Jess Bush on Christine Chapel’s Journey in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season Four

The role of Nurse Christine Chapel on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has been a chance for Jess Bush – not to go where no one has gone before – but rather to take a character with a familiar name and history, go deeper and make it her own. As season four continues Chapel’s journey aboard the Enterprise, Bush sees a woman who has spent much of her life avoiding the very things she may want most: connection, commitment and a place to call home.

“I think the events that have happened to her during her time on the Enterprise have forced her to confront, maybe, her avoiding tendencies and her resistance to committing to people, to places, to allowing love into her life, to allowing herself to desire belonging,” Bush says. “They’ve kind of forced her to crack herself open.” That emotional evolution is particularly apparent in Chapel’s relationship with Dr. Joseph M’Benga, played by Babs Olusanmokun (Dune). Their history runs deep, forged through their experiences in the Klingon war and years of working side by side. For Chapel, Bush explains, M’Benga represents something she has rarely allowed herself to have.

“Historically, I think Chapel has not really stuck to one person, place or path,” Bush says. “She’s always moving around to new opportunities, new places and things. New lovers — she pops around. And I think that her justification for that consciously is that things don’t feel quite like the right fit.” But beneath that restlessness is something more complicated. 

“I think the deeper thing that’s going on subconsciously is that she’s afraid of the vulnerability of committing to a place or committing to a person or the exposure of naming her desires or her wants or her needs,” Bush says. M’Benga, however, changes that equation. “M’Benga is someone that feels like home to her,” Bush says. “I think through their experiences in the war, through their time together working, they’ve become extremely bonded and extremely close. She feels understood by him. He feels like home. I think he’s probably the first person that feels like home to her.”

Chapel has come to think of herself and M’Benga as a package deal, even if she has convinced herself that her continued presence aboard the Enterprise is primarily about loyalty to him. “She believes that their friendship is unbreakable, that they are each other’s number one, that they have a bond that’s so deep that nothing will get in the way of it,” Bush says. When M’Benga casually reveals that he is considering leaving in episode five, “Off-Hour,” Chapel is blindsided — not only because of the prospect of losing someone she loves but what his decision forces her to recognize about herself. “I think she’s confused. Did she get her idea of their bond different to what he thinks and what he feels?” Bush says. “She’s deeply hurt. But I also think that him deciding to leave also makes her confront the feeling that she might want to stay here.” That realization may be even more frightening than losing M’Benga. “The Enterprise does feel good, and maybe she doesn’t want to leave and maybe this is the first place that she’s actually wanted to stay,” Bush says. “And I think that’s terrifying to her.”

Season four also gives Bush the opportunity to explore a decidedly less conventional version of Nurse Chapel through the episode “Level Five Transporter Incident,” which features puppets created by Jim Henson Productions. For Bush, seeing her puppet counterpart for the first time was an unexpectedly surreal experience. “Seeing my puppet for the first time was kind of magical,” she says. “It was this surreal kind of pinch-me moment. It was very, very cool.” Even more fascinating was watching the puppeteers recreate the actors’ performances without the actors being present. “What was even cooler was meeting the puppeteers and observing their craft and how they studied our mannerisms and our cadence and absolutely got it perfect,” Bush says. The actors recorded their dialogue on their phones and sent the recordings to the puppeteers, who used them as the foundation for their performances. Only afterward did Bush and her castmates return to the recording studio to dub their dialogue over the completed footage. “It was wild,” Bush says. “It was a very different experience for me.”

For Bush, that willingness to embrace the unexpected seems fitting for a character who has spent four seasons discovering that the person she thought she was — and the life she thought she wanted — may not be quite what she imagined.

Read more film reviews by Patrick Gibbs:
Film Review: The Magic Faraway Tree
Film Review: It Ends

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