Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 3 calls back to the genius of Nurse Christine Chapel (Jess Bush) from Strange New Worlds‘ first 2 seasons. Star Trek fans were treated to a first look clip of Strange New Worlds season 3 at San Diego Comic-Con 2024, which shows a 5-minute episode excerpt in which Nurse Chapel administers a treatment to Captain Christopher Pike (Anson Mount), Lieutenant La’an Noonien-Singh (Christina Chong), Ensign Nyota Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding), Commander Pelia (Carol Kane), and herself. Nurse Chapel’s admittedly “jury-rigged” serum is set to turn the away team’s humans into Vulcans for an undercover mission. Watch the clip below:

The practice of surgically turning Starfleet officers into aliens dates back all the way to Star Trek: The Original Series, with Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner) being surgically altered into a Romulan in Star Trek: The Original Series season 3, episode 2, “The Enterprise Incident”.

The practice became more widespread in Star Trek‘s 24th century, especially for the USS Enterprise-D’s first contact missions in Star Trek: The Next Generation, where surgical alien alteration was imperative for keeping Starfleet’s Prime Directive intact. Details of exactly how Starfleet accomplished these surgical procedures were never explained, until Star Trek: Strange New Worlds revealed the origin of surgical alien transformations.

Nurse Chapel Invented Surgically Altering Starfleet Into Aliens In Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 1

Chapel’s Surgical Alteration Technology Makes First Contact Easier

Nurse Christine Chapel invented the practice of surgically altering Starfleet officers into aliens, in a process that was shown in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 1, episode 1, “Strange New Worlds”. When Captain Pike, Lt. Noonien-Singh, and Lt. Spock (Ethan Peck) need to pass as natives of Kylie 279 in order to rescue Commander Una Chin-Riley (Rebecca Romijn) from a botched first contact mission, Nurse Chapel relishes the chance to use an experimental procedure that she’s invented. Chapel’s technology swiftly and radically restructures an individual’s genome — at least on the outside — so they won’t be detected as alien to the pre-warp Kiley.

Genetic augmentation is banned within the Federation, but it’s perfectly fine for Nurse Chapel to play fast and loose with the Enterprise away team’s genetic structure. Chapel’s technology results in a temporary alteration, and it wears off on its own (sometimes a little too quickly, like it did with Spock) instead of being a permanent augmentation.

Nurse Chapel is a civilian on loan to Starfleet from the Stanford Morehouse Epigenetic Project, as part of a program focused on exploring pre-warp civilizations without causing cultural contamination. This is Christine Chapel’s area of expertise, and a huge part of why Chapel is on the Enterprise, specifically.

Nurse Chapel Replicated Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2’s Kerkhovian Alien Serum

Chapel Seamlessly Integrated Alien Technology With Her Own Invention

In the Comic-Con first look clip, Nurse Chapel explains that the treatment to turn the Enterprise’s away team into Vulcans is based on a serum created by the Kerkhovians in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 2, episode 5, “Charades”. The Kerkhovians benevolently restored the health of both Chapel and Spock after a shuttle crash, but mistakenly interpret Spock’s half-Vulcan physiology as an error, accidentally returning a fully human Spock to the Enterprise.

When Chapel points out their error, the Kerkhovians grant Chapel a serum that will restore Spock’s Vulcan genetics. This is the serum that Nurse Chapel learns to replicate in order to alter the away team.

It’s not surprising that Nurse Chapel would jump on the opportunity to reverse engineer the Kerkhovian serum, and eagerly test it out on herself and the Enterprise away team as soon as possible. Chapel must be absolutely delighted to explore the alien approach that differs from Chapel’s own invention, comparing different processes and looking for ways to synthesize improvements.

The Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 3 clip suggests that Pike, La’an, Uhura, and Chapel might be stuck as Vulcans a little more permanently than they’d hoped, but with Nurse Chapel’s genius, the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds team will be human again in no time.