This week, Security Chief La'An Noonien-Singh,
Christina Chong herself,
and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds writer Davy Perez
stop by The Ready Room.
We have Star Trek science consultant Dr. Erin Macdonald
on hand to tell us all about using black holes
to escape enemy ships.
Plus, I've got an exclusive sneak peek at Episode 5.
Transporter room, beam us all directly to The Ready Room
for all this and more.
Hey, nerds. I'm Wil Wheaton and this is The Ready Room,
your official behind-the-scenes hub
for all things Star Trek Universe.
Today we're breaking down Episode 4
of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, our first glimpse
at La'An Noonien-Singh's terrifying past.
And with that, it is definitely time for a...
red alert!
If La'An's past is unfamiliar territory to you
and you don't currently have
some lizard-induced heebie jeebies,
then please, go back and watch Episode 4
titled "Memento Mori," and then come back here
to get all the inside info from Christina Chong herself.
That's right, today the woman who brings to life
one of the surliest security chiefs since Lieutenant Worf,
Christina Chong is here with this episode's writer,
Davy Perez to discuss La'An's unfortunate expertise
in all things Gorn, our first mind meld of the series,
and what it's been like to join the Star Trek family.
Then, Star Trek science consultant-at-large,
Dr. Erin Macdonald will explain the real science
that influenced this week's
out of the galaxy evasive maneuver,
when the Enterprise used a black hole
to trick the pursuing Gorn
into thinking the Enterprise had exploded.
Gravitational redshift, fascinating.
But before we get into any of that,
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds owes a debt of gratitude
to its amazing visual effects.
Everything from a star field out a window
to the landscape of last week's commet to,
well, the Enterprise hiding in the gas of a brown dwarf
requires a ton of work to bring to life.
Follow along as we take a deep dive
into how Star Trek's visual effects artists
take us to strange new worlds each week.
Control room, engage.
So we have an AR wall.
Fundamentally what it does is it brings worlds
real and imagined, strange or otherwise
to the shooting process.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and Star Trek: Discovery
are the two first Star Trek shows to use the AR wall,
or virtual production wall, here in Toronto.
It was definitely a new learning curve
to try and figure out how to incorporate the workflow
into the pre-production side of things.
We needed to know what the sets were going to be
almost six months in advance of shooting them.
It fell to me to produce the designs
of what ultimately would be the joint AR experience.
So I would have to design the physical set,
but then that had to connect and bleed through
in a smooth seamless way into the digital asset.
It's a spectacular process.
What it did was create this new sort of sub-department
of the Art Department,
where we had to develop a logistical plan
and working with the Visual Effects Department
to provide them with the landscape,
or the interior, that we would create in our world.
The concepts that would come out
would just be these fantastical places
that we could never have created before.
This is what's eventually gonna replace
green screen in filmmaking.
It's cool for us because we get to see
what we're working with.
It looks like a holodeck.
I think that's the word I'll use.
It looks very much like a holodeck
and you can just put whatever you want up there
and you are transported
to these incredibly strange new worlds.
We're going to different planets.
And so to have the AR wall as an asset to really stamp us
into the realism, I think it's really cool.
It's this great marriage of practical effects
and digital special effects.
And to have that work done for you is a huge help.
You're generating less imagery in your own mind
so you can focus more on your work
and I think it looks incredible on camera.
Especially from an actor point of view,
it feels like you're almost in the theater.
It feels like it's a stage, it feels real.
It's easier to get into the environment
and feel the environment
and feel that you're actually there as the character.
Strange New Worlds looks bigger
because some of our sets, some of our standing sets
are virtual environment.
Engineering is gigantic
because most of engineering is a projection.
It creates the opportunity to act, not make believe.
And to react in ways that are in real time and together.
It's the Gorn.
In Episode 104, we actually have a run-in
with some Gorn ships that we've never seen before.
So that was in itself an interesting creation,
trying to figure out the flight patterns
as it would interact in sort of a ship battle
with the Enterprise.
Akiva, he has been wanting to do something
with the Gorn for years.
Michael Chabon, my partner on Picard
and the showrunner for Season 1, and I,
we're obsessed with the Gorn.
So the Gorn are monsters. They're not analogs for anything.
