Can Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Get Back On Track After a Poor Third Season?

The one bright spot in Paramount’s live-action Star Trek offerings has drastically dimmed. Strange New Worlds is comfortably the best modern Star Trek show (that’s not animated), or at least it used to be. The first two seasons were good fun, and while the standalone episodes were hit-or-miss in nature, there were more hits than misses for me. In its recent third season, the ratio flipped. Hard. Season 3 is a poor season of television, the weaker aspects of the series coming to dominate and the proven successes frustratingly backgrounded. With two more seasons incoming, including a shorter fifth season to wrap up the series, can Strange New Worlds get back on track?

Thankfully the anthology format means that even if the previous episode was bad there’s always hope for the next. At least, that’s what I kept telling myself while suffering through the third season. When it ended I could only say I liked one or two of the ten episodes. And not a particularly strong liking either. Because while each instalment might be self-contained to an extent, the same sensibilities run throughout. And I’m scratching my head at some of the tonal and serialised elements that have pervaded.

I don’t understand why the writers are so set on making the series a bad comedy show when it has proven it is much better as a more serious drama. Some jokes, some character comedy, a little lightness, that’s all fine. That’s Star Trek. But the show is obsessed with slowly morphing into a live action version of Lower Decks. Yet that animated series not only handled comedy much better, it also managed to be a great Trek show, telling thoughtful dramatic stories while doing so. In its third season, Strange New Worlds began to feel like a parody of Star Trek.

My two favourite episodes of SNW are Ad Astra Per Aspera, a solid, serious courtroom episode, and Under the Cloak of War, a dark character study that echoed the kind of plots Deep Space Nine would tackle. Two genuinely good dramatic episodes, the likes of which are nowhere to be found in season 3. The best we get are another ‘the ship is on the verge of destruction’ episode, The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail, which was fine but that kind of story has gotten old. And then Terrarium was probably my favourite of the season, and that is as generic, algorithmically-produced an episode of Star Trek that can exist, consisting of scenes we’ve seen a million times before executed competently; at least it felt like the franchise.

I’d like them to be more original but Terrarium is the kind of episode future seasons of this show needs: instalments that feel like genuine, sincere Star Trek. Sincerity was lacking this season. It all felt like a big joke that neither the writers or actors could take seriously. The writers are so obsessed with gimmick episodes that that is all the show has become. They are fine when interspaced with regular episodes but they cannot successfully compose the majority of a season. The Lower Decks crossover episode in season 2 was great, and the musical episode kinda won me over (the weak songs were the issue more than the concept).

Season 3 was just wall-to-wall novelty episodes, enough to break the pact any TV show has with an audience: that what we’re watching is taken seriously enough to believe it to be happening. It made the incredibly simple and generic Terrarium, a completely unnotable episode in any other season, seem like sweet succour. My main hope for the fourth season, and the fifth, is that there are less novelty episodes and more regular adventures. No alt realties, no dress up, no characters acting differently, just missions. If the season 3 episodes were spaced out across five seasons then I wouldn’t have an issue but it was insufferable having them one after the other. Please, just a few episodes in a row that are sincere hours of Star Trek.

Of course, it’s not just the concepts but the execution, too. A in-universe documentary episode? I think that’s a great idea. The actual episode we got I thought was terrible, because it was less a documentary and more a YouTube video essay that felt incredibly obnoxious, in both production value and message, and I couldn’t work out whether it was supposed to be terrible on purpose. Even the finale I thought was handled poorly. It was so fantastical, more magic than science, that it didn’t feel like Star Trek and wasted a decent Pike story while it was at it.

Pike is such an underserved character with massive potential. He should be feeling immortal, knowing his fate could make him reckless, willing to take on danger knowing he’ll be okay, so the idea his girlfriend is the one who dies is a great twist that throws him for a loop. We could have had a season of him feeling invulnerable and then a season of him coming to realise he can’t think that way, that he’s obsessed with his own fate he’s forgotten about those close to him, his concept of danger and death contorted. Instead, it’s all compressed into half an episode that feels like a generic fantasy show. It makes me sad to see Anson Mount wasted. Pike is a nonentity on the show he’s supposed to captain.

Meanwhile Spock is always pushed to the forefront but they can’t really do much of anything with his character because TOS is around the corner. This prequel doesn’t line up with the original show in my mind, I view SNW the same way I do the Kelvin timeline, it’s own thing, which is fine. But the writers are stuck with one storyline for Spock: romance. Why? La’an and him getting together, despite having no chemistry and never before insinuating that they liked each other was the weirdest moment of the season for me. And the romance is never explored as a genuine characterful storyline. La’an is sidelined so Chapel’s jealousy can take centre stage, but the show did nothing with the Chapel/Spock relationship when that was a thing. The show is obsessed with romantic subplots, everyone gets one (Uhura’s being the worst with Ortegas’ bland brother), and I’d be okay with this being a theme of the season if it ultimately meant something but the writers have nothing to say about it. It’s just cheap melodrama.

There’s a lot of whining in the Star Trek fandom and I don’t like adding to it (he says after a thousand words of whining) but Strange New Worlds has potential. There’s good stuff there. It was much more prominent in the first two seasons but then the third took the show in a sillier insincere direction, the franchise now a far cry from the bastion of science fiction storytelling it once was. It’s just the basics that need changing. More Star trek-y plots taken seriously, visiting more strange new worlds (to make the series finally live up to the title), and alien dignitaries visiting the ship, with character-rich plots for the main cast rather than just the characters we know already. More Pike, less Kirk. Although I’ll take Scotty over Pelia, who I cannot understand without subtitles, and then when I can understand her I wish I couldn’t.

Simply, make it more classically Star Trek, like the intention originally was with this show, rather than running through a list of gimmicks. But, of course, the one thing that we do know about the fourth season is that there’s a puppet episode, so I’m not holding my breath.