Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4's Revised Opening Credits Tease Some Truly Wild Planets

Jan Thijs / Paramount+

The trailers for "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" Season 4 teased lots of, well, strange new worlds, and Season 4 itself wastes little time before delivering on that promise.

Per usual, Season 4's opening credits sequence shows the USS Enterprise firing up its engines and trekking to unusual places. Certain elements of these credits are familiar (like the stellar clouds, binary star systems, and pulsing quasars), but the Enterprise also appears to visit a heretofore unseen casino city that looks a lot like modern Las Vegas, complete with garish neon signage. Elsewhere, all the color is drained out as the ship passes by a newfound Art Deco-style planet straight out of Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" (complete with a zeppelin!).

On top of that, the Enterprise is shown soaring over a lake towards a mysterious tower at one point. The whole thing looks like something out of the Liam Neeson-starring sci-fi flop "Krull." There's even a Gorn ship in the mix, suggesting that Season 4 will have the show's favorite killer alien species getting up to their customary mayhem.

Other sights include the Enterprise visiting an outsize space station that's been outfitted with rich, verdant biomes held under massive glass domes (with additional Starfleet ships join it). The station itself bears a resemblance to Earthship Ark, i.e. the central biome-encrusted vessel from the obscure Harlan "I hate Hollywood" Ellison-created 1970s TV series "The Starlost."

After the opening credits, the "Strange New Worlds" Season 4 premiere continues to fulfill its obligations by paying a brief, tantalizing visit to some sort of Old West planet where Captain Pike (Anson Mount), Dr. M'Benga (Babs Olusanmokun), and La'An Noonien-Singh (Christina Chong) ride around on horseback wearing Stetson hats. It seems this season is shaping up to be quite the "pulp novel" season.

Jan Thijs/Paramount+

Judging by the opening credits sequences for the previous three seasons of "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds," many of the strange new worlds in the opening credits for Season 4 won't actually appear in the show itself. Rather, this montage is probably more of a tone-setter teasing the adventures the Enterprise will go on for the next 10 episodes. Luckily, "Strange New Worlds" is an episodic program, allowing for a greater deal of visual variety and wilder types of stories than could be fit into a larger, arc-forward series.

So, it remains to be seen if there's an episode where the Enterprise goes to a black-and-white world with zeppelins and Art Deco towers like in "Metropolis." At the very least, though, we know that it did at some point in its five-year mission thanks to Season 4's opening credits, regardless of whether we actually get to see this or not. Indeed, I like the idea that the Enterprise goes on more missions than we, the audience, get to witness first-hand. It makes the "Star Trek" universe seem that much broader and more exciting. Plus, the planets featured in the opening credits can now serve as fodder for expanded universe novels and comic books instead. This opening sequence isn't necessarily meant to be a preview of things to come, it's a means to inflame the imagination.

"Strange New Worlds" will end after its fifth and final season, so there will still be plenty of new locations to come after Season 4 as well. Who knows what we might see next. An undersea world? A haunted house planet? One where everyone is Canadian? Anything is possible, eh?