hard details on season 5, we do know that it will finally deliver on the initial promise of Strange New Worlds. By the Season 5 finale, the show will have the characters in the same positions we saw at the start of the original series. That will be a full circle moment for fans and the show, and we only just got a taste of what it will be like, thanks to "Tomorrow's Enterprise."