I Watch TV: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 3

 

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: Season Three

An element of Strange New Worlds’ 10 episode seasons is that it can never seem to find a status quo. There aren’t really any episodes where the crew arrive on a planet and solve a problem, and any character storylines are a C-plot that has them thinking about the next step. This has come fully to the fore in this season, where every episode feels like multiple characters confronting their past; having to make big choices that effect the future; and/or has a big weird gimmick that consumes the whole episode.

This leads to curiosities such as the show being 10% about Spock’s lovelife*. He spends more time dealing with his relationships with Christine Chapel and La’an Noonien-Singh than solving science problems (his nominal job) the bulk of the rest being putting him in scenes with Jim Kirk (first officer of the Farragut and once and future captain of the Enterprise) to see what kind of chemistry they have together (fine). The purpose of one episode is to send a team made up of legacy characters from the original Star Trek aboard the Farragut to try and rescue it, only for the captain to be injured leaving an uncertain Jim to take command and learn the secret of it**.

What this adds up to is that it is hard to complain about any individual episode. (In fact it is easy to complain about any individual episode, but rather, they all contain some good, fun, interesting science fiction problems, and the various characters are working through their own stories and obstacles – they all work). Yet as a whole they are exhausting, everyone is both running at full speed on the problem of the week, their own personal story of this episode, their season (series?) long arc plus there’s either a comedy B-plot or, if this week it’s a light-hearted A-story, a serious B-Plot to be dealt with.

It has, in fact, everything that makes a thirteen or fifteen or eighteen episode season of Star Trek fun, enough ideas and stories and characters learning about themselves and others. And enough annoying bits too, the whole using different ideas to keep Batel’s Gorn infection under control is okay as a running theme, only for it to become a destined solution to another problem. Meanwhile in an unrelated episode, a super-advanced creature has Ortega and a Gorn stranded together and the two overcome their hostility – a back half of the season mirror to Dr M’Benga and a Klingon who wants revenge having to come to terms with each other.

Again, none of this is a flaw, it’s more the seams show because it is crammed. And what is the point of complaining? This is still good Star Trek, on the upside. And on the down they’ve given it ten more episodes before closing it down for some reason. That’s a big one to start the season, one to end, one to build up to the end. One for Jim Kirk to come into his own. Put in two big gimmicky-y episodes and that leaves four for the crew to work through their own stories. Nine of them plus a handful of peripheral characters no doubt. And that’s what it is.

Watch This: Excellent space opera crammed with plot, ideas and characters
Don’t Watch This: Crammed with wackiness shouldering aside serious issues, brushed away by character growth

* The show lists nine main actors, Ethan Peck as Spock one of them.

** The secret is that this is an ensemble cast (crew); to succeed you need to give everybody a chance to show what they can do***.

*** The other secret is that your first attempt will always fail, so you need to pull back, rely on your crewmates, and dig in to find the resources the second time.