(courtesy IMP Awards)
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds S2, E1
Is it twee and over-devoted to think of the characters on a TV show as family, especially after just one season?
Possibly but then when the show is as well-written and skillfully executed as Discovery spinoff, Strange New Worlds, now beginning its second season after a superlative first, and also when the characters are so richly realised you feel like you know even centuries apart and a thin glass membrane between you, it may not be such a sentimental stretch, after all.
The wondrous thing about this show is that it felt so much like home, so quickly; likely that sense of emotional familiarity was assisted by the fact that three of the characters were reasonably well known to us by the time the show started, thanks to their appearance on “New Trek” flagship show Discovery‘s second season, but even so, whereas other shows fumble around a little, or a lot, in their debut slate of episodes, Strange New Worlds set off at a warp-driven run, very smartly and quickly returning us to a serialised-type of storytelling which was long missing from otherwise fine Star Trek iterations.
The good news is that even just one episode in, Strange New Worlds is every bit as good as it was the first time around, with season opener, “The Broken Circle” managing to both take us back to the first season of Discovery where war between the Federation and the Klingons raged, while giving us time with the characters we have grown to love and even harkening back to a plot point that saw head of security, La’an Noonien-Singh (Christina Chong), setting out to find the family of a Gorn-surviving kid.
A lot happened in “The Broken Circle”, and yet with the consummate ease and self assurance this show has demonstrated from the get-go, it felt like a relaxed mix of narrative action and character revelation, an episode that is as emotionally intimate as it is epic in scope.
After all, you don’t get much more epic than a bunch of extremists, who want to turbocharge the financial fortunes of a mining colony by restarting a terrible conflict that took an horrific number of lives, pushing things to such a tipping point that Spock (Ethan Peck), in charge of the Enterprise while Captain Pike (Anson Mount) races off to get crack legal counsel for his imprisoned Number One, Una Chin-Riley (Rebecca Romijn), sets off for a far-off galaxy in a stolen ship.
His and his crew’s stolen ship which is supposed to be at a starbase getting a complete makeover but which, needs must and all that, has to race across the galaxy to save La’an, the galaxy and countless lives.
Epic yes in all kinds of ways but how can something that big and important deliver such emotionally insightful storytelling.
Again, because Strange New Worlds has always focused its robustly interesting stories on what this means for the characters and not by forcing its characters to march awkwardly to the beat of a narrative drum, which means that while a LOT happens, it happens in the context of who these people are and what they and the ship mean to each other.
They feel like family because they are family, recalling one of the things we love about Star Trek which is that these people love each other, are willing to put their lives on the live for each other and do what they need to for the right thing to happen.
They also love their ship, which becomes delightfully clear when comms officer Nyota Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding) and kickass pilot Erica Ortega (Melissa Navia) bitingly but warmly (to us at least) defend their carefully tended systems from interference by Federation personnel.
In both cases, later on, it turns out to be the right move but those two little moments further underscore why we love these people – they are devoted to what they do and each other and this perfect season opener reminds not just why Strange New Worlds tells such good stories but why we get so involved in them and why we watch so avidly – we love these people, they are family and we will happily go wherever they go, a happy prospect with nine more episodes in the offing this season.
Strange New Worlds is streaming on Paramount Plus.
Silo S1, E 6-7
(courtesy IMP Awards)
It’s fascinating watching an autocratic system in its death rattles.
Though they are effectively in a death spiral, one they won’t recover from, despite delusional self-assurances that they reign supreme and unchallenged, the thrash about ever more wildly and furiously, convinced even now that they will walk away to live and autocratically rule another day.
The thing is though, and it’s on startlingly stark display in episodes 6 and 7 of Silo, what looks like strength and brutish violent upholding of the established order is in fact a system in such slow-motion but catastrophic decline that there is no recovering from it.
Oh the upholders of dictatorship will never accede to that fact which is why in episode 7, when newly-minted sheriff and dissident, Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) is, to all intents and purposes ———- SPOILER ALERT !!!!! ———- taken into a rather eternal custody Judicial’s Sims (Common) and, surprise surprise temporary nice-guy mayor Bernard Holland (Tom Robbins) who turns out to be not so nice, after all (quite Machiavellian in fact), they act as if everything is still stacked in their favour.
On the surface it is, BUT, and this is a status-quo challenging “BUT”, the residents of the Silo are getting enormously restive, there appears to be solid evidence that everyone has been royally lied to and Juliette is not the sort of person to let simply lay down and die.
She will fight and fight hard no matter how profoundly the odds are stacked against her, and so it is that just as Sims and Holland think they have this latest of rebellion under control – they lie and say Juliette said she wanted to go outside which, we all know by now, is the way all the dissidents are treated (whether it’s a death sentence depends on whether ou think the outside is radioactive mush … or not) – she leaps off the spiral stairs, evidence in hand, and …
Well, that is the joy of a cliffhanger … who knows?
It’s highly unlikely she’ll be allowed to die since the narrative is bound to, and driven by, her scepticism and gutsy willingness to act on it, and things will skid to a halt without it.
However she saves herself, it’s safe to say that the Silo will never be the same again; with oral memories of the rebellion of 140 years earlier still fresh in peoples’ minds – yeah, hey, autocrats it may seem like a warning not to misbehave but increasingly it’s looking like a how-to manual and encouragement to all-in-one – and Juliette not the kind of person to give up easily or at all, it’s fair to say that events are now in motion which not even Sims and Holland will be able to stop.
The end, or the beginning of the end, is now well in train, and part of what makes Silo so damn watchable, apart from stunningly pitch-perfect performances and taut writing that resonates with powerfully simmering emotion ready to burst forth, is that it knows intimately what it looks like when an autocratic system falls.
It’s usually not spectacular, though sometimes it is, but it happens by crashing degrees as the delusion that the system is unassailable and unbreakable slowly caves in the face of a thousand different reasons why that is now an abject fallacy.
Silo captures this slow but certain slide into oblivion, for the old guard at least, in perfectly measured detail, arrestingly portraying what it is like when people finally decide that the system as it stands can no longer be allowed to continue and must be challenged until it falls.
It’s a masterclass not just in building tension but in exploring what happens when the old system crumbles and a new one waits in the wings – though, to be fair, not much thought is often given to what comes next; the rebels simply want to get rid of that which oppresses them – and it’s thrillingly intense to watch.
It’s also a warning to any autocrats out there – your power may feel absolute now but it can be challenged and it will be, and as Silo grippingly shows, when the end comes it may be slow but it will be sure and it will be final.
You have been warned.
Silo is currently screening on Apple TV+