After waiting for what has felt like an eternity (but was actually only about a month after the teaser trailer dropped), the third season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has finally received a premiere date: July 17, 2025, on Paramount+.
The premiere on July 17 will see the release of two episodes, after which episodes will release weekly through the season finale scheduled for September 11. This will give us a total of 10 episodes, as is standard for Strange New Worlds and Paramount+’s other recent Star Trek series.
In addition to the premiere date and last month's teaser trailer, there have been further teases for the upcoming season. In particular, StarTrek.com reported in its premiere date announcement on Thursday that Season 3 will pick up where Season 2 left off, and we will see “the conclusion of Season 2’s harrowing encounter with the Gorn.” This was expected, but still exciting to hear.
On a similar note, Anson Mount (SNW’s Captain Pike) posted about the pending premiere on Instagram, where he included a caption, playing on the phrase “be there or be square” by saying, “Be there or be a two-dimensional representation of something that, were it three-dimensional, could suggest assimilation within a hive-like scourge sweeping through the galaxy.”
Of course, Mount’s reference here is to the Borg—or more specifically, their iconic cube-like starships—but given the context of Strange New Worlds’ revision of the Gorn, we can see some parallels between the Borg and the Gorn. These parallels are not only technical but also thematic in nature.
While many of the species opposing the Federation in Star Trek are antagonists on geopolitical (galacto-political?) grounds, the Borg have posed a more existential threat. Rather than ideological differences that can be worked out through negotiation, the Borg single-mindedly aim to assimilate Humanity (and all other life forms) into their collective.
In Strange New Worlds, it would be difficult to bring the distinctly 24th Century threat of the Borg to the 23rd Century, so they have created an analog of sorts by reworking a classic TOS alien—namely, the Gorn and their domineering Hegemony.
Of course, the Gorn, as shown in SNW, are different from the Borg in many ways. They are fully organic, for one thing. They also seem more interested in killing and devouring their opponents, rather than assimilating them. Nonetheless, the SNW Gorn have a distinctly Borg-like quality in how their actions seem motivated more by a fundamental drive, rather than an ideological goal.
As with many great Star Trek stories of the past, this sense of mindless destruction from the Gorn offers a window into the concerns and anxieties of our world. In this case, these concerns may range from a persistent sense of chaos to our increasingly complex relationships with our individuality in the face of social media algorithms that make things both more generic and more divisive.
When we left Captain Pike and the Enterprise crew in Season 2, the development of the Gorn was mostly left at them being threatening and scary in an Alien Xenomorph kind of way. The seeds are there, though, and whether he meant to or not, Anson Mounts invocation of the Borg opens a door to consider how the Gorn may function as an allegory for the present.
We will have to wait and see what happens on July 17. Episode titles have yet to be announced, so for now, we just have to work off of what we’ve seen in promotional material. Beyond resolving the Season 2 cliffhanger, though, I’m personally looking forward to the retro TV-style episode revealed in the teaser trailer.