Strange New Worlds is a spinoff from Star Trek: Discovery, the series intended to rebirth Trek as a television franchise. Discovery certainly has its strengths, but it was initially designed as an off-beat anthology series (it was, after all, co-created by the iconoclastic Bryan Fuller). The series always made for a strange flagship show, in part because it used a serialized format that told a single, season-long story. Picard and Prodigy have followed suit.
Even moreso than the animated comedy, Strange New Worlds sought to bring back classic Trek storytelling. Set on the Enterprise under the command of Captain Pike (Anson Mount), before Kirk (played here by Paul Wesley) became a captain, Strange New Worlds took its title as a statement of purpose. Each episode found the crew dealing with a new world, civilization, or mission, and finished the story in each episode.
Sure, there are runners that carry over episode to episode: the Gorn are shaping up to be an overarching threat and Pike knows about his ultimate fate (seen in the The Original Series two-parter “The Menagerie.” But, for the most part, each episode of Strange New Worlds tells its own story.
Strange New Worlds has used that format to tell a wide range of stories, even within the 20 episodes aired so far. We got a classic philosophical debate style episode with “Ad Aster Per Aspera,” in which Una Chin-Riley aka Number One (Rebecca Romijn) delivers a passionate speech about what Starfleet means to her. We got a comedic diplomatic situation in “Spock Amock,” in which Pike has to hold things together after Spock (Ethan Peck) swaps minds with his fiancee T’Pring (Gia Sandhu). And we got a time-travel episode that sent Kirk and – La’an Noonien-Singh (Christina Chong) to mid-2000s Toronto.
And yes, Strange New Worlds even did a musical episode. “Subspace Rhapsody” or its thematic sister “The Elysian Kingdom,” in which the crew all finds themselves transported into a fairytale world, aren’t everyone’s favorite flavor of Star Trek. These episodes tend to be less about boldly going to find new life and new civilizations and more about being wacky. But they are indisputably part of the fabric of Star Trek (McCoy didn’t chase that rabbit in “Shore Leave” for us fans to be serious all the time).
The problem is less the fact that Strange New Worlds takes time to bring Mariner and Boimler (Tawny Newsome and Jack Quaid, respectively) from Lower Decks into live action. Rather, the problem that even two silly episodes a season means that twenty percent of the episodes we get that year a comedies. As someone who has written defenses of “Threshold” and “Sub Rosa,” even this writer thinks that’s too much.
