Star Trek: Strange New Worlds - Season 1 Review, Part 3

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm writing about the epic finale of Strange New Worlds' first season! I wanted to get this published before the second season started so I've made it just under the wire.

I've got three reviews for you this time, covering these three episodes:

• 1-08 - The Elysian Kingdom
  
• 1-09 - All Those Who Wander
  
• 1-10 - A Quality of Mercy
  

Then afterwards I'll talk a little bit about the season overall afterwards. Will I be showering the series with glowing praise or going on an angry rant? The only way to find out is to keep reading until the end. Or I suppose you could just scroll down to the bottom, if you're in a hurry or whatever.

This will have SPOILERS for Picard season 2, the TOS story The Menagerie, and a whole bunch of other episodes. I know I'm writing about Strange New Worlds, but I just want to be certain you know that my spoilers will spread to other Trek series as well. I won't say a thing about anything that happens afterwards though. I mean at the time I'm writing this is the latest season, nothing else has happened past this point, but I've heard a few things about season 2 that I'll keep quiet about.

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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
1-08	The Elysian Kingdom		6
Episode: 008 | Writer: Akela Cooper & Onitra Johnson | Director: Amanda Row | Air Date: 23-Jun-2022 The ship gets stuck inside a nebula and M'Benga discovers that the crew have all started to look and behave like characters from the fantasy novel he reads to his sick daughter before putting her back in the transporter pattern buffer. Hemmer is also unaffected so the two of them try to work out what's going on, eventually discovering that M'Benga's daughter is out of the pattern buffer and generating the fantasy herself, with the help of the lonely intelligent nebula. The daughter decides to stay behind with the nebula where she can live in fantasies rather than stay trapped in transporter stasis, and M'Benga says goodbye. I was genuinely surprised by how this one went down. They wrapped up the M'Benga arc before the first season was even done! I figured that'd be a thing for a couple of seasons at least. In fact, I'd started wondering if they'd already filmed all of the kid's appearances for the whole arc to get around the fact that the actor was going to noticeably age. I suppose that they had, technically, just not in the way I expected. Plus I have to admit that I didn't expect Rukiya to go off with a friendly godlike energy being instead of being cured either. She basically received the same ending that Captain Pike will ultimately get in The Menagerie. We were given two clues early on about what was really happening in this episode: M'Benga inhaling the drug and the ship being stuck in the nebula, so the reveal could've gone either way. At first, I was leaning towards it being a DS9's Distant Voices kind of scenario, with everything being in M'Benga's head, but I began to realise it was more like DS9's Dramatis Personae or Our Man Bashir, with the crew possessed and playing out a story. Then at the end, I learned that it also has a lot of TNG's Imaginary Friend (a little girl makes friends with a nebula being) mixed with TNG's Lonely Among Us (crew members are taken over by a nebula being and one of them leaves with it). Hey, those are two of TNG's absolute worst episodes! It's nice to finally get a M'Benga story, but aside from his conversation with his daughter at the end, his role in the story was mostly to stand around and be confused. The most successful thing he did was get thrown in the same room as Hemmer, who then solved most of the problems from that point on. The other actors got a week off to play in a mid-budget fantasy series for an episode, and it seems like they all had fun hamming it up and showing off their range. Daring Captain Pike becomes a flamboyant coward, green cadet Uhura is a tyrannical leader, and Ortegas... well actually I'm not sure how different she was from her regular personality. I think they really should've tried to fit in an Ortegas episode before this one as this might be the most screen time she's ever had and she's not even herself! La'an didn't have time to do much though. I suppose they had to get her off-screen quickly as she was dominating every scene she was in with her singing. And her dog. And her dress. Also, Mitchell got a lot to do this episode too, which reminded me of how the Discovery bridge crew got bigger roles in the Mirror Universe. The writers have to be careful though, as they risk turning her into another Owosekun or Detmer by making her too visible and interesting for the minor role she has on the