Review by C.J. Bunce
When you’re only creating ten episodes of a series compared to 23 episodes of another, it’s going to be nearly impossible to compete. Once Star Trek: Strange New Worlds wraps its fifth and final season of only six episodes next year, it will have 46 episodes “in the can.” Those 46 episodes are the equivalent of two seasons of Star Trek: Enterprise, Voyager, Deep Space Nine, The Next Generation, or the original Star Trek series. Each of those five series had the odds in their favor. For every great episode we got a few middle-of-the-road episodes. Twenty-three episode seasons provided the opportunity for action-light episodes, for characters to develop and not merely be caricatures, for break-out characters to emerge in later seasons, like Ensign Ro or Seven of Nine. The ten episodes of these past four seasons of Strange New Worlds have been breathless, with rapid changes and the feeling of trimmed scenes to fit it all in. Strange New Worlds has the further limitation of being about a character who is heading toward a known, dire future–Anson Mount’s Captain Christopher Pike. After a third season that attempted to introduce the holodeck decades too early and retcon Captain Kirk into someone other than William Shatner’s swaggering hero, it had two standout episodes: “Four-and-a-Half Vulcans,” showing how great Ethan Peck’s Spock and Rebecca Romijn’s Una can be, and “Wedding Bell Blues” featuring an early appearance of Trelane retconned the right way as a Q.
How did Strange New Worlds Season 4 stack up?
For both Seasons 3 and 4, each episode revisited a script concept or combination of script ideas from previous series. Season 3 included humans disguised as Vulcans. It borrowed from shows like M*A*S*H and featured an episode from the perspective of a journalist. Another saw the Enterprise overtaken by another crew. One character is stranded on a planet and must survive. Each of Anson Mount’s Captain Pike, Ethan Peck’s Spock, Babs Olusanmokun’s Dr. M’Benga, Jess Bush’s Nurse Chapel, La’an, and Melissa Navia’s Ortegas get their own focus episodes.
Season 4 begins by whisking the crew into crazy territory via an episode where all of humanity would not have existed without some inadvertent acts by the Enterprise crew, in a Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park meets Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder story. Then crew members find themselves on a ghost ship. In another episode the writers decide to pair up Ortegas and Scotty as frenemies. Viewers get to encounter a rare event of the series with Rebecca Romijn’s Una as the focal character (finally!), this time in a noir episode. The crew find themselves playing out their roles soap opera style in another. A few TNG episodes are revisited and revised in an episode featuring a visiting admiral trying to make the crew commit a murderous act. TNG’s “Hollow Pursuits” is revisited on SNW for the second time. M’Benga faces death when he’s nearly split in two, in a spin on a Law & Order episode. And for the finale the writers try to look ahead to the future in a showcase of the talents of Celia Rose Gooding’s Uhura. But that’s not before fans got to see the crew become Muppets, courtesy of Jim Henson’s Creature Shop.
But somehow the fourth season did it better than before, maybe even better than the previous seasons except for its brilliant freshman season. Perhaps after Season 3 the very idea that SNW was going to lean into those “gimmick” stories allowed the actors to settle into their roles, have more fun, and find their characters in half the time it took the casts of previous Treks. Like the late-breaking emergence of Ensign Ro in TNG and Seven of Nine in Voyager, Martin Quinn swiftly settled into James Doohan’s shoes as Mr. Scott. Paul Wesley became Jim Kirk, catching up to Ethan Peck’s almost immediate conjuring of Leonard Nimoy’s famous Vulcan. And Carol Kane’s Pelia became a classic favorite character in the vein of Guinan. At the same time Celia Rose Gooding successfully connects her take on the character of Uhura with Nichelle Nichols’. That all means Anson Mount’s Captain Chris Pike took a backseat this season.
But it sure feels like there’s not enough time. Not enough to bridge the gap between Strange New Worlds and the original Star Trek in only six remaining episodes. The series, especially in this season’s final episode, hinted at futures for those characters newly created for this show, who won’t be there in the original series era. Ortegas may go away to become a teacher. Dr. B’Menga survives but works far away. The other newcomer, Christina Chong’s tough as nails La’an Noonien Singh, rises to be the likely focus of the next six episodes. Fans know of Ricardo Montalban’s Khan Noonien Singh during the original series and Star Trek II. Will the writers tie La’an and Khan together?
“Human Best Friend” contains a crisp mystery plot. Despite a slight misstep at the end, “Level-Five Transporter Incident” featuring Ethan Peck working with a crew of Muppets shows exactly why gimmick episodes are an intrinsic component of Star Trek. “Once La’an a Time” brought dragons into the franchise. Fantasy–not only science fiction–has always been a part of the core of the franchise. And those alternate scenarios in “Tomorrow’s Enterprise,” and those characters from the animated series hiding in the background, is the stuff that makes fans want more. Romijn singing karaoke in “Human Best Friend” was priceless.
Whatever comes of the six-episode Season 5, Strange New Worlds is one of the best series of the franchise, and these characters will be missed. It’s going to hurt when the series is over. And it’s a credit to 60 years of Star Trek storytelling. Four seasons of Strange New Worlds are now streaming on Paramount+. The final six episodes of the series are expected in 2027.
