Warning: SPOILERS for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 1 Finale - "A Quality of Mercy"
In TOS episode, "Balance of Terror." Pike's attempt to change his own future ends disastrously but one of the highlights of the finale was seeing Spock and Uhura's Strange New Worlds actors playing their characters in the TOS era.
Strange New Worlds features multiple Star Trek legacy characters but because it's a prequel set almost a decade before TOS, Ethan Peck and Celia Rose Gooding are allowed considerable leeway to reinterpret Spock and Uhura's younger selves. Even more allowance is granted to Babs Olusanmokun's Dr. M'Benga and Jess Bush's Nurse Christine Chapel, who are practically top-to-bottom reinventions of those TOS ing players. But Strange New Worlds has to be more careful with Spock and Uhura because both characters are so iconic and they appear throughout TOS as well as all six original Star Trek movies. Strange New Worlds has done fantastic work exploring Spock's romance with T'Pring (Gia Sandhu) and his burgeoning love triangle with Nurse Chapel. Perhaps even more impressive is how Strange New Worlds filled in Uhura's previously unrevealed backstory and gave her a mentor figure in the late Chief Engineer Hemmer (Bruce Horak).
Ethan Peck and Celia Rose Gooding were called upon to portray Spock and Uhura in Strange New Worlds' finale as the exact same characters Leonard Nimoy and Nichelle Nichols played in TOS and they ed the test with flying colors. Peck's emulation of Nimoy was spot-on while still balancing his own interpretation of the Vulcan. Without doing an outright impression of Nimoy, Peck quoted the same dialogue as Spock that Leonard spoke in "Balance of Terror" that conveyed Spock perfectly - including his famous raised eyebrow. It was easy to believe Peck embodied Nimoy's Spock because the feat was so seamless. It was the same with Gooding as Lt. Uhura. Although Gooding's Uhura lacked Nichols' famed beehive hairstyle, she also ideally embodied the older Communications Officer. While Gooding had less to do in Strange New Worlds' finale, this was also fitting because Uhura was a background player in "Balance of Terror."
Strange New Worlds Proves Recasting Legacy Characters Works
Ever since J.J. Abrams rebooted Star Trek in 2009, the franchise has had considerable success recasting legacy characters. Abrams' Star Trek movies proved that new actors could step into the iconic roles and embody them persuasively while still adding new facets and nuances. Anson Mount's Captain Pike is possibly the most successful example of Star Trek recasting a legacy character. Mount was an instant hit as Pike when he ed Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. While other properties have met with issues recasting their legacy characters or resort to CGI and deepfakes to keep their icons the way they were decades ago, Star Trek is the model for how to recast legacy characters properly.
Strange New Worlds also featured one of the new Star Trek series' biggest recastings of a legacy character ever when Paul Wesley ed the finale as Captain James T. Kirk. Wesley's version of Kirk wasn't quite the same as the Captain William Shatner portrayed in TOS but Strange New Worlds' finale came with a built-in rationale: this version of Jim Kirk lived a different life where he didn't become Captain of the Enterprise, hence he behaved differently from the Kirk we expected. Time will tell if Paul Wesley's young Kirk will hew closer to Shatner's when he returns in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 2 but Ethan Peck and Celia Rose Gooding's Spock and Uhura are the prime examples to follow.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 premieres in 2023 on Paramount+.