Strange New Worlds is set to premiere on Paramount+ on May 5. It is a spinoff-prequel-sequel to the second season of Star Trek: Discovery, which introduced the main trio of Enterprise officers. After the second season of Discovery, the show went on to blaze a path in a future farther than any Star Trek show had seen before.
That is the other shadow that Strange New Worlds finds itself in. Strange New Worlds embraces the aesthetic and tone of the original Star Trek from top to bottom. It is set on the Enterprise, years before Captain Kirk will sit in its command chair, so he is supposed to appear in the show in some capacity. The earnest embrace of the retro-cool look of the original Trek is worn on its sleeves with pride. Modernizing a 60s aesthetic that balances the lavish streaming-platform budgets of its contemporary shows with everything from bright-colored classic Trek uniforms to dazzlingly, gleefully retro knobs and switches, all lit up across the Enterprise's rainbow-colored bridge. The crew visits dangerous, beautiful space anomalies, stunning landscapes, alien cities, and even sumptuous Federation star bases every week. It feels like Strange New Worlds just wants to show you a big and often unpredictable universe, and hopes you have fun looking at it.
All that aesthetic embrace of classic Trek applies to Strange New Worlds. The ship and its crew persist from episode to episode, and their arcs grow across multiple stories, but Strange New Worlds is a weekly adventure series. In an era where shows like Discovery and Picard tell grand-scaled stories across entire seasons, it's refreshing. The adventures of Strange New Worlds are more fanciful than they are, but the series moves with such a rapid clip that it is free to bounce between tones and genres as it leaps from one adventure to the next. A style submarine chase on the edge of a black hole and a long-dead race are some of the mysteries of the film.
That's incredibly exciting, and it's clear that the creative team behind it enjoyed this sense of freedom, which is a fitting mood for a show that is meant to be about what the wonder and danger of exploring the Star is. Sometimes you are fighting for your life against a menacing threat and sometimes you are breaking peace between warring groups. You can go to Ye Olde Timey Planet or meet gods. Lower Decks is the most comparable counterpart to the current crop of Trek shows in many ways. The animated series is a little more fun than the TV show, but both shows are happy to celebrate how weird and silly Star Trek has been. Everyone is having a good time, and it makes you feel like you are in for a good time too.
It is the closest that Strange New Worlds gets to diving into serialized stories. Every member of the main crew gets at least one spotlight throughout the first five episodes, development and little arcs, even if they get less attention than the main cast. Anson Mount's Pike is still grappling with the knowledge of his personal future after receiving visions in Discovery's second season. Gia Sandhu plays Spock in multiple guest and he finds himself being pulled between his duties as a Starfleet officer and life as a fiancée.
This applies to the majority of the new characters coming on board, but particularly to the Cadet Uhura who has some of the biggest issues of the show. The first five episodes of the show give us a glimpse into the life of Laan Noonien-Singh, who gets to explore both emotional beats pertaining to her family name and also kick a decent amount of ass. Jess Bush and Babs Olusanmokun, as well as Dr. M and Nurse Chapel, who make a great pair, are given a decent amount of time. The nature of Strange New Worlds makes it hard for the main cast to have deep, meaningful stories, but there is enough to make them feel more than their parts.
It's really what Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is, something quite simple yet also more than what it seems, in a very refreshing way. It is not trying to be a heady, introspective examination or deconstruction of what Star Trek is. It's a fun, fun adventure, full of daring spectacle and a lot of humor, driven by the heart of a big, exciting crew that's clearly having a lot of fun even when they're thrown across a shaking bridge. If you've missed out on the classic Star Trek feeling that other contemporary shows have moved away from to explore their own strengths in other niches, then Strange New Worlds will feel like a missing piece of a larger puzzle.
The first season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds will premiere on Paramount+ on May 5.
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