Strange New Worlds has started writing Ortegas out, and Sulu is already cast to replace her
Some faces you’ve met in 'Strange New Worlds' never beam into 'The Original Series' — and the Paramount+ sequel is finally explaining why, but not how you might think.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is seriously closing in on the era of The Original Series now, and it feels like the showrunners are all too aware they’re running out of runway for some rather big continuity questions. With Season 5 already confirmed to be the final chapter—set to wrap in 2027—they finally look like they’re setting the stage for those main characters who, let’s be honest, very conspicuously never show up on Kirk’s bridge later.
Strange New Worlds will conclude its run with Season 5, ending in 2027.
Original Series Disappearances
In case you’ve lost track, the two big names still aboard the Enterprise who are nowhere to be seen when The Original Series kicks off in the ‘60s are Lt. Erica Ortegas (Melissa Navia) and Lt. La'An Noonien-Singh (Christina Chong). True, there’s also the matter of Commander Una Chin-Riley (Rebecca Romijn), but at least she did appear (briefly) in the original run, so her absence doesn’t cause a total canon meltdown. For La'An and Ortegas, though, there’s a ticking clock for the writers to explain their eventual vanishing act before credits roll for good.
Right now, La'An’s storyline about her Augment background is clearly building towards some kind of exit, but honestly, your guess is as good as mine as to whether she’ll jump ship, get reassigned, or simply slip off quietly into the Starfleet bureaucracy. It’s Ortegas, though, who had an especially telling turn this week.
Soap Opera Shout-Out (and Space Madness)
Episode 7, "Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass", went for a full soap opera pastiche—plenty of melodrama and, rather amusingly, some truly dodgy fake science. The crew suffer from a made-up illness called "space madness," which is classic daytime TV nonsense: symptoms just vague enough to mean whatever the plot needs. In this case, it’s a hand tremor brought on by the usual suspects—stress, self-doubt, trauma. For Dr. M'Benga (Babs Olusanmokun), it’s indecision about his own future on the ship; for Ortegas, the aftermath of that nightmarish run-in with the Gorn, which she says kicked off her symptoms: the shakes started after she made it off the Gorn ship last year.
In true soap style, she’s been keeping this hidden—worried, quite sensibly, that it might get her grounded from the helm. But with Trelane’s magical interference (played with typical energy by Rhys Darby), all these inner struggles get dragged into the open, complete with melodramatic confessions. It’s all very tongue-in-cheek, but there’s an undercurrent of real character setup here: the suggestion that Ortegas’s difficulties could become permanent, and ultimately, this is probably the writers’ cleanest way out for her character before The Original Series rolls around. Not to mention, the same bit of psychological hand-waving could explain why M'Benga turns up with much less responsibility—different actor and everything—by the time Kirk shows up.
The Hand-Off to Canon
The ship’s real-world history looms large over this, because everyone knows that the main spot at the helm is filled by Lt. Hikaru Sulu (George Takei, back in the day) in The Original Series. Within Strange New Worlds, Sulu has yet to make his on-screen mark as he’s technically on another assignment, but you didn’t need to be a betting man to guess he’d be waiting in the wings for his big moment. Originally, I half-suspected they’d let Ortegas quietly fade away off-camera, with Sulu just… appearing after a time skip. But then Paramount officially cast Kai Murakami as Sulu for the actual series finale next year—which is about as explicit as tees get.
Alongside him, Thomas Jane (yes, from The Expanse) is stepping in as Dr. McCoy in the same finale, which means the full, classic Original Series bridge crew will literally be assembled in front of us, presumably so Strange New Worlds can hand over the keys and bow out gracefully. For Ortegas, it’s now all but confirmed that we’ll see her step aside on-screen, likely tied to her struggles with ‘space madness’—if not, it’ll kneecap all the careful setup they've done this season. She gets one last go at the helm, then passes the baton to Sulu while the remaining fans (and continuity obsessives) breathe a sigh of relief.
- Melissa Navia as Lt. Erica Ortegas
- Christina Chong as Lt. La'An Noonien-Singh
- Rebecca Romijn as Commander Una Chin-Riley
- Rhys Darby as Trelane
- Babs Olusanmokun as Dr. M'Benga
- Kai Murakami as Lt. Hikaru Sulu (finale)
- Thomas Jane as Dr. McCoy (finale)