Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is either good or it’s just so comforting that I don’t care

[Karlston]

The latest Trek series plays it almost too safe, but it still feels right.

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If the modern Star Trek shows have all felt a little off to you, Strange New Worlds may be what you've been waiting for.

 

The modern era of TV Star Trek has been more than willing to experiment with what a Star Trek show is. Discovery and Picard both focus on heavily serialized season-long plotlines. Lower Decks is an animated sendup of (and love letter to) Trek's cultural peak in the '90s. And the computer-animated Prodigy aims for a younger audience, with simpler storylines, a lighter tone, and tween-y interpersonal melodrama aplenty.

 

What none of these shows has explicitly tried to do is replicate the format of older shows like the Original Series or The Next Generation—monster/alien/glowing-godlike-being-of-the-week stories where no matter how bad things might look for our heroes, everything will be more or less wrapped up at the end of the hour.

 

Strange New Worlds faithfully follows the episodic template developed and perfected over many seasons of television and many hundreds of episodes of Trek shows of years past, and the result is a comfortable, old T-shirt of a show. Familiar plotlines, storytelling beats, and crew dynamics quickly emerge over the course of the show's first five episodes, and Strange New Worlds is executing on all of it remarkably well. It's also by far the safest, most retread-y of all of the new Trek shows, for better or worse.

Familiar old crew

Anson Mount returns as Captain Christopher Pike, the hottest dad in space.

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Strange New Worlds benefits from the work done to establish Christopher Pike (Anson Mount), the latest iteration of Spock (Ethan Peck), and Una "Number One" Chin-Riley (Rebecca Romijn) in the second season of Discovery. Mount in particular has successfully cultivated a Cool Hot Space Dad vibe for Pike that is nowhere to be found in Trek’s original failed pilot-turned-cost-cutting-flashback sequence.

 

Even most of the "new" characters—Cadet Nyota Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding), Nurse Christine Chapel (Jess Bush), Dr. M'Benga (Babs Olusanmokun), and Chief Security Officer La'an Noonien-Singh (Christina Chong)—are either lifted from the Original Series or directly inspired by established characters. Because it's not starting from scratch, Strange New Worlds hit the ground running, avoiding the awkward first-season break-in period that most Trek shows suffer from as they attempt to fill in backstories and depict mind-bending sci-fi scenarios at the same time.

 

Strange New Worlds picks up where that season of Discovery left off, with a few scenes to remind everyone exactly what happened on Discovery in the first place—Discovery's plotting is convoluted at the best of times, and any pre-pandemic television season feels as distant to me as the burning of Rome. Pike has glimpsed a grim vision of his own future, and he decides to carry on captaining the pre-Kirk Enterprise in spite of it.

 

There are a couple of characters, like Lt. Erica Ortegas (Melissa Navia), who don't have anything to do with characters we've met before, but they're few and far between.

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After establishing that, though, the show makes only occasional nods in the direction of serialized storytelling, and most episodes follow a pattern that even casual Star Trek fans will recognize: A threat or unknown anomaly is introduced, the crew puzzles over the situation together in ways that help to establish their characters, and then the situation is resolved by some combination of diplomacy, phasers, and good-old-fashioned know-how.

Space to breathe

Celia Rose Gooding as Cadet Nyota Uhura. Younger versions of TOS characters like Uhura and Spock show us newer, more vulnerable sides of familiar characters.

Paramount+

 

Without spoiling any specific episode’s storyline, I can say that the first few Strange New Worlds episodes all deal in familiar Trek tropes: visiting alien planets in disguise, figuring out how to communicate with creatures the universal translator cannot understand, watching a strange disease spread throughout the ship, and engaging in a game of cat-and-mouse from inside a cloud of space dust. These are all competently executed, and they each conform to a type of Trek episode, even though nothing in them is as nakedly derivative as some early TNG episodes.

 

Where Strange New Worlds feels the best is in the quiet character interactions, the space where TNG, DS9, and Voyager found so much of their character and humanity. Discovery and Picard struggle to leave room for these kinds of interactions (the latter in particular—Discovery has gotten much better about this in the last couple of seasons). Both shows repeatedly fail my imagined, Trek-specific version of the Bechdel test—two characters have a conversation, it isn't about a reality-destroying super-threat, and it's not because they both believe they are about to be killed in their quest to stop the reality-destroying super-threat.

 

Strange New Worlds lets these kinds of lighter character explorations breathe in cold opens, B-stories, and throughout entire episodes. One episode has some strong Data's Day energy and is by far my favorite of the five screeners that have been released so far. What a relief it is to have a Trek series where low-stakes conflict and light hijinks can coexist with the action and exploration.

 

Jess Bush's Nurse Christine Chapel injects some fun into most of the scenes she's in.

Paramount+

 

After four years of the hyper-serialized apocalypse-a-minute melodrama of Discovery, something about Trek’s return to episodic storytelling just feels right. Its rhythms are recognizable and comforting. This one’s an Uhura episode. This one is Spock-heavy. Here’s an alien species with a civilization ordered around a specific prophecy that I will never need to remember or think about ever again. And no matter how bad things get, I know the tension will be resolved in time for the captain and his Number One to discuss everything they learned at the end of the episode. 

 

One of the very loud trailers for the 2009 film reboot of Star Trek proclaimed that the movie was "not your father's Star Trek." It was part of a marketing campaign that was clearly meant to show that this new iteration was a clean break, commercially and creatively, from the moribund franchise that Nemesis and Enterprise had killed earlier in the decade.

 

Strange New Worlds is your father's Star Trek. Its format, characters, plotting, and general vibes are all trying to capture the best qualities of the older shows. What these first five episodes don't do is show us what Strange New Worlds can do that those earlier shows couldn't, beyond much more impressive and versatile special effects. But for now, it's enough that one show in the broad (and ever-broadening) constellation of current Trek shows feels like Star Trek rather than a half-successful modernization of Star Trek. 

 

The first episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is currently available on Paramount+. New episodes of the show's 10-episode season will air on Thursdays.

 

 

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is either good or it’s just so comforting that I don’t care