TV Q&A: Did a Pittsburgh writer name ‘Star Trek’ planet after Primanti Bros.?

Trib Total Media TV writer Rob Owen answers reader questions every Wednesday at TribLive.com in a column that also appears in the Sunday Tribune-Review.

Q: In “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” season three, episode eight, a crew member returned from the planet “Primanti 3” with a sandwich that had fries “inside the sandwich.” Who on the writing staff has Pittsburgh connections?

— Kurt, via email

Rob: I heard from several viewers the day this light-hearted episode premiered Aug. 28. The episode, written by Dana Horgan and Henry Alonso Myers, features the crew on a mission where they go undercover as Vulcans, get stuck in Vulcan form and encounter Vulcan artist Doug (Patton Oswalt).

The planet that gets mentioned multiple times — including with a reference to a sandwich with fries on it — indeed sounds like Primanti 3, although the pronunciation emphasizes the last syllable, as in “Pri-man-TEE.”

Horgan is a 2000 grad of Montour High School who was raised in the Robinson area. She studied cinema and photography at Ithaca College and went to Boston University for graduate school to study screenwriting.

Horgan, who previously wrote on ABC’s “Once Upon a Time” and The CW’s “Supergirl,” said it was not hard to get the local reference into the “Strange New Worlds” script.

“Henry Alonso Myers, our [co-showrunner], is very supportive of the fun of ‘Star Trek,’ getting to add to this gigantic universe with personal things that mean something [to the show’s writers],” she said. “So many ships are named after loved ones, same for planets and characters. I believe Henry’s grandmother is from Pittsburgh, though he grew up in Ithaca. But he has a Pittsburgh connection, and we talked about that a lot.”

Myers encouraged Horgan to slip in the Pittsburgh reference.

“When I mentioned this [idea], he’s had the sandwich, so he said, ‘Yes, of course, we should do it,’ ” Horgan said. “It was just a question of how we could pronounce it, how it could be hidden enough. Unless it’s naming a ship after somebody, we try to hide it a little. We landed on ‘Priman-TEE.’”

She said in the script, written more than a year ago, it was spelled either Purmantee or Permantee.

Horgan was on set during filming of the episode last year and she did get asked about the proper pronunciation by cast members and the episode’s director. She had to explain, “One of my favorite things about Pittsburgh is how we put french fries on everything.”

The final season of “Strange New Worlds” is now in production, but not all the scripts have been written. So far, Horgan said there are no additional Pittsburgh references in completed scripts.

“Not yet, but that’s not to say there won’t be,” she said. “I’ve named some characters after loved ones that I grew up with, but nothing actually Pittsburgh other than the big one.”

Horgan joined “Strange New Worlds” in its second season and although she was not a die-hard “Trek” fan, her parents were.

“My parents were so excited [when I got the job] and were like, ‘Let’s talk ‘Star Trek,’ ” Horgan said, noting they texted her immediately upon hearing the Primanti Bros. reference.