In comparing the two Big Bads, he adds, “The Gorn are very flesh and blood. They’re the brick-and-mortar version of a villain. The Vezda are very, very cthulhu, they’re very the world behind the world. They’re very much a personification of a kind of almost non-anthropomorphic darkness, and that’s another kind of evil.”

Anson Mount’s Capt. Pike tasks Christina Chong’s La’an to run the nascent program through the wringer to see how it holds up. La’an, who loves a 1960s murder mystery series featuring an investigator named Amelia Moon, has Martin Quinn’s Scotty upload those stories into the holodeck’s programming, which then creates a new mystery for her to solve.