Star Trek: Strange New Worlds - Season 1 Review, Part 1

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures I'm giving my thoughts on the first three episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds!

Strange New Worlds is the third live-action series of the Alex Kurtzman era and the first to return to the episodic style of shows like Star Trek: The Original Series, Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager. It's so old school that when I describe it to people, I just say that it's Star Trek. It's about a crew of competent professionals going from world to world on the USS Enterprise, solving space problems and moral dilemmas in around 40 minutes. At least, that's what all the reviews say when they're listing reasons why it's so much better than Discovery and Picard.

From what I can tell, Star Trek fans aren't just happy with how the series has turned out, they're also relieved. It's not going to have have serialised seasons that start spinning their wheels halfway through because there's only enough story for four episodes. It's not going to have examinations of how imperfect the Federation really is. It's not going to have damaged heroes who routinely find themselves at the centre of universe-threatening crises because they're so special. Well, in theory anyway.

Personally I've liked the very serialised Discovery and Picard so far... to a degree, but variety is good and I am 100% for an episodic Trek all about Pike, Spock and Number One. In fact I've been waiting for this since Discovery's second season finale, so my enthusiasm level is high here.

I'll start off by sharing thoughts and SPOILERS for these three episodes:

• 1-01 - Strange New Worlds
  
• 1-02 - Children of the Comet
  
• 1-03 - Ghosts of Illyria
  

Though I'll probably also mention something about the earlier Star Trek series as well, so continue reading at your own risk.

