Popular sci-fi’s most philosophical space opera, Star Trek, may be no stranger to existential queries, but the third season of Strange New Worlds, the franchise’s de facto flagship series, invites a different kind of questioning. Namely, why does this show exist?
Beginning as both a spinoff and bouncier counterpart to the sometimes grimdark melodrama of Star Trek: Discovery, Strange New Worlds now sets the primary tone of Paramount’s multimedia universe—with an emphasis on primary tones. The series brings us back to the original show’s monochrome uniforms, and while it’s undoubtedly a much more even and more enjoyable series than Discovery, it manages to be so mostly because it’s markedly safer. This has been an issue since the first season, but by now the show’s refusal to grow invites increasingly unfavorable comparisons to Star Trek’s heyday.
Take, for example, the romantically themed second episode of Strange New Worlds’s third season, “Wedding Bell Blues,” in which Spock (Ethan Peck) accidentally wishes himself into a fantasy scenario in which he’s on the verge of nuptials with Nurse Christine Chapel (Jess Bush), the lover who’s recently spurned him. Inevitably, Spock realizes this reality is a sham, and that he’s become a demigod’s plaything; inevitably, he accepts the truth of his and Chapel’s breakup after facing the temptation of living his fantasy; and, as expected from this series, we make it to the end of the episode with a character explored but nary a convention called into question.
One can imagine the scenarios here playing out similarly in prior Star Trek shows, but along the way, the emphasis on allegory would likely have pointed us toward questioning our world, lives, and morals. Star Trek: The Next Generation used romance tropes to play with the bounds of heterosexuality—like having one character fall in love with a member of a species that has no concept of gender or another character contemplate whether she could live with the fact that her symbiote boyfriend now had a woman’s body—in an era when it was the insistently enforced norm. It would be difficult to make the case that Strange New Worlds pulls off—or even aims at—using its outer-space setting to make us think. On the contrary, it’s more than content to simply deck standard TV-drama morals out with pulp-genre window dressing.
Still, the show’s versions of Spock and Captain Pike (Anson Mount) are ever more endearing as the series goes on. Pike takes a bit of a backseat in the five episodes available for review, but Mount continues to be the steady, charismatic anchor of a series that’s much more ensemble-focused than Discovery, and as character-driven as anything in the entire franchise. The thread running through the season is the battle with the lizard-like Gorn that capped last season and the effects the conflict has had on various crew and their loved ones, from psychological trauma to genetic manipulation—secret and repressed struggles forced to the surface in contrived scenarios like the crew fighting their way off a zombie planet in “Shuttle to Kenfori.”
One could argue that Strange New Worlds takes its characters more seriously than it does its franchise. Indeed, these days, Star Trek seems mostly capable of articulating creator Gene Roddenberry’s grandiose vision in self-ironic parodies, as in the episode “A Space Adventure Hour.” In a rehashed pastiche familiar from dozens of post-’60s spoofs, the episode mocks the low-budget costumes and on-set tensions of the original Star Trek, along with the weirdo Playboy-era egoism of male sci-fi gurus like Roddenberry.
In “Adventure Hour,” enterprise crew members enter the holographic simulation room within the USS Enterprise to solve a murder mystery set among the cast of a cheesy mid-’60s sci-fi show called The Last Frontier. The simulator’s computer has used other crew members as models for the characters, so that we see the cast of Strange New Worlds playing caricatures of figures from past Star Trek shows. Paul Wesley, this show’s James Kirk, delivers a broad Shatner impersonation, for example, and Mount, normally the suave Captain Pike, plays the socially inept, wild-haired creator of The Last Frontier, who’s more an amalgam of Isaac Asimov and L. Ron Hubbard than a direct caricature of Roddenberry.
These are fair targets, for sure, and the actors look like they’re having fun, but is it even worth pointing out that Star Trek: Deep Space Nine already did the same “boy, the old show was corny but fun” schtick much more lovingly, and the deconstruction of ’60s sci-fi creators much more incisively? Of course it’s not, as the producers know that we know that they’re treading familiar ground. In fact, they count on us to know that they are. Making the old new is the show’s core trait, as if that by itself will make Star Trek great again.
As with the first two seasons of Strange New Worlds, a tendency toward easy callbacks and superficial pleasures doesn’t make the series bad per se. It’s at least a tightly written pastiche, structuring its hour-long stories with watchable simplicity and enjoyable character beats.
In the end, though, what Strange New Worlds continues to offer is less a new type of Star Trek and more a kind of Star Trek smoothie. It’s got all the most pleasing parts of whatever’s been thrown in there, and boy is it sweet. But it may also leave you with the sneaking suspicion that it’d be better for you to just eat the banana it was made from.
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Cast: Anson Mount, Ethan Peck, Jess Bush, Christina Chong, Melissa Navia, Babs Olusanmokun, Celia Rose Gooding, Rebecca Romijn, Melanie Scrofano, Paul Wesley, Gia Sandhu, Carol Kane, Martin Quinn Network: Paramount+
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