series. I guess it's less likely to be an issue here as Strange New Worlds has a much bigger cast. Once the episode had set up that everyone was going to be playing a role it left me in suspense wondering who Spock and Number One were going to be. Then I was kind of blindsided when Uhura turned up as the queen, because I assumed she wasn't in this one. It stretches believability a little maybe that the main characters in the series are all playing main characters in the book, even the cadet. Especially considering that the story's coming from Rukiya's mind not M'Benga's. But it's a TV show so I suppose there was a zero percent chance of it happening any other way. As the episode went on I started to worry that it was dialling up the goofiness to make a tragic ending hit harder, but I guess there was no way they were actually going to kill M'Benga's kid two episodes after what happened to that other child. M'Benga is ultimately given a choice between his daughter getting to live and his crew being released from their mind control, but then the story immediately gives him an out as he can pick option 3: give her up to a stranger he just met. His leap of faith apparently works out, though he still has to leave her in her own heaven and walk away, which is tough. Fortunately, this energy being is a lot better at bringing humans into the nebula to live with them than the one from Lonely Among Us was, so she's apparently doing fine. I think I enjoyed the episode, but I'm not generally a huge fan of stories like this, where the characters are all possessed. I'm fine with the actors playing actual other people, like in Mirror Universe stories, but it kind of breaks the spell for me when they're all just goofing around and leaning into the weirdness. I don't see La'an Noonien-Singh playing Princess Thalia here, I see Christina Chong. She's pure joy in the role, but I wasn't really getting immersed. I've been putting Strange New Worlds episodes up against episodes from the Original Series' first season and figuring out which I like the most in order to find out which is the better season. The Elysian Kingdom is episode 8, so that means it's up against Miri, the one where they find a planet where everyone has died except for the children. This definitely wasn't Strange New Worlds' strongest episode for me, but Miri is even weaker so it is easily defeated. Winner: The Elysian Kingdom.
1-09	All Those Who Wander		6
Episode: 009 | Writer: Davy Perez | Director: Christopher J. Byrne | Air Date: 30-Jun-2022 Pike leads a team down to investigate a crashed Starfleet vessel while the Enterprise is busy delivering batteries. They discover a couple of survivors and a lot of blood. Turns out that Gorn attacked the crew and they get to experience a replay when some baby Gorn burst out of one of the survivors and go on a murder spree. La'an and Hemmer are able to lure the Gorn into a trap and freeze them, but Hemmer reveals that he's been infected and jumps out the back of the ship, presumably to his death. The internet can be a bit frustrating sometimes. I usually manage to avoid spoilers but this time I got spoiled on the Gorn appearing, Hemmer dying and La'an leaving! All Those Who Wander is a bit of a derivative scarefest that traps the crew in an intensely stressful situation and lets us watch as Sam Kirk cracks under the pressure. I don't know why he snapped at Spock in particular for being calm though, as everyone was holding it together pretty well. Actually I do know, as it set up Spock's plot, where he releases his rage over losing a crewmember. He's still angry at the end of the episode, so I don't know if that's something that's going to carry on or if it's just yet another excuse to put him and Chapel together in an emotional scene. I'm still not keen on it. The episode was doing really well at the start, with the crew having a mission briefing over food (while Spock washes the dishes), but after that it got a bit unfocused. It has a lot of characters and cares about what they're all going through. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it slowed the plot to the point where it began to lose me halfway through. The teaser sets it up as being a Uhura story, but the Gorn are La'an's nemesis so she gets a lot to do here too, Plus M'Benga mistakes Newt Oriana for his daughter at one point, and Hemmer's the one that ultimately dies. I knew his death was coming, so I was actually a bit surprised when he kept surviving things for most of the episode. I definitely didn't expect him to be infected by Gorn eggs after being spat on... because this is the first time we're learning that can happen and we don't learn it until later. It makes his death feel like a real 'wait, what?' moment. There aren't many horror stories I can think of