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Note: I rate episodes on a 1-9 scale, with 5 being where my attention starts to fail.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds - Season 1
1-01	Strange New Worlds		6
Episode: 001 | Writer: Akiva Goldsman | Director: Akiva Goldsman | Air Date: 05-May-2022 Captain Pike is reluctant to come back to command the Enterprise after getting a vision of his horrible accident in his future, but Number One needs rescuing so he pulls Spock from his fiancée and heads to the planet she disappeared at. His landing party uses DNA-altering disguises to infiltrate the facility their officers are being held, but Spock's disguise wears off, leading to violence. Pike realises that the planet is on the verge of destroying itself with a warp bomb and decides to stay behind to tell them a cautionary tale about Earth's World War III. Starfleet isn't happy that he broke the General Order 1 but April manages to get Pike off the hook. I was a bit confused when the first episode of the Pike series started with a Michael Burnham monologue voice over, but I soon realised that it was actually Number One making a rare appearance in this story. The rest of the episode is all about Pike dealing with his foreknowledge of his horrible fate and how it's going to affect his ability to command. And I mean all about that, even the main plot on the strange new world of the week. I can't really complain about that, seeing as pilots like Emissary and The Cage have also been focused on the captain working through their issues, though I think those episodes did a better job at telling their story. Part of the problem is that I was getting a bit impatient waiting for the episode to finish introducing Pike and Spock so the plot could start. It takes twenty minutes for them to reach strange new world #1 and I've been rewatching The Animated Series recently so that felt like an eternity to me. The TAS crew would've resolved the whole plot by then! The other part of the problem is that I'm also watching TOS, Next Gen, and Voyager etc. so I'm very familiar with how a Starfleet crew operates. All the work the production team has put in to make Strange New Worlds an updated throwback to classic Star Trek in both its style and standalone nature has also left it feeling like uncanny valley Trek to me, especially during the away mission. It turns out that during this particular part of the timeline Starfleet is using temporary DNA modification to to quickly and painfully transform the away team's appearance! Okay I can't say that Star Trek hasn't had fun with DNA before and we've seen something similar happen to Archer when he was used to develop a cure for the Augment virus in Enterprise, but that was weird then and it's weird now. Especially how fast it works, with one of the locals noticing Spock's ear changing back during the mission. The guy must heal as fast as Wolverine. Plus the whole thing about beaming the DNA treatment straight into Spock from orbit so that his retinas change in time for the scan just didn't pass the 'wtf?' test for me. It all took me right out of the episode and I didn't like it. Plus isn't genetic experimentation banned? Star Trek: Picard's been careful not to nail anything down about Eugenics War and World War III during its trip to the past, but Strange New Worlds is not so careful. In fact we get our first proper look at the attack here, with cities being wiped out, and those 21st century nukes do not mess around! It's a bit weird that the footage of it is so clear though. Maybe Pike just borrowed some visual effects from a movie about the event. Speaking of movies, the trouble I had with the episode's resolution is that Pike's solution is supposed to be inspired by his unique foreknowledge of his fate, but we also saw it in the clip of The Day the Earth Stood Still at the start, so he could've skipped all that introspection and just copied the film. Speaking of his foreknowledge, I was wondering if Spock was going to wipe it from his memory with a mind meld to spare him from dwelling on it in future stories, but nope. The positives: I like the 70s style sets, even if they're a bit cavernous and covered in strip lights. They don't match the Original Series, but then they don't match the ship's appearance in Discovery either, so there's precedent for an extensive interior redesign every five years or so. It's not something that's going to bother me unless the characters turn to the camera and say "This is exactly what the ship looked like during Kirk's five year mission". I also liked the characters, especially the ones I already met in Discovery. La'an Noonien-Singh is clearly the result of Tasha Yar and Malcolm Reed getting into a Tuvix-style transporter accident, but I have zero issue with that. Plus I liked that the series has its heart in the right place, and I liked that Pike did the right thing and got yelled at for it. Mostly because it amuses me how that mirrors how Kelvin Pike yelled at Kelvin Kirk for saving a planet in Into Darkness. Star Trek Into Darkness In fact both stories take place in early 2259, so it's possible that the scenes are taking place simultaneously.  The negatives: they didn't put the episode title on screen! Though it's got the same name as the series so I suppose they kind of did. Also what the hell was Number One thinking beaming her entire crew down to the planet with no disguise, in uniform? Her empty ship was an interesting mystery at first but it turns out that she was just incredibly inept. And is it really Starfleet procedure to knock out two innocent scientists from a technically pre-warp culture and literally kidnap them? It really threw me for a loop when they woke up on the Enterprise and Chapel was acting like this was fun rather than a severe fuck up. Plus did they say the Gorn captured La'an and her family? But the TOS episode Arena is all about how the Gorn might be misunderstood! Why would the writers choose to remove that ambiguity? I don't even know what I think about the T'Pring stuff so I'm just putting that on hold for now. I definitely didn't imagine her and Spock having an actual relationship though. Oh, also I knew that there was something wrong with April's appearance almost immediately but I couldn't quite put my finger on it... then it finally clicked with me: this is the very first time we've ever seen Robert April, the original captain of the original Enterprise, in live-action, and yet the story isn't about him in any way! He's just a reasonable authority figure there to pull Pike into action and get him off the hook at the end. It's like if Zefram Cochrane just wasn't all that important in First Contact, or Captain Pike wasn't a big deal in the first episode of Discovery season 1. Overall this wasn't my favourite Star Trek pilot... or even my favourite of the recent batch of season premieres. In fact to be honest I didn't even enjoy it all that much. But it does a lot right and it has a great cast, and that earns it bonus points. I've been comparing Picard season 2 with Next Gen season 2, so I reckon it's only fair that I do the same with Strange New Worlds and The Original Series. I'll go through TOS in airing order just to keep things simple, so first up it's The Man Trap vs Strange New Worlds. TOS did not put its best foot forward with a dull story about a shapeshifter wandering the ship so for me this is an easy win for Strange New Worlds. Current score: 1:0 to SNW!
