Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Adds Thomas Jane As Doctor McCoy

Thomas Jane will join Star Trek: Strange New Worlds for its final season, playing everyone’s favourite irascible space medic.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is ending after five seasons, which sucks. But they seem to pulling out all the stops for their final run, which rules. It seems several familiar characters will be joining the space opera in the upcoming season, and the most exciting bit of casting news to emerge is that noted hater of shoes Thomas Jane is taking on the role of Starfleet medical officer Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy.

McCoy, the grumpy foil to both the adventurous Captain Kirk and the coolly logical Mr Spock, was originally played by the late DeForest Kelley, while The Boys star Karl Urban took on the role for the big screen reboot in 2009.

With Ethan Peck’s Spock already in the main cast, and Paul Wesley’s Jim Kirk cropping up from time to time, that means all of the original Star Trek‘s “big three” characters will have appeared in SNW, along with fellow OGs Christine Chapel (Jess Bush), Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding), Scotty (Martin Quinn), and various minor characters.

Jane is no stranger to science fiction, having most notably played dogged detective Josephus Miller in The Expanse, as well as appearing in stuff like sci-fi shark flick Deep Blue Sea, grim AF Stephen King adaptation The Mist, and tabletop adaptation oddity Mutant Chronicles. He most recently popped up in Shane Black’s Play Dirty, a loose adaptation of Richard Stark’s Parker novels.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, McCoy isn’t the only original series character making their Strange New Worlds debut, with newcomer Kai Murakami playing future Enterprise helmsman Hikaru Sulu. Sulu was previously played by George Takei and John Cho.

Now, THR has it that both Jane and Murakami are only appearing in the finale of SNW’s six-episode final season, so at a guess it may just be seizing the opportunity to get new iterations of the original crew all on the screen at the same time and seeing how the fanbase reacts. Which is fine, of course, but personally I’d much rather a few more seasons with Anson Mount’s Captain Pike running the ship, rather than plunging into a seemingly inevitable second reboot of the original Star Trek. But Jane is a brilliant choice for McCoy, nonetheless, so I won’t complain too loudly.