Spoilers: Why did Star Trek: Strange New Worlds kill off *THAT* character?

This article contains the spoilers for Season 1 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

If you’re reading this, you either don’t care about spoilers or have already watched the season to completion. So with that said, let’s take a look at why the producers decided to kill off one new, and fan-favorite character on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

The co-showrunner of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Henry Alonso Myers, did an interview with Cinemablend where they talked about pushing the level of comfortability with the decisions they make. One of those was the decision to kill off a fan favorite character.

That of course would be Chief Engineer Hemmer. Fans loved Hemmer and his grumpy ways, so when was killed off rather unexpectedly, fans were put off and even angry. This despite the fact the man who played Hemmer, Bruce Horak, approved of the decision and will be brought back in a new role.

Yet, when Myers talked about the decision to kill off Hemmer, it was not one made lightly, saying;

"You don’t want to look back at your season and say, ‘Phew, we didn’t take any risks, thank God!’ You want to look back and be like, ‘Boy, I hope these risks paid off,’ because I know as a viewer I love it when they take risks. I love it when [shows] try different things. Hemmer’s death is a heartbreak, but, my God, it’s one of the best scenes we did all season. It’s a beautiful scene…it just makes me cry. The way that Bruce performs it, Celia performs it…and Melissa and Celia’s speech at the funeral it’s a really moving scene, and it does wonders for the Uhura character."

Killing off Hemmer was the right move for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

Killing off a beloved character is never an easy decision. In some instances, it fortifies the tone of the show and makes people wonder “what’s going to happen next”. Characters like Captain Pike and Nurse Chapel are safe, thanks to future-plot armor, but everyone else not established in Star Trek: The Original Series isn’t.

That means that every new character, or every character we don’t see on the series, could get 86’ed before this series is over. Even a character like Una Chin-Riley, aka Number One, could get axed before the end of the series, as we know she was only alive during the events of The Cage/The Menagerie, which featured the original cast of the Enterprise. Since we know she was alive then, but we don’t really know when “then” is in this Strange New Worlds timeline, it’s very possible we could see characters like Una killed off at some point.

That’s what the death of Hemmer gave to the show, the realization that if they don’t have a future on TOS, then they may not have long at all.

So killing off Hemmer was the right call.