It is a rare, rare thing indeed, especially in an age of multitudinous streaming abundance where derivative ideas and leveraged brands are everywhere like rabbits in plague numbers, to find a new show that feels like a freaking breath of fresh air.
It’s even more remarkable when said show, in this case Star Trek: Strange New Worlds comes from a venerable franchise that’s been around since the 1960s, and which by all the rules of inertia and creative exhaustion, should have well and truly come up with its last truly impressively watchable idea.
It’s a good thing then that this is a franchise that has, since its very inception in The Original Series (TOS) starring the one and only James T. Kirk, has spent its time defying the very worst impulses of human nature, the cruel hand of fate and destiny, and creative nothingness.
Whether it’s The Next Generation (TNG), Deep Space Nine or recent shows like Discovery and Picard, the franchise has shown a remarkably vital penchant for reinvention and narrative freshness, while sticking to its idealistic roots, all of which is evidence in a gloriously energising way (pun intended) in Strange New Worlds, which effectively had a backdoor pilot of sorts when Captain Christopher Pike (Anson Mount), Una Chin-Riley / Number One (Rebecca Romijn) and Spock (Ethan Peck) took centre stage in Discovery‘s second season.
So successful was their appearance on what is in many ways the new era of Trek‘s flagship show – though I’d argue Strange New Worlds is superbly well placed to take that mantle if it sustains the quality of the first five episodes reviewed here – that they were spun off, with a whole new cast and crew into a show that precedes TOS (it cleverly features James T. Kirk’s older brother, George Samuel “Sam” Kirk, played by Dan Jeannotte in one episode) and which possesses an episodically inspiring life of its own.
It is well nigh impossible not to watch the first five episodes of Strange New Worlds and not feel a thrilling sense of adventure and excitement, the kind you only get when great characters meet perfectly realised plots comes together with a giddy sense of idealism and curiosity for what lies just beyond what we know.
In the 23rd century humanity knows a great deal more than it does now, of course, fresh as they are off a war with the warlike Klingons, treading warily around the Romulans and having to cope with the mercenary predations of the Gorn who make their harvesting presence felt in the terror and thrills of fourth episode “Mememto Mori” in which the Enterprise (yes, the ship at the heart of Trek mythos lives again) find a colony that has had many of its people taken to feed Gorn young and has to fight for its very existence.
It’s tense and blisteringly, shockingly human but like each of the four episodes, which benefit from dazzlingly good special, lush special effects and robustly full characterisation right out the gate, it is storytelling done so well that you will find yourself sitting on the edge of your seat, metaphorically or actually it matters not, throughout, utterly immersed and enraptured by creativity that is as fast from spent as you can get.
This is not a franchise or a show suffering from six decades old creative vision or lack of ambition, with Strange New Worlds in glorious good form from its first shining episode which is everything you’d want from episodic Star Trek storytelling – the series marks a demonstrable step away from the arc-narrative structures of Discovery and Picard with a return to TOS and TNG-style week-by-week plotting – featuring a juicy first contact scenario, a moral conundrum, wit and whimsy and awe-inspiring twists and turns that deliver up an expected end but in a wholly original way that makes a great deal of Pike’s well-judged inclination to lean on gut instinct and hunches.
As pilots are meant to do, but don’t always manage, the first episode “Strange New Worlds” introduces to the rest of the crew elegantly and without fuss but always with the just right amount of emotional import – in short order, we meet prickly La’an Noonien-Singh (Christina Chong) the Enterprise’s newly assigned chief of security – yep, that family – the Enterprise’s thoughtful chief medical office M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun), a reinvigorated Nurse Chappell (Jess Bush) who’s all wit and playfulness, cadet Nyota Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding) who’s our newbie window on Trek, and gutsy pilot Erica Ortegas (Melissa Navia) – all of whom are given moments to shine in the five episodes that make up the first week-by-week batch of episodes.
In each of every episode which veer from the sheer terror of trying to stay alive in “Memento Mori” and “Children of the Comet”, the latter of which comes with a healthy serving of wonder and hope for the future too, to the mischievous fun of “Spock Amok”, which also manages to deliver a substantial emotional lunch, we are treated to a show that already knows what it is and what it wants to be.
Far from limiting the palette of narrative choices, which to be fair could just as easily come from being a part of a longstanding franchise with all the attendant rules and expectations that entails, knowing itself so well from the get-go means that Strange New Worlds is free to go for broke, with imagination the only limit.
That confidence, which most shows do not possess in their tremulous, often uncertain first season, means we get to see characters acting as if they have been around for a good few seasons already – it definitely helps you to buy into the idea that these people have connections that predate the pilot – episodes set on breathtakingly new and different planets, fascinating alien races such as those of 21st-century-Earth-like Kiley 279 and the R’ongovians – and a general willingness to take some narrative chances while staying close, but not suffocatingly so, to the ideals that have always underpinned the franchise.
Best of all, Strange New Worlds feels like fun which is, even when tension abounds and moral quandaries are thick on the galactic ground, is precisely what you want from a science fiction series.
Yes, you want derring-do, danger and all kinds of mortal peril, for what is space opera but humanity on the ropes in some form or another, faced with rising to the occasion or falling into the grubby hands of murky fate, but you also want to feel a sense of escapist abandon, a sense of being removed from the everyday by boldly going … well, you know.
Strange New Worlds has that, and a whole lot more, and it’s impossible not to feel the same sense of awe and wonder as the crew who are on the Federation’s flagship, ready to place their lives on the line but also to have their enriched in thrillingly unique ways, and who, like us, can’t wait to see what happens next in an episodic world where anything can happen, and in a show this brave and sure of itself, most likely will.