Star Trek Strange New Worlds Season 3 Just Quietly Upgraded a Character with a TOS Twist

Season 3 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds won’t arrive until sometime in 2025, but at NYCC 2024, fans were treated to a surprise clip from the first episode of the new season. And, interestingly, this moment kind of spoiled the cliffhanger from season 2. At the end of season 2, Captain Pike (Anson Mount) was left in the impossible position of leaving behind crewmembers who had been captured by the Gorn, while being told by Starfleet to pull out of the area.

The new NYCC clip shows what Pike does next, and in revealing these opening moments of SNW season 3, the series doubled down on something that happened in the last season premiere. Watch the clip below:

The clip also teases how the show is continuing to slowly elevate one Enterprise crew member in terms of her importance and screen time. This person isn’t considered a regular cast member, but serious fans know who she is. We’re talking about Jenna Mitchell, played by Rong Fu, who plays a pivotal role in saving the day in Strange New Worlds, even though she’s not a “main” character. Curiously, the name “Mitchell” should also sound familiar to Original Series fans.

Mitchell Takes the Initiative—Again

The overall point of the new SNW season 3 clip is to show that the Enterprise crew is frantic for solutions as the Gorn are closing in. This is a classic Captain Pike command-style decision, asking everyone for input before making a dangerous call. The Next Generation fans will find this frantic technobabble spitball session familiar, and there are even aspects of it that are reminiscent of the TNG classic “Cause and Effect.” But, what’s interesting here is that Jenna Mitchell (Fu)—who is at the ops/navigation station, next to Number One (Rebecca Romijn) at the helm—is the one who comes up with the answer. The Enterprise has to tag the Gorn ship, but they need to disguise the tracker as something else. So, Mitchell suggests using a dud photon torpedo, an attack that is really a way of tagging the Gorn ship.

This gambit works, and the Enterprise lives to fight another day, plus, it now has a way to track their missing comrades. We don’t know what happens next, but interestingly, this scene wouldn’t have worked without Mitchell’s quick thinking. And this isn’t the first time this character has been pivotal in Strange New Worlds.

In the season 2 premiere, “The Broken Circle,” Mitchell is part of a very small inner circle of officers—including Uhura, Chapel, and M’Benga—who all conspire with Spock to steal the Enterprise. It was Mitchell who faked the coolant leak that allowed the Enterprise to have a legitimate reason to leave spacedock. In another episode later that season, she’s the one helping Spock try to make Klingon coffee, raktajino. Mitchell was also transformed into a Crimson Guard character during the storybook effect in season 1’s  “The Elysian Kingdom.”

The point is, in many of the big episodes of SNW, Mitchell has been right there, even though she’s not a main character. But maybe she lowkey is a main character?

The SNW Mitchell Continues a Star Trek Tradition 

Although we think of Sulu, Uhura, Chekov, and Scotty as main cast members of The Original Series, the truth is, from a cast point-of-view, they were guest stars. In her memoir Beyond Uhura, Nichelle Nichols referred to their status as “day players.” Eventually, these characters came to be thought of as the most important regular characters on the series, but that certainly isn’t the case throughout every single TOS episode. Obviously, this is a lot like Mitchell in SNW now. She’s not billed at the top of the cast in our universe, but in-universe, she’s clearly an essential part of Pike’s crew. In a way, Mitchell is a bit like Chief O’Brien on The Next Generation, not part of the main cast, but had been on the ship since the very first episode, in “Encounter at Farpoint.”

To put it another way, Mitchell is the latest example of an interesting Star Trek tradition: Continuing to feature a secondary “background character” and continuing to give that person important jobs to do on the ship, which creates a veneer of realism. Not every single crew member can be on duty 24/7, which means the relief officers, like Mitchell, would be on the bridge all the time. TNG was pretty good about this too, often rotating out helm and ops officers for a degree of realism. But, with her latest quick-thinking, you have to wonder if Mitchell isn’t suddenly going to be promoted to a full-time cast member by season 4.

Where No Mitchell Has Gone Before

Finally, although this is almost certainly a coincidence, the fact that Mitchell shares the same last name with Gary Mitchell (Gary Lockwood), from the second TOS pilot episode is… fascinating. In “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” Gary Mitchell sits at the exact same bridge position that Jenna Mitchell is occupying now. This is a little like the fact that Pike had a crew member named Tyler (Peter Duryea) in “The Cage,” and then worked with a different Tyler (Shazad Latif) in Discovery season 2. 

If this were Star Wars, we could say the duplicate Mitchells and duplicate Tylers are like poetry, they rhyme. But, perhaps with Strange New Worlds, Jenna Mitchell is a better version of Gary Mitchell. In “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” Gary Mitchell is mutated into a space god and tries to murder everyone. We’re fairly certain this isn’t going to happen to Jenna Mitchell. Because if there’s one Mitchell who will go down in Starfleet history as an unsung hero, it’s our current resident Mitchell in Strange New Worlds. Here’s hoping somebody gives her a promotion before the end of season 3.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 3 will hit Paramount+ sometime in 2025.