where they keep establishing new rules for the monster even after the threat is over. I suppose Hemmer's death was foreshadowed way back when he explained that he wouldn't die until he had fulfilled his purpose, which is fixing things. Turns out that Uhura was the last thing he needed to fix, as he gives her the advice that resolves her season 1 arc of not knowing where her place is. If only he hadn't suddenly become the nicest guy on the ship this episode, she would've remained broken and he'd still be alive! It's a bit weird how he never got to use his precognition skill though. Overall I thought that the episode was okay, but flawed. I suppose the biggest disappointment for me was that we didn't get to see much of the crew walking through the snow to the crashed ship, though 'retconning the Gorn' is definitely in second place. We learn a lot about the Gorn in this episode, like the fact that they're now the Xenomorph from Alien except with Predator-vision. Well okay they skip the egg and face-hugger steps of their reproductive cycle, so that's different, but they're literally chest-bursters! I suppose the biggest difference is that Gorn children actually kill each other so that only the strongest survives. How did these guys even develop space travel? Fortunately, the last of the infants was frozen and shattered by La'an with a club, because children aren't allowed on Starfleet ships in this era. It's downright weird that the writers looked at the episode Arena, which is about Kirk fighting an alien one on one and ultimately realising he was acting out of anger and hate against someone who may have had a good reason to do what he did, then made the alien from it irredeemable and impossible to fight one on one! And the only reason this episode could even get made is because the Gorn are lizard creatures and not like us. Imagine if they did this episode with Klingon children or Cardassian children, and the crew had to murder them to survive. The idea would be absurd. On the positive side, the series is really showing off some surprising animatronic aptitude this season, as Buckley and the Gorn were really well realised. The episode also gets bonus trivia points because the actor who plays the girl is the twin sister of the actor who played the doomed genius kid in Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach. Episode 9 of TOS is Dagger of the Mind, which is about a doctor is carrying out unethical experiments at a penal colony, so that's what All Those Who Wander has to beat. I gotta give this one to the Gorn I'm afraid. Dagger of the Mind has its moments and I'm sure it has its fans, but I'm not really one of them.
1-10	A Quality of Mercy		3
Episode: 010 | Writer: Henry Alonso Myers & Akiva Goldsman | Director: Chris Fisher | Air Date: 07-Jul-2022 Pike receives a visit from himself, who has come from the future with a message: that he should quit trying to escape his horrible fate. To demonstrate what he means, Future Pike puts Regular Pike into the episode Balance of Terror, except this time Kirk never became captain of the Enterprise. He is around as captain of the Farragut however and the two captains really screw up in their hunt for the sneaky Romulan Bird-of-Prey that's been blowing up their outposts. In the end they lose a ship, start a war, and Spock is horrifically injured. So Pike finally accepts his future. A Quality of Mercy is a lot more focused than the previous episode was, as it's all about Pike getting a lesson from Future Pike about why he needs to accept his tragic fate. So yay, it turns out that the Boreth monks were wrong about Pike's time crystal vision showing him an unchangeable future! I hated that idea, because it was a little too magical and I don't think fate has any business being anywhere near Star Trek. We don't like superstition around here. Unfortunately the moral of the story is that he can't change the future, because every attempt to do so will lead to epic tragedy. So... fate again? Pike lesson comes in the form of a remake of TOS episode Balance of Terror, with him in command instead of Kirk, and I think this is the first time in the whole history of Star Trek they've ever done a 'what if...?' story where one captain takes the place of another in a famous episode. They're doing something legitimately new here and that's amazing. It's not the first time the characters have travelled into a previous story though, as the DS9 crew visited The Trouble With Tribbles, Janeway and Tuvok visited the movie Star Trek VI, and holograms of the NX-01 crew visited the Enterprise-D holodeck during The Pegasus. The big difference is that they've All Good Things'd Balance of Terror up a bit, so it doesn't quite match reality even before Pike starts making different choices. Ortegas is still on