That's an interesting view on the universe
and one that I don't think should be discarded.
Some things in this universe are just plain evil.
The truth is, plenty of people have seen the Gorn.
They just don't live long enough to talk about it.
From a producing perspective,
we were looking for a classic villain to reinvent.
The decision that we came to as a writer's room
was to slow play them.
If you use Jaws as a metaphor,
when you don't see something,
it's often even more terrifying
than when you do see something.
The goal was in designing their ships was to design a ship
that doesn't look like a ship that we would understand.
In that episode, in Episode 4, we don't see them,
we see them from afar.
We see their ships, their ships are weird, they're alien,
we don't understand them, they're terrifying.
But very interesting scenes, or creation, with Dan Liu
the director, is kind of interesting.
They actually took a Hunt for Red October approach
where it's almost like a submarine battle.
Henry and Akiva both kind of agreed
that it would be interesting to see it
more like a battle map
and create that sort of inner sub feel
where it's very claustrophobic and very quiet and tight
to really build the suspense.
They wanted us to fire.
They sacrificed an entire ship just to get our location.
Why is that blip so much bigger?
I am now joined by Christina Chong,
who plays Enterprise Security Officer La'An Noonien-Singh
as well as Davy Perez, the writer of this week's episode.
I am so glad you could both be here with me today
in The Ready Room, thank you.
It's a pleasure to be here.
Thank you, Wil, it's lovely to meet you.
Christina, on behalf of Legacy Star Trek,
as one of the old dudes, welcome to the Star Trek Universe.
Thank you for having me.
Tell me about La'An and tell me what you love about her.
I love playing La'An.
It was such a big surprise because I accepted this job
off a few pages of dialogue when you're auditioning.
I had no idea what I was coming into.
And season one has just, you get so much of her backstory,
especially in Episode 4.
But what I love most about her,
I guess is the fact that she's so courageous, so brave.
And even though she's been through so much trauma
in her childhood, she's working to overcome that,
no matter what.
And it's also very cool that I get to do
all the kick ass stuff, she goes on all the missions.
So I get to experience all the different planets.
I get to work with,
I think I get to work with almost every character
and yeah, I love her.
Davy, I suspect a non-zero number of Trekkies,
myself included, lost our collective shit
when we found out that the Gorn were making a reappearance
in the Star Trek Universe.
I just wanna know how the creative team
came to the decision of like, yeah, it's gonna be the Gorn
'cause I have always felt that they're amazing,
they're legendary, but the amount of love for the Gorn
compared to the amount of screen time
the Gorn have received until now
seems a little out of balance to me.
So talk to me about developing them
and why they were the perfect villain for this episode.
Well, the Gorn was something Akiva Goldsman
had in his mind at the beginning,
even when I met to be on the show, he sort of said,
hey, what are some of your favorite episodes?
And "Arena"-- - Of course!
Of course, slow moving Gorn coming after Kirk.
And he said, well, you know, that's one of the big bads
that they wanna explore.
And so I was on board with that concept.
I was fortunate enough to get to write this episode
and I think what made them very interesting
and a unique bad, for this episode in particular,
was because it's La'An's story, it's her history with them.
The Gorn captured my family's colony ship.
I was the only one to survive.
We don't know that much about them
and we actually use that to our advantage.
The unknown is sometimes more scary than what you do know.
They're literally just here to destroy you.
There's nothing. They can't be reasoned with.
They can't be communicated with.
And Christina, we find out a ton about that
through La'An's backstory this week.
We find out about her childhood,
we find out about her brother.
We watch her step up and become a Gorn expert
on the Enterprise.
It's the Gorn, sir. It's them.
This was a trap. The hologram, the colonists as bait.
They waited for us to be vulnerable.
It's what they do first.
Run you down, use up your resources.
Tire us out. Smart tactic.
And deadly.
Emotionally for her, it's a lot that happens this week.
What was it like for you as the actor who plays her
to discover all this context about her character
and did you think at all that you were really adding
to her backstory with all of this
and it's going to inform her moving forward?
Sorry, I'm just-- can I say,
I just didn't realize how Gorn-appropriate I was dressed.
[Davy and Wil laughing] - Amazing.
My question was that we see so much about La'An this week.
