Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (2022)
Follow Captain Christopher Pike, Science Officer Spock and Number One in the years before Captain Kirk boarded the U.S.S. Enterprise, as they explore new worlds around the galaxy.
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What critics say influenced Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
Ah, so new opening credits this season? Just like TNG did in season 3!
Fans watching during the golden age of The Next Generation, Voyager, and Deep Space 9 know this feeling of anticipation and excitement well.
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.
The writing this season nails the middle ground between the silly-but-sometimes-smart space operatics of the original series and the warm surrogate-family vibe of The Next Generation.
…or the tragedy in TNG’s “The Wounded” of Captain Ben Maxwell, who never got over the loss of his family in the Cardassian War and almost brought the Federation into another war as a result?
Of course, this isn’t the first time Star Trek has done a “disaster in space” episode. Just look at TNG’s appropriately named “Disaster” for starters.
Fans watching during the golden age of The Next Generation, Voyager, and Deep Space 9 know this feeling of anticipation and excitement well.
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?
Deep Space Nine’s “The Reckoning,” which featured a showdown between a Pah-wraith-possessed Jake Sisko and an equally (if Prophet-inhabited) possessed Kira Nerys…
Strange New Worlds is the most fully functional live-action Star Trek series of the new era, and it currently feels like it could, and should, at least reach the seven-season mark that felt like the natural ends for The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager.
I had forgotten that Benny Russell, Captain Sisko’s alter ego from Deep Space Nine’s “Far Beyond the Stars” and “Shadows and Symbols,” was revealed to be the author of the book The Kingdom of Elysian back in Season 1.
DS9: "Take Me Out to the Holosuite"…
Now, any horror story set on a starship inevitably evokes comparisons to the greatest sci-fi horror film ever, 1979's "Alien."
There's few things that creep me out more in science fiction than characters finding an abandoned spaceship (think "Alien" or "Dead Space").
…the Gorn have paid homage to the Alien films since their reintroduction…
His girlfriend, Captain Batel (Melanie Scrofano), winds up infected by the lethal creatures, meaning that she’s facing an Alien-esque eruption of Baby Gorn if Nurse Chapel (Jess Bush) can’t figure out a solution.
…with the Enterprise under siege by the Gorn, who are apparently now on loan from the Alien franchise…
…some big-time gore the likes of which we haven’t seen since Star Trek: Discovery Season 1, when that show was flirting with how far it was willing to push the sex and violence factor in the new-for-the-franchise streaming space.
Episodic storytelling is what sets it apart from Star Trek: Discovery, and in this case, that’s a good thing.
But Strange New Worlds has never been serialized in quite the same way as Star Trek: Discovery or, especially, Star Trek: Picard, the latter of which essentially told one big story each season.
…since we know that class of ship wasn’t introduced until after the war (as seen in Star Trek: Discovery’s second season).
…the vision of the terrible future that Christopher Pike (Anson Mount) saw in Star Trek: Discovery…
His fate is one that he foresaw while picking up the time crystal during season 2 of Star Trek: Discovery.
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Fans watching during the golden age of The Next Generation, Voyager, and Deep Space 9 know this feeling of anticipation and excitement well.
Una (Rebecca Romijn) and Uhura (Celia Gooding) finally get a moment to shine in an episode reminiscent of Star Trek: Voyager’s “The Killing Game.”
Strange New Worlds is the most fully functional live-action Star Trek series of the new era, and it currently feels like it could, and should, at least reach the seven-season mark that felt like the natural ends for The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager.
Strange New Worlds also finds time to pay an artful homage to a B'Elanna Torres (Roxann Dawson) Voyager adventure.
…will Pike get a visit from one of the temporal agents that appeared in Enterprise or Voyager?
But as Star Trek: Voyager’s Captain Janeway once told us, the best way to make sense of temporal paradoxes is simply not to try.
This episode is a straight-up horror story, like "The Shining" on a starship, as Jim Kirk (Paul Wesley), Spock, and La'an are trapped on the Griffin, an abandoned ship that may be genuinely haunted.
…some real Jack Torrance on New Year’s Eve 1921 shit…
La’An starts to turn into Jack Torrance, stalking the others with that dagger…
That she is both now and apparently has always been the Beholder is a bit of timey-wimey gobbledygook worthy of that franchise featuring the time-traveling Doctor that Pelia once hung out with…
…it’s all terrible in the delightful way that often makes old school Doctor Who so entertaining…
Fans have spent years discussing the many similarities and overlaps between the sci-fi elder statesmen Star Trek and Doctor Who, and both franchises have delighted in slipping in references to the other at various points in their recent canon.
Another Doctor Who reference. That’ll do at this point, Pelia, that’ll do.
Pelia (Carol Kane) says she once witnessed from inside “a phone box,” a claim that opens up all sorts of questions about shared science fiction universes that would seem to demand more follow-up, though no one asks for it. (Doctor Who won’t be the episode’s last sci-fi reference, direct or otherwise.)
Where Star Trek: Picard truly felt cinematic this past season, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is a showcase for the classic episodic television that the franchise is known for.
…allowing it to cast off the chains of cause and effect that bind together each episode of Discovery and Picard.
After Star Trek: Picard delivered an entirely serialized story — particularly with its third, widely beloved season…
…unlike Picard and Discovery…
But Strange New Worlds has never been serialized in quite the same way as Star Trek: Discovery or, especially, Star Trek: Picard, the latter of which essentially told one big story each season.
…with projects like Lower Decks, Starfleet Academy, and even Picard bringing back characters and storylines from the era of Kate Mulgrew's Captain Kathryn Janeway…
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…experience a touch of space madness goes full Event Horizon by episode’s end…
There’s a drug-trip episode, a noir episode, a puppet episode, and what to me will always be (perhaps because I watched it shortly after Sam Neill’s passing) the “Event Horizon” episode.
…an attempt at immortality had the Event Horizon–like side effect of bringing something really, really bad into their dimension…
…which may or may not be the closest thing the Federation has to The X-Files.
…referring to the mysterious, X-Files-like Starfleet department that investigates, for lack of a better term, weird space shit…