the Enterprise, Uhura has different hair, the ship still has its SNW look more or less, the wedding is happening in the cargo bay instead of the chapel, Hansen's not a Caucasian with white hair anymore, the Romulan Praetor's a woman now, the Neutral Zone is about 2 kilometres across, Starfleet ships can go warp 9 now, Romulan uniforms have changed, the Bird-of-Prey has changed, the Bird-of-Prey bridge is green instead of purple, the 'Monster Maroon' Wrath of Khan uniforms have deltas down the sleeves, Kirk is a completely different person... Oh also they've turned the Romulan Commander into a bumpy-headed 'northerner' that doesn't look Vulcan... even though they've kept the shocking moment where the crew get a look at him on the viewscreen and discover that he looks like a Vulcan. See, this is why you need to read the script before you start on the makeup! Also, a massive Romulan fleet turning up out of nowhere led by the Praetor herself just made me roll my eyes. Especially as she's on a giant flagship we've never seen before, and Balance of Terror specifically mentioned that the Bird-of-Prey was their badass flagship in this era. Man, Picard can go on a crazy time adventure and absolutely nothing changes, but Pike stays on the Enterprise for 14 more episodes and everything's gone weird! Well, 12 I guess, as The Menagerie wouldn't have happened. Wait, 11, as The Conscience of the King wouldn't have happened either. The episode pretty much makes the case that Pike needs to step aside after this series as the TOS era will go to crap without a Kirk in the chair who'll chase down bad guy ships and destroy them, so that's a weird thing to say about a lead character in his first season. But Alternate Pike had a pretty damn good run, completing 6 more years of his own missions and then a bunch of Kirk's afterwards. And I suppose it's fitting that the episode has the opposite moral to Arena, seeing as the series has been going out of its way to vilify the Gorn. One thing that hasn't changed is that there's still a bigoted vengeful Stiles character sitting in the navigator's chair... and it's Ortegas! She actually switched chairs just so she could be a Stiles, and I don't know why because that dude sucked! I don't want Ortegas to be like this, and I definitely don't want her to be like this without any explanation. Though she wasn't the only one out of character, as every other legacy character suddenly seemed very different to how I remembered them in Balance of Terror. Of course, that's inevitable, even explainable to a degree by this being a warped All Good Things... future which isn't quite right. But putting the new actors in a classic story was a mistake as it just makes it obvious that they're not playing them the same. Uhura didn't even have the hair! It's a great cast, some of the best characters I've seen in Star Trek, but I can only buy them as younger versions of the original cast. And I couldn't buy this version of Kirk at all. And the episode ends with Una getting arrested for lying about being an augment when she joined Starfleet. We learned from the flashforward that she's still in prison 7 years later, which is pretty extreme. Julian Bashir's dad only had to serve two years in minimum security! They must have been pretty short years though to be fair, considering how everyone looked basically the same in the future and still had the same jobs for the most part. So my final verdict for the episode: it's far less boring than Voyager's Flashback but basically the opposite of DS9's Trials and Tribble-ations, and it annoyed me so much that I'm not sure I even wanted to enjoy it. It's funny, but I think what bothered me most might be that they gave us a 'Strange New Worlds version' of the Monster Maroons. Those are from a 1982 theatrically released movie, so they don't even have the 'it's from a low-budget sixties show so we had to update it' excuse to justify it this time. They were seen unaltered in Star Trek Beyond just a few years ago! Strange New Worlds keeps bringing back things that people remember so it can take advantage of their existing emotional attachment, but it also wants to be new, so it changes everything it brings back! "Look, we've brought back the Alsatian you loved as a kid and now it's a Poodle!" Uh, thanks Star Trek? The final TOS episode challenge is A Quality of Mercy vs The Corbomite Maneuver. I'm not as keen on Corbomite Maneuver as a lot of people are because I find it to be incredibly padded. There are lots of scenes of characters just sitting there, waiting. But I think it has the edge over this time-travelling tale of magic crystals and shameless retcons. So the final scores are SNW: 4, TOS: 6! The Original Series wins, but it was close. Not a bad result for season 1 of a Trek spin-off.

