We here at Nerdist love Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. We don’t mean to disparage other modern Star Trek iterations like Discovery or Picard, which all have their virtues. But SNW was a breath of fresh air, a return to the classic kind of storytelling, born out of a 1960s “New Frontier” style optimism, in a way we hadn’t seen in a long time. The excellent cast, led by Anson Mount, Rebecca Romijn, and Ethan Peck as Spock, became instant fan favorites. It was also a return to stand-alone, “adventure of the week” episodes, which had gone away with the advent of the streaming era. It created a lot of new fans, and brought back a lot of lapsed Trekkers. But for us, Strange New Worlds has stumbled in season three. This stumble is most evident in the recent episode “A Space Adventure Hour.”
Every Star Trek series has leaned into comedy, sometimes several times a season. One of the most beloved episodes of TOS, “The Tribble with Tribbles,” is essentially a sitcom episode in space. The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and even Enterprise continued the tradition of having at least one comedic episode per season. Many of them are classics. But those shows contained 26 episodes per year. When you only have ten episodes a season, like SNW does, and a third of them are just goofy farces, it just fundamentally changes what the show is.
One of the most egregious examples was the recent “A Space Adventure Hour,” a holodeck adventure taking place in a simulation of 1960s Hollywood. Security Chief La’an (Christina Chong) poses as her favorite fictional 20th-century private investigator, trying to solve a murder mystery. If this sounds like the TNG episode “Elementary, Dear Data,” where Data poses as Sherlock Holmes for a holodeck adventure, it’s because it’s basically the same episode. But this version chose to go full meta in references to Star Trek itself as a franchise, and by doing so, we’re afraid Strange New Worlds might have just jumped the Andorian shark.
Much of the episode pokes fun at the original Star Trek series, or, more truthfully, how someone views the original series if they can’t see past the plywood sets and sexy mini-skirts. The original show was all of those things, to be certain. But usually, it tried to say something about our real world within the framework of what they had to work with. The main players of SNW each play thinly veiled counterparts of famous people associated with the classic show. Paul Wesley plays Maxwell Saint, a stand-in for William Shatner. Anson Mount plays a TV producer clearly based on Trek creator Gene Roddenberry. Needless to say, neither portrayal was very kind to either individual.
Rebecca Romijn comes off a little better. Here, she plays a Hollywood actress entering the world of producing, and whose first show is a sci-fi series. This is yet another reference to behind-the-scenes Star Trek history, as TV legend Lucille Ball’s Desilu Productions financed the original Star Trek pilot. Lucy sunk a lot of her own capital into launching the series. Simply, there is no Star Trek franchise without Lucy. And she doesn’t come off as bad as the men do. But they essentially made their Roddenberry doppelganger a lecherous jerk. Paul Wesley’s Shatner-esque Maxwell Saint is a similar jerk and called a lousy actor too. Ouch.
Accusations of crappy behavior have been leveled against the real people who inspired these characters for decades. And hey, maybe they’re right. We weren’t there. We’ve seen more than one hilarious SNL parody making fun of Shatner’s acting style. But it’s one thing for a comedy sketch show to poke fun. It’s quite another for the franchise to roast itself so hard. The original Star Trek is the foundation upon which the entire franchise is built, especially Strange New Worlds. The entire thing feels in bad taste, and kind of disrespectful. Recently, reports surfaced that Paramount was courting William Shatner to return to the franchise in some form, and after they painted him the way they did, we wouldn’t be shocked if he told them where to stick it.
But all of this underscores a bigger problem with Strange New Worlds, particularly in season three. This season, three of the ten episodes heavily favor comedy. The writers, at least this season, seem more interested in using the Star Trek format to create space sitcoms. And if it’s not sitcomy, it leans into the soap opera aspect of it all. Both of those elements have a place in Trek. Certainly, TNG and Voyager had romantic “will they/won’t they” romances running through each series. But it was always secondary to the main plot of each episode. In season three, SNW is diving into both more than ever. It feels like the sci-fi exploration has taken a back seat more than ever to wacky gimmick episodes, or “Who is Spock hooking up with this week?” The balance (of terror) is lopsided.
More than anything, it feels like the writers are huge fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer much more than any Star Trek. It’s obvious from last season’s musical episode, and the just-announced puppet episode in season four. They wear their Whedon influence on their sleeve. Buffy remains one of the greatest genre shows ever made, so we understand the reverence. But what made Buffy work is not what usually works for Star Trek. On Buffy, the characters were teenagers, and their hormones made their love lives seem more important than their heroic missions. On Star Trek, these are all supposedly adult officers whose important jobs should take precedence in the story over any romantic entanglements.
The last couple of episodes of Strange New Worlds end on a strong note, so perhaps all is not lost. Much of the episodes of season three were likely written in some kind of haste post-WGA strikes. But this cast deserves better than what they’re mostly getting this season. The original Star Trek’s first two seasons were revolutionary but it’s well known that the quality dropped off hard in their third season. TOS never got a fourth season to get its mojo back, and it took feature films for that to happen. With a fourth and fifth season of Strange New Worlds guaranteed, here’s hoping they get back to the kind of storytelling they excelled at in seasons one and two.
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