We see her relationship with her brother,
we see the childhood trauma that she carries
and I'm just really curious to know
how you feel about her backstory
and what it was like for you as an actor
to discover those parts of her.
I was very excited.
Her whole arc in Season 1 is just amazing
and getting those emotional scenes
as well as the kind of-- after Episodes 1 to 3,
where she's obviously very kind of put together.
And then for being able to really let loose with her trauma.
And I think what I tried to do with La'An
is make that loss personal to me
and my traumas and my childhood stuff
and the things that I've lost in my life
and bring it down to a real core, primal level
and use that energy in La'An
so that hopefully everyone out there who has lost somebody
or has experienced that kind of trauma
can connect to her on that level.
So for me, it was really almost cathartic in a way
to use my stuff and because she is so brave
and she's trying to overcome it, it's almost like therapy,
let's be honest, it's therapy, I'm using it
and overcoming it through La'An.
So I feel like I've been able to play such an array
of emotions with her.
So been very fortunate to play La'An.
Davy, you had something to add to that.
Well, I was gonna say it's interesting
that I got to write a lot of La'An's story this season
because I myself have childhood trauma.
And so in the writing of it,
and in the talking with Chrissy about the character of it,
this was something that we wanted to approach it
as not everyone manifested in the same way.
Everything you see on TV
is a version that we're all aware of,
but what is the real truth of somebody
who's had this thing happen to them at a very young age
and how do they function as an adult?
How do they function when a trigger happens,
and on top of all of that,
now you're face to face with that actual immediate trauma.
So I thought Chrissy did a beautiful job
bringing all of that to life.
And I just wanted to chime in
because it was like a very kismet sort of connection
between the story we wanted to tell
and the person who got to bring it to life.
- Thanks, Davy. We talk a lot
about representation on Star Trek
and how Star Trek really says to everyone
there's a place for you specifically in the future
and just knowing that this episode
sort of specifically says, hey, people with mental illness,
it's gonna be all right,
there's a place for you in the future.
That's really important. None of this is on my card.
So all of this just came up
organically in this conversation and I appreciate it.
Let's move to something a little bit lighter.
I feel watching Strange New Worlds
the way I imagine people felt watching The Original Series.
It's brand new, yet it is familiar to me
and it brings so many wonderful,
familiar storytelling conventions from The Original Series.
Specifically, in this episode,
we are revisiting a storytelling style
that was real prominent in The Original Series.
It came out of the Cold War and a lot of our starship combat
was based on submarine warfare.
And I love going into the brown dwarf
and being around that black hole,
you get the sense that you're in this underwater battle
that's very evocative of "Balance of Terror"
and "The Tholian Web",
a little bit of "The Doomsday Machine",
just that sort of thing.
So are you thinking about that?
Are you like, yeah, man,
this is how they did it back in the day.
A hundred percent.
I mean, you mentioned "Balance of Terror"
and that was one of my favorite episodes
and that was an episode that I think was inspired a lot by,
whether intentionally or not, "The Enemy Below" which--
- Oh, a hundred percent. Right.
I really wanted to bring that and do a classic style episode
and have it be a war style film.
I sort of went with "Run Silent, Run Deep".
- Yeah! Which was this,
they're looking for this thing in an unknown region
and they don't know where it is
and there's a younger officer with an older officer
and they're kind of learning from each other.
So I 100% was watching a bunch of submarine movies.
I can't even tell you in the room,
how many times one of us would just go "one ping", you know?
So we, yeah. [Wil laughing]
All of those films, "Red October",
I was just watching these submarine movies
and then sort of letting that inform
what is the modern Trek version of that.
And a big part of those sequences
are because of the low tech, because it's radar
and because it's you don't know where they are
and that's scary and that's spooky.
I love that you kind of recreated radar for this.
It's like this thing happens when we're in the future
and we have all this great technology
that does all this stuff.
Oh no, how do we put our people in trouble?
How do we pull them away?
And you just did it in this very organic,
just totally appropriate way.
- Thank you. I loved that.
Christina, I've been in Star Trek for 35 years.
I've worked with people who are mega-fans like myself,
I've worked with people
who know nothing about Star Trek at all.
It's this beautiful continuum.
And I know that you live on that continuum as well.
And in this episode, La'An engages in a mind meld.
