By Joshua Tyler
| Published
There are fans who hate everything new Trek has done, but that’s not nuanced enough. We all hate Star Trek: Discovery, of course, but Lower Decks was great, and so was the third season of Star Trek: Picard.
Then there’s Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, a show that kicked things off with a great first season. It seemed poised to carry the franchise torch forward, and I want to love it.
Now, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is in trouble. The show’s quality has declined season after season. Rather than evolving and growing, the Anson Mount-led series has devolved.
Strange New Worlds still has two seasons left, which means it’s not too late to fix it. So I’ve put together this handy, easy-to-use guide to fixing the show and bringing it to a crescendo of realized potential.
This is what needs to happen, what must happen, to save Star Trek: Strange New Worlds from itself.
Step 1: Narrow The Ensemble
Strange New Worlds started out with a big primary cast, and it’s gotten bigger every season, diluting the show.
Captain Pike (Anson Mount) is theoretically the series lead, but his screen time is increasingly limited. Number One (Rebecca Romijn) is barely on the show, Sam Kirk (Dan Jeannotte) is a punchline, and Ortegas (Melissa Navia) goes entire episodes without more than a single line.
Instead, we spend time with Erica’s little brother (Mynor Luken), who just showed up out of nowhere and is now in every episode. Captain Pike’s girlfriend, Captain Batel (Melanie Scrofano), now seems to live on the ship. Oh, look, now James Kirk (Paul Wesley) is here again. Hey, let’s add a new chief engineer! Now let’s bring in Scotty (Martin Quinn) to be the chief engineer’s assistant! What about a second helm officer named Mitchell (Rong Fu)? Let’s give her a character arc. Nurse Chapel (Jess Bush) has a new boyfriend? Let’s add him to the cast, too.
It’s overstuffed, and the show’s storytelling ability is being handicapped by the need to fit in so many characters. Speaking of characters…
Step 2: Tell Stories About Ideas, Not Characters
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has become a character-driven program. The show’s scripts revolve around people, and when the writers run out of ideas, they just add more people. That’s probably why the cast size has gotten so out of hand.
The bigger problem with this is that Star Trek is not a character-driven franchise. It is supposed to be about ideas. All of the show’s most beloved and iconic episodes are about big questions, deep understanding, and the nature of our universe and the people in it.
That was always what made Star Trek special. It’s what made it different from everything else. When your stories are character-driven instead of idea-driven, your show becomes like any other random television show.
I don’t need to know every detail of Nurse Chapel’s history and personal life. I can get that on any random soap opera. The original series barely told us anything about the show’s main characters; what we learned about them was a function of what happened along the way as part of their adventures. All I know about Deanna Troi is that she liked chocolate and once dated Will Riker. It was better that way.
On the other hand, Strange New Worlds spends a lot of time on weddings, bar hangouts, and endless dating. It’s become as much a soap opera as it is an adventure series. And we already have plenty of soap operas on television. Speaking of romance…
Step 3: Stop Involving Spock In Romance
Because of a sixty-second scene in the original Star Trek in which a Spock (Leonard Nimoy) under the influence briefly expressed interest in Nurse Chapel, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has now subjected us to three seasons of non-stop Spock (Ethan Peck) dating episodes.
It was cute in season one when he was dealing with his fiancée. It got boring when he got involved with Christine, and now it’s become ridiculous that he’s screwing La’an (Christina Chong) just because they danced together once.
The show’s writers seem to take special delight in turning Star Trek’s beacon of rationality and logic into a lovesick sap who can’t stop making out with every woman who crosses his path. It’s literally a key piece of every single Strange New Worlds episode now. Spock can’t enter a turbo lift, much less go on an away mission, without getting involved in some romantic girl drama.
It’s too much. Even Captain Kirk, operating at peak male performance, wasn’t this girl crazy.
Step 4: Stop Being Silly, Think Of The Audience
Star Trek has always had lighthearted moments. Spock and McCoy teasing each other at the end of original series episodes was always a highlight of the show. Now and then, they’d do a full episode, which was a little goofy, like the one where Kirk has to learn to drive a stick shift on a gangster planet.
Subsequent Star Trek series and films followed that formula. They tried to hit a middle ground where they told serious stories with a few lighthearted moments.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has thrown all that out the window. The show does only ten episodes a season and spends five of them on joke episodes, farcical re-creations, puppet pantomimes, and full-on musicals. It’s like watching a high school drama club on a starship.
Cut it out. If you want to do that many silly episodes, you need to increase your overall episode total. If you want to do five just kidding episodes, you need 24 episodes a season. You get one joke episode a season if you’re only doing ten. Only one. Any more than that is self-indulgent.
Strange New Worlds should be less interested in making sure the cast is having fun and more interested in making sure the audience is getting something out of it. That stopped happening shortly after the end of season one.
Step 5: Visit Some Planets, Brighten Up And Build
The strangest thing about Strange New Worlds is that it no longer visits any planets. Every once in a while, they beam down and run around inside a building for a minute, but that’s about it.
The first season was filled with exploration, and the second had a decent number of scenes on the ground. But the third season refuses to do anything it can’t film in front of an LED wall, which mostly means ship interiors. Or, if they’re feeling spendy, building interiors that look like obvious green screen work.
New planets mean new sets to build and new alien makeup designs to create. That’s a lot of work. So, instead of putting in some elbow grease, on the rare occasion the Enterprise crew does leave the ship, they usually end up on a dark and mostly empty environment where you can’t see much.
For instance, in an episode where they are supposed to investigate ancient ruins, they spend all their time in a dark, empty room with some vague stuff happening dimly lit in the distance. That’s not fun.
It’s an annoying contrast to scenes on the ship, which are brightly lit, filled with color and contrast. That bright and hopeful look was initially the show’s strength, a strength they’ve abandoned.
Build some actual sets and stop relying on that damned LED wall so much. It’s not fooling anyone, no matter how dimly you project it.
Show us a weird-colored sky and alien sun, a huge stone temple where you actually build pillars and structures your actors can interact with and lean on. At this point, I’d settle for a papier-maché boulder.
I’m sure there’s a budgetary excuse for all of it, but it’s killing the show, and I’m here to tell you how to fix it, not how to afford it.
Step 6: Come Up With Your Own Ideas
Strange New Worlds has become increasingly less unique. The first season had a few original series callbacks mixed in with a few fresh stories. The second season skewed more toward cribbing from other people’s notebooks, and the third season has had five straight episodes of ripping things off. The show now feels like it’s outsourced all its script writing to Grok.
Season 3’s first episode was a ripoff of The Next Generation’s “The Best of Both Worlds.” The second brought in Trelaine from the original series. The third was a hackey zombie episode. The fourth was a budget holodeck episode borrowed from Next Gen’s Dixon Hill adventures. The fifth is a knockoff of the movie Event Horizon with a bit of the Next Gen episode “Conspiracy” mixed in.
The show is called Strange NEW Worlds. New is the reason it exists. Do something new. Something fresh. Something that’s all your idea. Take a risk.
It’s Not Too Late To Save Strange New Worlds
In theory, Strange New Worlds is done after season 5. But Trek’s parent company, Paramount, recently completed a buyout by Skydance, and their new owners are re-evaluating everything.
If Strange New Worlds enters its fifth season with big ratings and strong fan support, it may have a future beyond season 5. But right now, the show is devolving. Not only will it end, but future fans will ignore and forget it in favor of better past Trek offerings.
Star Trek fans want to love Strange New Worlds. Follow this roadmap, and they will.
