Paramount has confirmed that the final episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds will see two legends board the starship Enterprise: the Star Trek prequel has found stars to play Hikaru Sulu and Doctor Leonard “Bones” McCoy.
Today the studio confirmed (via Variety) that Kai Murakami and Thomas Jane will appear in the final episode of Strange New Worlds‘ truncated fifth season as Sulu and Bones, respectively. While Jane is well known for a bevy of projects, such as The Mist, The Expanse, Deep Blue Sea, and the 2004 Punisher movie, Murakami will make his TV debut as Sulu, having previously focused on stage work with the Royal Shakespeare Company and video game mocap work on Rise of the Ronin and Assassin’s Creed.
Strange New Worlds is already no stranger, of course, to slowly introducing members of the classic Star Trek crew as it details the transition from Captain Pike’s command of the Enterprise to James Kirk’s famous five-year mission. The show debuted with both Spock and Uhura as members of Pike’s senior bridge crew, played by Ethan Peck and Celia Rose Gooding, respectively, and quickly brought in Paul Wesley as the young Lieutenant Kirk serving aboard the USS Farragut as a guest star, making appearances here and there over the first three seasons. The climax of season two also brought on Martin Quinn as a young Montgomery Scott.
We did, however, know that more were coming—we just didn’t know we’d be waiting until the very last episode of the series to get them. “[The studio] gave us the opportunity to get up to TOS,” co-showrunner Akiva Goldsman previously said of bringing in most, but not all, of the legacy Trek cast to the show in an interview with Polygon. “We’ve got to reach TOS to fulfill the promise to the fans, which was, ‘What happens to all these people? How do they start to become those characters we know, and what happens to the ones we don’t see in canon?’”
So maybe don’t expect to see Yeoman Rand anytime soon—although there are still 16 episodes of Strange New Worlds to surprise us—but by the show’s end, the entire main bridge crew of the Enterprise will firmly be in place to boldly go.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is expected to return for its fourth season sometime in 2026.
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