Now, the mind meld is cool.
When you get to be part of a mind meld, that's a big deal.
A mind meld with Spock is an insanely big deal in Star Trek.
For me as a Star Trek fan,
if I got to do a mind meld with Spock,
I know it's a TV show, I know it's not real.
I'm still just gonna lose my mind.
I just want to know what was that experience like?
So, I-- obviously you know,
by Episode 4 we're kind of in the thick of it.
And I didn't really think,
I mean, 'cause obviously Ethan had to do it to me,
so I wasn't really aware of, or conscious of, researching it
and going, okay, mind meld, what is that?
'Cause I was like, okay, he's gonna do it to me.
He's gonna do something, I'm not sure what it is.
And so I learned about the mind meld through Ethan
and it was only on the day I was like,
oh right, this is a huge thing.
Oh crap, probably should have rehearsed that
and looked it up and realized how big it was.
But it was only afterwards that I realized,
which I kind of think is better as the actor
because La'An has never experienced that before ever.
So it was like I was experiencing it as La'An
for the first time.
Obviously since I've done that,
I've realized how big of a thing it is.
And yeah, and I think, I kind of,
no, I'm glad I didn't research it before
and realized how big of a thing it was, actually.
That is fascinating to me and wonderful,
the experience of "I've never done this before,
this is brand new to me."
It makes me think of a moment I had on Next Generation
where watching it-- I shot it when I was in my teens,
I watched it in my thirties, and I thought, "Wow, buddy.
You really missed that moment.
You blew all of it."
Watching it again recently, I thought, oh my goodness,
this is the first time Wesley's ever experienced this.
It's the first time I experienced it as a person,
the reaction is super normal.
And if it had been what I intellectually thought
it should have been,
it would've been completely wrong for the moment.
Exactly. And I think the same for La'An as well.
Exactly, she had to experience that for the first time.
The audience has seen four episodes
of Strange New Worlds now.
I've had the privilege of seeing most of them.
I am just having an incredibly good time
watching all of your characters develop.
Thank you for your contributions to Star Trek.
We're just at the beginning
and I can't wait to come back at some point in the future
and talk about this again
when y'all have a little bit more Star Trek behind you.
I'm so interested to hear
how your perspectives change over time.
I'm really looking forward to it
and just thank you for this incredible character.
Thank you, no, thank you Wil and thanks Davy
for writing such an amazing episode for La'An.
Oh, you have to say that don't you?
Yes, I do.
No, thank you, you're being sincere. I appreciate it.
Thank you for always being a pleasure to work with, Chrissy.
- Aw. We always thank the writer--
We know if it doesn't start with you,
there's nothing for us to do.
We can't make bad writing good. It's just not possible.
And actors who know that always thank the writers.
- Oh, yeah. I appreciate that.
And I will share the love right back.
I think a lot of-- it becomes really easy to write
for the characters when the actors,
we have such an amazing cast
and when you have conversations with them
and you understand what the roles mean to them
and then you say, oh, I can use that in a story
or I can inform the story that I'm telling
and use some of that in a great way.
Yeah and I love the fact that Davy is so patient with me
when I'm on set.
He will sit there and listen to my pitches
for the next season.
Yeah, yeah.
Chrissy and I have a very fun dynamic when I'm up there.
We have a lot of fun. - Yeah.
Thank you so much, both of you, sincerely for being here.
I'm really looking forward to chatting with you again.
Awesome.
- Thanks, Wil. Thank you for having us.
Even if the technology Star Trek uses
to get our starships to warp
doesn't exist in our real lives yet,
the team behind Star Trek makes an effort
to respect the physical laws of our universe
as much as possible.
Dr. Erin Macdonald has helped us keep our science fiction
grounded in science fact as a technical consultant
on every Star Trek series since Discovery.
Today in The Ready Room,
she gives us some insight into the science
that made the newly named "Pike Maneuver" possible.
Take a look.
Hi, I'm Dr. Erin, astrophysicist and science advisor
for the Star Trek franchise.
Today, we're going to look at some science behind
this week's Strange New Worlds episode "Memento Mori."
In the episode, the Enterprise hides from the pursuing Gorn
inside the clouds of a brown dwarf
that's tethered in the gravity well of a black hole.