CONCLUSION

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The first thing I want to say is that as its own thing Strange New Worlds is alright! It's certainly a lot better than Enterprise season 1, as it's full of life and enthusiasm and ideas. Plus after watching Discovery and Picard it's nice to have good characters talking like regular people and living in a universe that isn't off-putting and miserable. I admire the show's variety and its joy and the fact that it can finish a story in a single episode. Sure the dialogue's a bit goofy and the characters are a little unprofessional, but this is a series made with love, and I recognise and appreciate that.

But Strange New Worlds season 1 left me feeling miserable in the same way I did after watching Doctor Who's The Timeless Children and after beating Mass Effect 3. The kind of miserable that gets my brain fixated on trying to figure out what happened. What did the series do to make me feel this way?

2022 was a bit of an awkward time for modern Trek, with all the live action shows having serious flaws. Discovery season 4's issue for me was its characters and dialogue. Picard season 2's biggest problem was its plot. But I'd rank Strange New Worlds season 1 below both of them, because it has a far bigger flaw: it takes creative liberties.

The Star Trek franchise is one giant piece of collaborative artwork that started back in the mid-60s. A remarkably consistent imaginary universe, passed from one set of creators to another so they can expand on what's been established and push the story forward. And artists have typically used the opportunity to expand the canvas and fill in gaps without falling into the temptation of expressing their creativity by drawing metaphorical moustaches (or delta symbols) onto the art that's already there. TNG, DS9 and Enterprise all recreated the classic Enterprise looking just as it did, as did TOS Remastered and even Prodigy! The choice has been made already, the audience has been taught that there is visual continuity. Even the Klingon foreheads were explained. Which is good, because watching the older series is easier than ever. The Original Series is from the 60s, but it's not an ancient relic that only exists in the fuzzy memories of the oldest fans. People are watching it for the first time right now, because they have been given reason to think that it's still relevant. But Strange New Worlds suggests that maybe... it's not?

Okay, I get that the stories we get in any show or movie are a compromise between what the creators wanted to make and what reality let them make, and I know you can't just reproduce designs from a 60s TV show 100% precisely when you're making the main sets for a series in 2022. In fact, the last thing I want is for Strange New Worlds to look like a fan film. But what bothers me about the series is that it's often reimagining things to give us a writer's or designer's new vision instead of using its budget and technology and talent to reveal a greater level of in-universe truth underneath the imperfect production of the Original Series.

They've added lights in everyone's faces, glowing railings, distracting shiny floors, blinky lights high up on the wall where no one can read them, deltas on everyone's sleeves etc. Instead of getting closer to the imaginary reality that's been revealed over hundreds of episodes they've introduced a different kind of obvious unreality, updated for modern audiences! Sometimes the designers did a fantastic job, the props are damn near perfect for a prequel, but they're tiny on screen compared to things like the Romulan uniforms and the Enterprise herself.

I mean in-universe, what does the exterior of the USS Enterprise look like during Kirk's first five-year mission, generally? If you squint your eyes a bit. Here are the three options according to the flash-forward in the final episode of this season:

• The TOS ship is correct in-universe, the SNW ship is wrong.
• The SNW ship is correct in-universe, the TOS ship is wrong.
• Neither ship is correct in-universe, television is not yet powerful enough to represent its true form.

None of these options is really bringing a smile to my face, to be honest. And yeah I know some people can't tell the difference between the ships, that doesn't really help me while I'm watching it! If the Rodger Young or the Raza or the Rocinante had been updated I'd probably struggle to tell them apart too, but the Enterprise is one of the most iconic spaceships in history, just behind the Millennium Falcon and maybe the TARDIS; I can tell when it looks wrong..

