I went back and forth over whether I wanted to write a full post for this season of "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds," because there are no major changes to the status quo and there are no major deviations in quality or production to discuss. There aren't any interesting new characters introduced, except Ortegas's brother Beto (Mynor Luken) and Chapel's new love interest Dr. Korby (Cillian O'Sullivan) in recurring roles, and hardly even any guest stars of note.
However, as "Star Trek" is moving into another transitional phase, I think it's worth taking stock of how the best regarded "Trek" show of the streaming era is doing. This is definitely a less experimental, less risk-taking year. Despite some of the grumblings I've heard, only three of the ten episodes are comedic ones. A few others break the show's standard format, but for the most part "Star Trek" is focused on pretty straightforward adventuring this season. Captain Pike's love interest, Captain Marie Batel, is onboard the Enterprise for most of this year and is at the center of several of the ongoing plot arcs. Unfortunately, these arcs are pretty badly handled, ultimately culminating in an incoherent finale that's resolved with the worst kind of random science-fiction gobbledegook.
The individual stand-alone episodes, fortunately, are much better. The plots are familiar stuff to "Star Trek" watchers, but the execution is very strong. There's a holodeck mystery episode, a funny wedding episode, an "Enemy Mine" scenario, a documentary expose episode, and one where multiple regulars get turned into Vulcan versions of themselves. However, the highlight of the season is "The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail," where James T. Kirk gets an early test of his leadership skills when the Enterprise is attacked by unknown enemies. It's classic old school science fiction of the best kind, and still has room for action beats and a little of Pelia's kookiness. The versatility of "Strange New Worlds" is what I appreciate the most about it, because all of these stories are able to exist very comfortably together in the same season.
On the relationship front, Spock and Chapel are firmly no longer a thing, with both of them seeing other people. The breakup takes a while to process, but I'm just glad these two aren't paired together anymore, because the relationship always struck me as awfully juvenile and a little out of character for "Star Trek." The show's romances remain largely on the back burner, playing out as a secondary concern to whatever the adventure of the week is, but I do appreciate that the writers take the care to develop them fairly realistically, using them to explore parts of the characters that we wouldn't see otherwise.
There are a lot of callbacks to the original '60s "Star Trek," and every time the future Captain Kirk shows up, there's a lot of pointed foreshadowing of the crew's future adventures together. However, as someone with only a cursory knowledge of the first "Star Trek" series, this never got in the way of my enjoyment of "Strange New Worlds." I completely forgot that certain characters were part of the old show at times, because I've become attached to the current incarnations. In fact, I'm getting worried about the fates of the ones who aren't, particularly La'an and M'Benga.
I have a few minor nitpicks about things like how often certain characters are featured (or not featured), and the finale really was an awful flop, but overall this was a good season and gave me nearly everything I want out of a "Star Trek" show. We've got sixteen episodes over two seasons left to go, with Paramount+ shifting its attention over to the new "Star Trek: Starfleet Academy" series. It's a shame, because I think that "Strange New Worlds" has the potential to go for several more seasons in this vein. However, I'm also glad that the show isn't outstaying its welcome.
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