Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Review: A Journey to Places We’ve Gone Before

Much of what the series offers can’t help but come off as clever franchise strategizing.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
Photo: Paramount+

Jeffrey Hunter played Christopher Pike, the contemplative, melancholic, and outwardly misogynist original captain of the Starship Enterprise, in the initial Star Trek pilot, “The Cage.” He was more abrasive, and arguably more interesting, than his eventual replacement, William Shatner’s Captain Kirk. In the prequel series Discovery, Pike is played by Anson Mount, whose performance dispensed with Hunter’s suggestion of seething masculine resentment, substituting it with an easygoing, smirking charisma that’s reminiscent of Kirk.

Mount’s breezy confidence brought the pulpy clarity of early Star Trek to Discovery and, now, Strange New Worlds, the 12th TV series in the franchise’s history (and the sixth to arrive on Paramount+). The series is primarily aimed at audiences hungry for such esoteric delights as meeting Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding) when she’s still a cadet and discovering the backstory of Oona “Number One” Chin-Riley (Rebecca Romijn). No doubt both characters could have used more fleshing out, but there’s something tiresome about the excessive fealty to the Star Trek canon evidenced by the predominance of legacy characters in Strange New Worlds.

At times, the riffing on Star Trek’s golden age can feel truly excessive. In the five episodes made available to press, we get teased with the prospective appearance of a “Lieutenant Kirk,” we return to Vulcan for a restaging of the mating duel from the original series episode “Amok Time,” and we meet younger versions not only of Uhuru, Spock, and Number One, but also Nurse Chapel (Jess Bush) and Spock’s fiancée, T’Pring (Gia Sandhu). Paeans to the United Federation of Planets, which have become de rigueur since fans and producers alike misinterpreted the problems with Discovery’s early seasons, dot the episodes as part of Strange New Worlds’s evident will to strike a decidedly optimistic note.

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But despite all its prequel baggage, the series somehow feels freer than its contemporaries, perhaps because it’s thus far unsaddled by a serialized story arc, unlike Picard and Discovery. The latter—and the more promising of the two—has been pulled in contradictory dramatic directions throughout its four seasons, with its current pivot to an ensemble format seeming like a hollow gesture after three seasons of galactic family melodrama. What Strange New Worlds seems to understand from the outset is that Star Trek is part jaunty space opera, part conference-room procedural. Sentiment is merely supplemental.

In tone, Strange New Worlds is most conspicuously a throwback to the 1960s series, but in structure and story it has most in common with the Trek-verse as it existed in the ’90s. The eponymous first episode centers Mount’s Pike, but the remaining four spread the spotlight around, with intertwining A and B plots giving other characters room to breathe.

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Serial elements are de-emphasized in favor of broadly defined character arcs, and each episode constitutes a self-contained adventure. There’s a surprisingly thrilling episode-long space battle with the reptilian Gorn in episode four, “Memento Mori”; a familiar “disappeared colony” mystery in episode three, “Ghosts of Ilyria”; and some diplomatic intrigue in episodes two, “Children of the Comet,” and five, “Spock Amok” (though, as the Vulcan characters complain, the latter skirts much closer to hijinks than intrigue).

There are some new characters on board, but the show mostly offers reinterpretations of figures that Trekkies have met before. Peck’s Spock makes the character’s well-established but sexual appeal less of an enigma, with a scene giving us an extended look at the now-muscular torso of everyone’s favorite Vulcan. Showrunners Akiva Goldsman and Robert Kurtzman cleverly incorporate Pike’s well-known grisly fate into the pilot, establishing him as a Byronic hero whose knowledge of the future accident that will paralyze and disfigure him fills him with the kind of existential uncertainty familiar from his characterization in “The Cage.”

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While the depictions of Spock and Pike resonate with prior versions of the characters, it feels a bit more like the producers have hit the reset button with Uhura and Chapel, which isn’t an entirely unwise approach to female characters first conceived of by men in the mid-’60s. Gooding plays Uhura as doe-eyed, gifted youngster, lacking the professionalism and occasional sass that she displayed on the original series but also less apt to extemporaneously perform song and dance numbers for her male crewmates. Chapel’s reimagining as a quirky, mischievous loose cannon doesn’t feel based on anything in Majel Barrett’s original performance, but it gives the character something to do other than pine for Spock.

The first six episodes are fun, light, and well-crafted, but much of what Strange New Worlds offers can’t help but come off as clever franchise strategizing. Beloved characters who need to be in a certain place at a certain time will be placed there; those whose attributes bespeak a space-age American mentality will be tweaked to be acceptable to the Trekkie of the 21st century; and the “strange new worlds” will be balanced by familiar worlds and situations. There’s no doubt that Strange New Worlds both counts as the most successful of the new Star Trek shows and is still, in crucial ways, determined to only go where we’ve gone before.

Score: 
 Cast: Anson Mount, Ethan Peck, Rebecca Romijn, Christina Chong, Jess Bush, Celia Rose Gooding, Babs Olusanmokun, Gia Sandhu  Network: Paramount+  Buy: Amazon

Pat Brown

Pat Brown teaches Film Studies and American Studies in Germany. His writing on film and media has appeared in various scholarly journals and critical anthologies.

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