Discovery annoyed me a bit at first, but it was distant enough from TOS in its time frame and location for me to be able to reconcile the two series, especially when the producers took steps to make them connect better in season 2. But Strange New Worlds is right on TOS's doorstep, and they're reimagining things as they begin to overlap! They're giving landing parties DNA disguises and beaming clothes onto them, characters like April and Hansen have been race-swapped, Chapel already knows about T'Pring, the Gorn are Xenomorphs now, the starships fly around like jet fighters... lots of little things, mostly inconsequential things when taken on their own, but they keep happening.

Especially in A Quality of Mercy which was just wall-to-wall retcons. I mean the Romulan bridge is green instead of purple. Even if you averaged out the image, blurred away the uniforms, bridge set, and makeup so that nothing remained but a block of solid colour, it would still be wrong. My mind is just seizing up thinking about this. What you're reading now is a print out of my brain's error messages.

One of the things that makes Star Trek work is the illusion that the storytellers know more than we do about its universe and they're revealing it to us. When the viewer notices that things contradict, it breaks that illusion and eventually the story collapses. It's like going to a maths class and finding that the teacher has some original ideas about what addition is; it makes the whole thing suspect. Writers have to build trust or else the audience can't relax and go along for the ride, and I'm all out of trust in the SNW writers.

Of course, the series is still in progress and things will continue to evolve over time, but I feel like the creators have put their cards on the table with episode 10. SNW comes across as the kind of TV show that considers any kind of continuity with previous series to be 'an Easter Egg for the fans', something we should be hyped to see. "Holy crap, they brought back the Gorn and they're awesome Xenomorphs now!" "They called the transporter guy Kyle, wow that's a deep cut!" It wants to be a version of Star Trek and do its own thing, while also counting on fans to cheer when Pike turns up wearing some horrible reimagining of the Monster Maroon uniform. Stories are told about people, but universes are created from details, and this keeps getting the details wrong.


tl;dr: I went with the angry rant instead of giving the season glowing praise.


My top three season 1 episodes:

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1. Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach (6)
2. All Those Who Wander (6)
3. Momento Mori (6)

You only have to glance at the scores to see that there's not really much separating these episodes for me. First seasons are difficult, but this is the first time in Trek history that I haven't handed out a single 7. No 8s or 9s either. This is partly because things keep bothering me and preventing me from getting into them and partly because these just aren't great stories in my subjective opinion. They certainly have good scenes, but there's no The City on the Edge of Forever, Conspiracy, Duet, State of Flux or The Andorian Incident here for me.


Bottom three season 1 episodes:

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8. The Serene Squall (6)
9. The Elysian Kingdom (6)
10. A Quality of Mercy (3)

Right after watching A Quality of Mercy I decided to rate it a 6 and rank it somewhere in the middle of the season. SNW's cast, writing, and production values are at the level where the series doesn't really do bad episodes. But it's the anti-Trials and Tribbleations and it left me feeling absolutely miserable, so I'm revising that score.

The Elysian Kingdom gets second worst place because it was one of those 'the whole cast is there but only two of them are playing their characters' stories and they're typically not my thing. Especially when it feels like Melissa Navia has had more to do as a fantasy knight than as Ortegas this season.


Next time on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds:

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I don't think it really matters what I want from Strange New Worlds' second season, as I likely won't be getting it. The writers are happy with what they did for the first season, the fans and critics loved it, so it's just going to to carry on being... this. Honestly, the only reason I'm going to be sticking with the series is because of a certain upcoming episode with the initials 'TOS'.

But my hope for the other Star Trek series is that they continue to ignore Strange New Worlds' retcons and stick with the established Trek universe. Let SNW be an Elseworlds if that's what it really wants to be.

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COMING SOON

Thanks for reading! If you've got anything you want to say about Strange New Worlds' first season, you can leave a message in the box below.

I'm all out of Star Trek reviews for a while so I think it's time to give Doctor Who some attention. Next, on Sci-Fi Adventures, it's the Ninth Doctor story The End of the World.