1-02	Children of the Comet		6
Episode: 002 | Writer: Henry Alonso Myers & Sarah Tarkoff | Director: Maja Vrvilo | Air Date: 12-May-2022 The Enterprise tries to stop a comet from colliding with a planet, but their job is complicated by a mysterious device projecting a shield around it and an alien ship determined to allow it to continue its mission. Uhura manages to lower the shield by figuring out the musical code and Spock goes on a surreptitious shuttle mission to alter its trajectory. This both saves the planet and dumps a ton of water on it, making it much more suitable for supporting life. The alien captain tells Pike that he's just learned a lesson about leaving sacred comets alone to do their thing, but the Enterprise crew discovers that the comet's creators were able to see this future and had been relying on their interference. When Children of the Comet started with a 'previously on' recap I began to have concerns that this 'episodic' Star Trek series was going to be more serialised than advertised. It turns out that the episode does continue to dwell on Pike's vision, as it's about how seeing the future doesn't necessarily mean understanding the future. Though it also seems like Pike may be thinking of a way to save all the cadets without the personal cost. He knows all their names somehow and it really hammers home why he's still on this path to horrific self-sacrifice when we see them all as much younger kids on his screen. I'm 50/50 on this arc to be honest. On the one hand it's a perfectly sensible thing to mine for drama, on the other hand I feel we kind of got a resolution to it already and now the series is already repeating itself. On the plus side there was no beaming clothes onto people or genetic disguise weirdness to bother me this time! This feels more like a proper prequel to the Original Series. They also made good use of a couple of legacy characters, with Hoshi Sato being played by Uhura and Malcolm Reed being played once again by La'an. It did feel very familiar to have an episode focused on a nervous linguist who isn't even sure that Starfleet is for her (and her tragic backstory really feels like it's been done before), but I thought Celia Rose Gooding did a good job at making this Proto Uhura feel like an actual human being whose willingness to be a trope only goes so far. I also liked the scene where Hemmer is offended when she tries to help, and she ends up deciding that he and Spock are probably just hazing her. On the negative side, I really don't get these windows in Pike's quarters. They're at the edge of the saucer so they should be leaning forwards to match the wall and the window frame, but they're not. I also wasn't keen on how long the episode took to get to the plot. It's great to see the characters hanging out, that's exactly what I've been wanting from Discovery, but 10 whole minutes of it at the start of an episode is a bit much! Then later it turns out that the egg at the comet's core was just a puzzle to keep the landing party occupied for 20 minutes, until the time was right for the shields to come down, so that was a bit of time wasting as well. In fact the solution was unsatisfying for me in general, with Spock going on a flashy CGI shuttle ride for reasons that are only explained later, and the Enterprise pretending to be more damaged than it is and getting towed away for reasons that are never entirely explained. Speaking of the Enterprise taking damage, they decided to have the 440 metre long Enterprise flying around like a starfighter and it looks kind of ridiculous. I mean the effects of the comet fragments hitting the shields were great, but they're really not emphasising the scale. Also they're really doing 'shields at 50%' again? Why'd that have to be the piece of Berman-era Trek that gets to come back? Ultimately we learn that the comet was sent by someone years ago along with a guardian shepherd ship, and their plan was that the Enterprise would show up, fight their ship, and shave a bit of ice away to divert it from the planet. The plan worked, so I can't really criticise it, but it doesn't seem like the simplest way to achieve their goal. Also they basically tricked the Enterprise into doing some positive interference and pulling a reverse-Tatooine on a desert world which is interesting. Oh, by the way, I have to mention that Pike states outright that interfering with a civilisation's natural development is bad, while interfering to save planets is good. That line was my favourite part of the episode, and someone should've written it down in the Prime Directive manual for Picard and Janeway to read. I also liked the moral that even if you have faith that things will all work out, someone still has to put in the work to make it happen, so either do it yourself or get out of the way of the people who are willing to do the job. We get to see Pike properly commanding the Enterprise here and he's definitely not a 'Hornblower' kind of captain like Kirk and Picard are to a degree. He doesn't see any need to torment himself over his decisions or distance himself from his crew, and if he puts on any kind of mask as a leader it's one that's even less moody than he actually feels. I was a bit surprised that either he or Number One wasn't leading the landing party though and I'm starting to wonder what her place in this series is, as La'an and Spock seem to make her redundant. And Ortegas should've been flying the damn shuttle! At least then we wouldn't have gotten that bizarre moment of Spock laughing at how badly things had gone, even though they'd actually gone really well. Overall the episode was... okay. It was nice to have a proper Star Trek space mystery, we got a little bit of a space battle, and it was all resolved with ingenuity and benevolence. Plus Spock and Uhura got to use their music skills, and there was a fantastic animatronic alien. I was just a little bit bored by it all to be honest. Making television is hard. But is Children of the Comet better than Charlie X. This is very close, but I feel like Charlie X just has the edge for me. It's a creepy little Twilight Zone story that does exactly what it sets out to do.