First, let's talk about what a brown dwarf actually is.
This has to do with how stars form.
To get a star, we start with a big cloud of gas,
mostly made up of hydrogen.
The hydrogen in this cloud will slowly clump together,
and as it does, it starts to grow in mass,
kind of like a snowball forming.
And you know how when you rub your hands together,
they warm up?
This is due to friction.
And the same thing is happening
in the middle of this big dense cloud of gas.
The particles all start to heat up from friction
and as the cloud keeps getting bigger and bigger,
drawing in more and more particles,
eventually the hydrogen particles in the center
gets so pressed together that they fuse and become helium.
When this happens, it releases energy in the form of light
and this is essentially the birth of a star.
A brown dwarf, however, is a cloud of hydrogen gas
that all clumped together into a dense sphere,
but there wasn't enough gas around for it to get big enough
to cause any fusion to happen.
This just means it doesn't give off any light
and it just floats through space as an almost-star.
But it's still a dense ball of gas,
and like Pike says, it's essentially a gas giant.
Even though it's not dense enough to fuse and become a star,
the center of the brown dwarf
is still incredibly dense and dangerous.
As Spock says, the pressure against the hull
will increase the deeper they go
and the density field will eventually obliterate them.
Bottom line it for me.
The central mass of the brown dwarf
has a density that will crush the entire ship,
surrounding that is a volatile gas cloud.
We will lose sensors, optics, long range communications.
And most importantly, the shields.
We'll be running dark.
- That sounds-- - Perfect.
This brown dwarf they hide in
is gravitationally bound around a black hole.
But what exactly is a black hole?
To understand how black holes work,
we have to learn about gravity wells and escape velocity.
Einstein realized that our universe is essentially a fabric,
a sheet of space and time.
When you have a massive object like a star or a planet,
it dips that fabric down,
kind of like a bowling ball on a trampoline.
And this forms what we call a gravity well.
The more massive an object is,
the steeper and deeper the gravity well,
and the faster you need to be moving to escape it.
As objects start to get more and more massive,
the escape velocity is gonna get greater and greater.
Eventually you'll have an object
where the escape velocity's greater than the speed of light
and that's what we call a black hole.
We can imagine that this system we see of a brown dwarf
and a black hole that they find themselves in
could have formed when a rogue brown dwarf
was making its merry way through our galaxy
and found itself trapped
in the gravity well of a black hole.
It wasn't moving fast enough to escape
and thus, it got stuck in orbit around it.
Now the final escape from the Gorn, or the Pike Maneuver,
takes advantage of a phenomenon
called gravitational redshifting and relativity.
When an object falls into a gravity well,
its emitted light's frequency stretches out,
kind of like a Slinky being pulled.
Additionally, someone watching from the outside
wouldn't necessarily see events happening in real time
as the light emitted is taking a little more time
to reach them.
We're going to slingshot off the black hole
and drop the AP350 as a decoy.
We pull this off, it's officially the "Pike Maneuver."
All of the weird relative effects that are happening
as an object falls into a black hole
gets taken advantage of here by Pike
to make it seem like the ship has been destroyed
and gives them the space and the time to get away.
So, there you have it.
I'm Dr. Erin Macdonald, bringing you all the science facts
behind the science fiction in Star Trek.
We spent a lot of time this week terrifying you
with the Gorn and I cannot imagine terrifying you further
by leaving you in the dark
as to what next week's episode might hold.
Well, luckily for y'all, I've pulled some strings
and I have a clue right here
in the form of an exclusive sneak peak. Take a look!
Spock?
Your ears.
You're human.
T'Pring.
I will not marry a human.
I choose kal-if-fee.
But that's ritual combat.
Who am I supposed to fight?
You will fight...
him.
But fighting myself is illogical.
Y'all, thank you so much
for watching this week's installment of The Ready Room.
Next week, I am joined by Mr. Spock himself, Ethan Peck,
along with Gia Sandhu, who plays his badass fiance T'Pring.
Plus, we wrote the entire cast of Strange New Worlds
into a game more difficult than a round of anbo-jyutsu.
You'll have to watch to find out exactly how it goes.
I promise you it will be worth your time.
Until then, I'm Wil Wheaton.
Live long and prosper.