Boldly Going Barely Anywhere

Wow, that was an uneven season. By now, if you’ve read much of this site you should know that I really like Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Of “New Trek” it’s my favorite series so far, with Lower Decks riding right behind. I felt that many of the individual Strange New Worlds episodes of the first season were great, while the second season was narratively better (even if the episodes didn’t quite hit the highs of the first). And that’s to say nothing of the charismatic cast, or the production team that finally felt like they understood how to make good Star TrekOriginally conceived as "Wagon Train in Space", Star Trek was released during the height of the Hollywood Western film and TV boom. While the concept CBS originally asked for had a western vibe, it was the smart, intellectual stories set in a future utopia of science and exploration that proved vital to the series' long impact on popular culture. in this (Alex Kurtzman-led) era for the universe.

But this third season is a real dog. The episodes are generally worse, the overarching storylines of the season don’t work, and nothing really comes together. The cast do what they can with underwritten scripts that will swing wildly in tone from one scene to the next, but there’s only so much you can do to save a sinking ship, and it does feel like the ship for Strange New Worlds is sinking. While this isn’t the worst season of Star Trek I’ve ever watched (most seasons of Discovery and Picard were much, much worse), this marks a lower for this season in comparison to what came before, and you have to wonder if the production team can pull the show out of this tailspin.

And yes, I know that the production team has stated that they know this season was bad and they’ll work to make the next one even better. They blame it on the 2023 Writers’ Strike and how they didn’t have as much time to make this season as they did for the previous seasons (this despite the season getting delayed by an entire extra year). But here’s the thing with that: this is a streaming show. You don’t have the same kind of forced schedules with streaming as you would with network TV. There’s no such thing as “sweeps weeks”, you don’t have to plan around specific events, you don’t need to worry about start and end dates in the same way. If your show needs time (say, another year), your production lead (Alex Kurtzman, in this case) should get the time for you to do it right. If they didn’t, that’s either on the network or on the production team’s own hubris, and throwing the Writers’ Union under the bus feels like them dodging out on the blame they earned because it was a bad season.

It was, absolutely, a terrible season. We aren’t going to go in detail episode by episode, but you can see even early on just how the show fails to understand how to tell its stories at all. We start with the second half of the two-season, two-parter, “Hegemony, Part II”, which sees Pike and the gang having to battle the Gorn while some of his kidnapped crew battle the Gorn from within the alien enemy’s own ship. It’s an episode that should feel dark and harrowing, and at times it does, but then the show pulls out some Star Trek-level technobabble, things get easily dispatched with minimal effort, and all we’re left with are some characters experiencing PTSD that then goes largely ignored for much of the season…

And then the next episode is a light and funny, frothy Spock episode. He’s visited by a very powerful, god-like being (maybe a Q?), who decides to rewrite reality so that Spock can be with the girl that just dumped him, Christine Chapel. Suddenly it’s the day before their wedding and the only two people that don’t know anything is wrong are Spock (who suddenly gets knocked out of his deliriously happy mode) and Christine’s new boyfriend, Roger Korby. This is a cute and funny episode that feels tonally at odds with the first episode of the season, which isn’t helped by the fact the two episodes came out on the same day as the premiere for the season. It’s tonal whiplash, the kind of writing mistake someone should have caught when they laid all the episodes out and said, “should we really have the frothy Spock marriage episode right next to the one where members of the Enterprise crew have to battle for their life through the heart of a Gorn ship?”

No, they should not, and many of the episodes show that same problem, either in their placement to other episodes, or just within the bounds of their own narrative structure. We go from a zombie episode the next week (which isn’t even a good zombie episode, if we’re being honest) where the good doctor M’Benga admits to being a war criminal into another cute and silly holodeck episode the following week. There’s absolutely no narrative structure at all to this season, with stories simply happening because the production team had ten episodes to write and it feels like they went with the first ten ideas they came up with.

Characters also lack needed arcs to make us care about them this season. Previous seasons slow rolled the love story between Spock and Christine, or the mounting tension in the relationship between Christopher Pike and fellow Captain, and lover, Marie Batel. But this season, despite having plenty of episodes focused on their characters, Chris and Marie barely share any time to discuss where they are, even after she’s infected with Gorn DNA and slowly starts changing into something else. They only address her condition when it’s narratively convenient and then dismiss her as a character other times. And when they want Spock and La’An to fall in love, it happens in one episode, out of nowhere, simply because. That’s not good storytelling, it’s bad writing 101.

And all of this is on top of the fact that the show seems to keep playing around with the legacy characters in ways that clearly don’t make sense in the larger continuity. Spock and Christine getting married is something we, as the audience, would be more concerned about if it felt like, in any way, the show would actually commit to that change despite both characters not wanting it even a day beforehand. But because this is a prequel series, we already know they won’t get married so that drains all the narrative tension out of the story before it can even get going. Will the show leave Chris Pike and Joseph M’Benga on a zombie planet to die? Absolutely not because they both have narrative plot armor by grace of the fact they show up in TThe Original Series. Nothing that happens until then really matters.

Even when the show actually focuses on a new character and gives them a story that feels different and interesting it still manages to drop the ball. Erica Ortegas, having very quickly gotten over her PTSD in the span of half a season (I’d say spoilers but the show barely addresses it) then gets herself marooned on a desolate planet on the other side of a wormhole and has to work with a stranded Gorn pilot to find a way to survive. It’s actually a pretty good episode (even if it has some basic, structural problems) but then the show ruins it by tying the episode, “Terrarium”, into the classic series episode “Arena” as if to say, “it’s a prequel episode in a prequel series. Isn’t that interesting?!” It was not.

And don’t even get me started on “What Is Starfleet?”, an episode filmed like a documentary that seems to ask the question, “is Starfleet a dictatorship?” before it then completely drops the question and says, “Starfleet is a family, and isn’t that nice?” So many episodes do this, raising an intriguing idea, only to then scuff the whole plotline right when it counts. “What if four crew members were changed into Vulcans and Sock, the half Vulcan, had to deal with their bigotry? Who cares! Let’s do another frothy Spock episode!”

Seriously, the show needs to do more serious things with Spock and stop being quite so silly. I like silly Spock episodes, but I didn’t need three of them in one season. It’s too much, and it shows just how much the production team failed to understand what was working about this show going into season three. At every turn they made the wrong decisions, did the wrong story, found a way to screw everything up time and again to make a worse version of this show than they’d had before. It’s baffling.

I still want to like Strange New Worlds. Many of the ideas in the season were fun, and quite a number of the episodes had good moments even if they didn’t once actually stick the landing. Nothing really works, but I can see how, somewhere in all this mess, the bones of the show are still good. They just need to pull it together, sit down, and really plan out a proper season for next year. Strange New Worlds has, effectively, one-and-a-half seasons to go (a full season four and a season five with one six episodes instead of the full ten) and you have to hope they can right the ship.

Because, if not, it’s going to be a rough sixteen episodes to come before we’re done with this series. I don’t want to see that. This show was charting such a great legacy until this season. I really don’t want to see them throw it all away.