1-03	Ghosts of Illyria		6
Episode: 003 | Writer: Akela Cooper & Bill Wolkoff | Director: Leslie Hope | Air Date: 19-May-2022 An away mission to investigate an empty Illyrian colony is interrupted by a storm, and crew members start acting strange all over the ship. Especially Number One, who sunbathes under the interior lights to the point where she starts glowing. The crew discover that an infection is spreading across the ship that's making people suicidally obsessed with light, but Number One has an immunity as she's secretly a genetically augmented Illyrian! La'an's illness drives her to set the warp core to explode and her trauma over being a descendant of Khan means she only too willing to fight back when Number One comes to stop her. Fortunately Number One's immunity is strong enough to cure her too allowing them to develop a treatment for the whole crew. Meanwhile, on the planet, Pike and Spock take shelter from an ion storm, and friendly space ghosts come over to help out. Turns out that they're what's left of the Illyrian colonists, who fell victim when to the plague when they genetically engineered themselves to no longer be genetically engineered in order to be allowed to join the Federation. When they get back Number One admits that she's an Illyrian who illegally joined Starfleet and she learns that M'Benga has his terminally ill daughter stored in the transporter's pattern buffer! Ghosts of Illyria is a tale of prejudice, secrets, a virus, and energy ghosts. It's also a very different episode to the first two stories, showing off Strange New Worlds' range. It was great to see a third strange new world in three episodes; the series is definitely living up to its premise there. Plus they took a break from dwelling on Pike's fate, which I also appreciated. I think Pike needs to watch more of those classic sci-fi movies though as I guessed that the colonists were the energy beings fairly early on, despite it being kind of inexplicable. And weird. I couldn't figure out why they were so desperate to break down the door to stop the storm from killing Pike and Spock however, because the two of them seemed to be fine at that point. I get why the ghosts needed to put the shield over them when the window shattered, but they could've flown in when it was necessary instead of pre-emptively breaching the shelter themselves! Meanwhile the 'outbreak on the ship' plot finally gave Number One a chance to shine (literally), even if the episode kept it mysterious whether she was our protagonist or antagonist for the first part. Trek series tend to do a virus episode early on, like TOS's The Naked Time, TNG's The Naked Now and DS9's Babel, but time it wasn't a 'characters act weird and reveal their true feelings' virus, more of a 'characters act like moths and go straight to the most dangerous light source' virus. They could've called the episode The Darwin Awards with all the talk of genetics and the ways people were trying to remove themselves from the gene pool. The story came down to a fight between La'an and Number One driven (at least in part) by La'an's issues over genetic engineering, and man, this poor woman had it bad in her childhood. We already knew about the Gorn incident and now it turns out that also she suffered prejudice due to her last name being Noonien-Singh! She doesn't seem to have inherited any of Khan's super-strength however, as she was vulnerable to the virus and got her ass kicked by the genetically enhanced Number One. It's unclear whether Number One inherited her altered DNA from her parents or was genetically altered after birth, but either way it seems like Starfleet's going to have an issue with her if they find out. The episode definitely had a message to it about prejudice, but the plot being about genetic engineering kind of complicates things. Characters never talk about why it's banned, only about the prejudice that genetically engineered people suffer, so it seems to be making the case that the ban is a bad thing and the Federation is wrong to discriminate. But we know that 100 years from now it'll still be banned and the moral paragons of the 24th century are actually okay with that, so where is this storyline even going? Plus there was a bit of a plot about M'Benga's daughter in the transporter buffer which just seemed ridiculous to me. He smuggled his daughter on board without telling anyone? No wonder he's not the chief medical officer in the future! Or maybe the crew just struggled too much with the guy's accent and had to promote someone else to run sickbay. I couldn't make out a lot of what he was saying here to be honest, so I wasn't looking forward to his scenes. The biggest problem of the episode for me however was Number One somehow curing La'an by her proximity and basically solving the virus plot by accident. It's lucky their resident geneticist was the last one to fall ill and was able to use this fluke event to develop a cure. (I'm not even going to ask why they have a geneticist on board if genetic engineering is banned.) Overall this was probably my least favourite of the first three episodes, but not by a huge margin. I'm just not all that into energy ghosts I guess. The TOS episode challenge this time is Ghosts of Illyria vs Where No Man Has Gone Before. These are both stories about a crewmember demonstrating super powers that cause them to be feared by others, but I think WNMHGB tells a better tale. Plus it has a more powerful abbreviation. Which means the score so far is 2:1 to The Original Series! Of course you might disagree with my choices entirely, but that's what the comment box is for.

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NEXT EPISODE

Thanks for dropping by and reading what I thought about Star Trek, but now I want to know what you think. Did Strange New Worlds have a strong start or did it leave you a bit disappointed?

I'll be writing about more Star Trek soon, but next on Sci-Fi Adventures it's Babylon 5's Movements of Fire and Shadow!